The American Bar Association Is Wholly Compromised by the Left

The American Bar Association is the latest elite institution that’s expending the last fumes of its credibility on behalf of the Left.

The ABA recently released a statement denouncing what they called the Trump administration’s attempt to undermine the courts and the legal profession.

This is, frankly, laughable.

The ABA holds enormous power over the legal profession and it apparently wants to browbeat the Trump administration despite the fact that it’s proven to be a highly ideological, nakedly partisan organization that operates on behalf of leftist causes.

The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann recently wrote that the ABA’s power over accreditation and “virtual monopoly on entry to the legal profession” gives the group a “monopoly to push far-left extremism and deprive Americans of lawyers and judges dedicated to the U.S. Constitution.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., wrote an excellent thread on X Friday about how the ABA stayed silent while President Joe Biden’s administration weaponized the legal system, but suddenly it cares enough to go to war with Trump.

“How many statements did the ABA put out against Biden’s lawfare? Biden’s refusal to accept the Supreme Court’s student loan ruling? The Democrats’ assault on the Supreme Court? Zero,” Schmitt wrote.

That’s absolutely correct.

The American Bar Association began rating judicial nominees back in the 1950s. In theory, this system aims to ensure that the president wasn’t choosing unqualified judges.

But as Michael A. Fragoso wrote in City Journal, by the 1980s ABA began sliding very much to the Left and began to use its position to torpedo Republican appointments by labeling conservative jurists “unqualified.”

This slide prompted the Trump and George W. Bush administrations to end ABA preclearance of appointees. However, the first Trump administration didn’t entirely cut them out of the process.

“The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, for example, still instructed nominees to allow the ABA to check their bar records, and permitted nominees to sit for long interviews with the organization,” Fragoso explained. “The Trump I-era Judiciary Committee also invited the ABA to testify during Supreme Court confirmation hearings.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term there wasn’t quite as much alarm over institutional capture as there is now, so many Republicans—including in the first Trump administration—still gave the ABA some level of deference.

The Biden era revealed how far-gone Western institutions really were. They dropped all pretense of objectivity or fairness in the name of cultural revolution and naked ideological and partisan one-sidedness.

“The ABA’s public actions grew increasingly partisan throughout the Biden presidency and now into the early days of Trump’s second term,” Fragoso wrote. “The organization justified President Biden’s preposterous assertion that the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified; claimed that bar associations have a First Amendment right to engage in racial discrimination; and sued President Trump for slashing USAID subsidies.”

The backing of the Equal Rights Amendment was particularly egregious. Biden unilaterally declared it the law in his final days as president without legal justification. Whatever credibility the ABA retained should be put to rest with that preposterous endorsement.

Fragoso concluded that the Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy “should remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process, forbid nominees from signing bar waivers, stop transmitting questionnaires to the ABA, and end the practice of nominees sitting for interviews.”

The widespread, toxic abuse of institutional power has precipitated an era of justified and uncompromising populism. The Trump administration isn’t likely to let the ABA get away with its nonsense this time around. Attorney General Pam Bondi has already threatened to pull the ABA’s power of accreditation of law schools over its refusal to fully eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Critics of the ABA are correct. It’s time to stop allowing them to be the gatekeepers they once were.

In a larger sense this must be an era of institutional decoupling. The trust so many elite institutions built over generations was slowly squandered and their actions over the last five years have revealed that the problem has become terminal. This needs to be a time in which the Right recaptures, rebuilds, and creates its own institutions.

Give the failing, leftist institutions the heave-ho and don’t look back.

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