Pro-democracy groups are ramping up efforts to make sure President Joe Biden backs off his reported plan to nominate an anti-choice Federalist Society supporter to a U.S. District Court in Kentucky amid news that the White House is moving forward with the nomination.
"They're defending it," a source who was briefed on the Biden administration's judicial nomination plans told HuffPost Tuesday regarding the president's choice of Chad Meredith, a conservative lawyer who served as chief deputy general counsel to former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican.
"There's literally no reason to nominate this truly awful person to a lifetime appointment in exchange for basically nothing."
The White House has not publicly addressed the potential nomination, which was first reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal. As HuffPost reported Tuesday, Meredith is likely one of a large group of nominees that would be announced all at once.
In an email to Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear about the nomination on June 23, HuffPost reported, "White House officials appear to have simply cut and pasted White House language about Meredith into the email--including the number eight right before Meredith's name, as if he is one in a list of nominees being lumped together."
Grassroots organizing group Indivisible on Tuesday circulated a petition urging voters to call on their senators to reject Meredith, who while serving in Bevin's office defended a state law requiring doctors to perform an ultrasound and describe the image to the patient before providing abortion care.
"There's literally no reason to nominate this truly awful person to a lifetime appointment in exchange for basically nothing," said Meagan Hatcher-Mays, Indivisible's director of democracy policy. "Let's not make it easy for him."
As Common Dreams reported last month, Biden agreed to nominate Meredith in exchange for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) claim that he will not obstruct the president's future judicial nominees.
Mark Joseph Stern of Slate also reported that "McConnell will allow Biden to nominate and confirm two U.S. Attorneys to Kentucky" in exchange for Meredith's nomination.
The news of the reported deal followed the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, ending abortion rights for millions of women across the country and likely reducing access even in states where the procedure has not been outlawed.
Meredith's nomination would be "an enormous betrayal to the very people who worked to put Biden in office," said former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner.
Biden reportedly initially planned to announce his choice of Meredith on June 24, but scrapped the plan after the Supreme Court's right-wing majority handed down its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The White House, along with the rest of the country, had known for weeks at that point that the justices were likely to overturn Roe due to a leaked draft opinion from the court.
"Why is a Democratic White House doing more for anti-abortion right-wing extremists than they have for the majority of us who just lost our reproductive freedoms?" asked Pennsylvania state House member and U.S. House candidate Summer Lee.
