Today Senator Josh Hawley grilled a Trump judicial nominee for US district judge in Michigan, Michael Bogren, over comparisons he made between a Catholic family and the KKK.
After listening to this, one must wonder why Trump even nominated this guy:
Let me put this in context. Do you remember a case we posted on back in April about a Catholic family in Michigan who’d been disallowed from participating in the farmers market in East Lansing because they responded to a question on Facebook that they don’t allow same-sex weddings on their farm?
Michael Bogren is the attorney defending the City of East Lansing and the comments from Bogren which Hawley refers to in his questioning are comments Bogren made in the brief regarding this same Catholic family, the Tennes.
In the brief Bogren is absolutely making the comparison, in defense of the City of East Lansing, that this Catholic family refusing to allow gay marriages on their property is no different that the KKK using Christianity as their basis for refusing to allow interracial marriage or Muslims Imams arguing that women cannot drive automobiles. How absurd!
And then on top of that Bogren refused to admit to Hawley that he questioned the sincerity of the beliefs of the Tennes when saying that they applied the teachings of their faith “quite selectively”. After Hawley grilled him on this, Bogren finally just played dumb and claimed he didn’t understand the question.
I am so glad Hawley exposed Bogren for all of us to hear and I sincerely hope Trump pulls his nomination and sends him back to private practice before this goes any further.
UPDATE:
As I’ve been looking into this more, I now suspect that this nominee from Trump may just be something to appease Democrats so that he can continue to push his agenda through. This isn’t anything new, either. For decades Republicans have been making concessions to Democrats on district court judges in order to push through stronger constitutional judges to the appellate courts and the Supreme Court. If Bogren is in fact a token liberal judge, we should see Democrats vote en masse for him when his name comes up in the Senate.