Senate Democrats slam move to block ABA from vetting judicial nominees

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Courthouse News Service

May 30, 2025


WASHINGTON (CN) — The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee took aim at the Justice Department on Friday, slamming Attorney General Pam Bondi’s steps to hamstring the American Bar Association’s longstanding practice of rating White House judicial appointments as a “seismic” shift in the nomination process.

Bondi, who has called the country’s leading legal professional association an “activist” group and accused it of favoring Democrats, went after the ABA just a week before the Senate is expected to examine the Donald Trump administration’s first set of court nominees. In a letter to Bar Association president William Bay, the attorney general claimed that the organization “no longer functions as a fair arbiter” of judicial nominees or their qualifications. “The ABA’s steadfast refusal to fix the bias in its ratings process, despite criticism from Congress, the Administration, and the academy, is disquieting,” Bondi added.

In response, the Justice Department said that its Office of Legal Counsel will no longer instruct court nominees to allow the Bar Association access to non-public information such as bar records. Further, nominees will no longer respond to ABA questionnaires or sit for interviews with the organization, the attorney general told Bay. A source familiar with the letter told Courthouse News that the Bar Association was aware of it but had not received any official correspondence from the Justice Department. Bondi posted the letter to on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday afternoon.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted the move in a statement Friday, pointing out that stripping the Bar Association of its access to nominees upends a decades-old practice in place under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations.

Read more: https://www.courthousenews.com/senate-democrats-slam-move-to-block-aba-from-vetting-judicial-nominees/