"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Born in 1921, Motley was the first Black woman to argue at the Supreme Court and the first to serve as a federal judge. Democratic presidents twice considered — and twice rejected — her for a seat on a federal appeals court.
Motley, who went by Connie, faced countless indignities. She graduated from New York University and Columbia Law School, and a Wall Street firm offered her a job interview based on her stellar academic record. But the firm wouldn’t even meet with her when she showed up for the appointment because she was Black. Instead, she took a job at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
She was the only female lawyer at the Fund for 15 years. During her employment interview in 1945 with then Legal Defense Fund boss Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice asked her to climb a ladder next to a bookshelf. “He wanted to inspect her legs and feminine form,” writes Tomiko Brown-Nagin in her compelling and readable new biography of Motley, “Civil Rights Queen.” When Marshall stepped down to become a judge in 1961, he passed over Motley and picked a less experienced White man as his successor.
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Motley earned less than men who did the same work. Motley nonetheless won nine of the 10 cases she argued at the Supreme Court. As a new mother, struggling with postpartum depression, she drafted briefs for Brown v. Board of Education. Pursuing the implementation of the landmark decision turned out to be a decades-long slog. She successfully integrated the flagship universities in Georgia and Mississippi, where she was James Meredith’s attorney.
In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson had intended to nominate Motley to take Marshall’s seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit when he resigned to become solicitor general — a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court in 1967. But then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), remembered by history as a civil rights champion, pressed Johnson to pick a White man over Motley for the appellate court. Kennedy called Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in July 1965 to complain that naming Motley would be too risky from a “political and public relations viewpoint.” Katzenbach summarized the call in a memo to Johnson. “I think there is merit in Sen. Kennedy’s assessment,” the attorney general told the president.
(Johnson nominated Motley to the District Court for the Southern District of New York a year later. The American Bar Association declined to give Motley a “highly qualified” rating on the dubious grounds that she lacked trial experience in New York, even though she’d litigated hundreds of cases in federal courts. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James O. Eastland (D-Miss.) accused her of being a communist sympathizer and held up Motley’s confirmation for seven months.)
A dozen years later, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Attorney General Griffin Bell had veto power over judicial nominations and opposed Motley’s elevation to the 2nd Circuit because they’d tangled when she was a lawyer for the Legal Defense Fund. Carter eventually nominated Amalya Kearse, a Black woman who was a partner at a major law firm and didn’t have critics inside his administration.
Along the way, Motley mentored Sonia Sotomayor after the future justice joined Motley’s court in 1992. Sotomayor, who in 1998 secured the 2nd Circuit appeals court seat that eluded Motley, famously wrote that “wise Latina” judges “would more often than not reach a better conclusion” than White male judges who lacked their lived experiences. Motley, who rejected being called a “feminist,” disagreed that female judges brought special insight to the bench. Instead, she argued for a more representative judiciary on the grounds that inclusion would strengthen democracy by increasing confidence in the rule of law among racial minorities.
Motley died in 2005 at 84, still believing in the ability of the third branch to help deliver on that promise. Biden’s pledge to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court is a validation of Motley’s enduring faith in a system that repeatedly passed her over.
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The Thurgood Marshall story shows that it wasn’t only White men who undervalued Black women. Black men displayed some of the same disgusting and condescending attitudes! Motley just kept on achieving and contributing, making the most of her opportunities, rather than stewing about what had unfairly (and probably illegally) been denied to her.
Obviously, the careers of guys like GOP Senators Wicker, Cruz, and Kennedy show that White guys still benefit from a system that still doesn’t hold them to the same standards imposed on women, particularly talented women of color.See, e.g.,https://apple.news/A-e_PL2khRhiEbrj_L7woCA
But, unlike these “snowflake right-wing whiners,” women of color are used to “plowing forward” and making their own way, despite systemic biases and obstacles placed in their path by men of limited ability who spread lies, show disgusting bias, and contribute little to the common good!
Folks, this is the same Ted Cruz who demonstrated his true character and lack of concern for his constituents by fleeing with his family to a cushy resort in Cancun while Texas was in crisis! He’s also someone who would deny legal refuge to those whose lives are actually in danger because they don’t “fit in” with his White Nationalist view of desirable demographics. (Compare “Cancun Ted’s” version of “refuge” with the camps in which real refugees and their families are rotting in Mexico thanks to righty-wing judges and GOP AGs.)
Perhaps the most interesting disconnect among the privileged GOP White guys who are opposing a Black woman nominee who hasn’t even been named yetis the juxtaposition with the performance of these dudes during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings — an unending homage to the “birth privilege” of angry, entitled right-wing white guys. Here’s an apt quote from Chauncey Devega in Salon:
When Trump says “young men,” no adjective or modifier is needed. It is clear to everyone, given his inclinations, history, words and deeds, that “young men” of course means “white men”.
This reflects a larger sentiment in America at present. For too many white men — poor, working-class and middle-class — there is widespread anger at somehow being displaced by nonwhites and women who are “cutting ahead in line” because of “affirmative action” and other nonexistent “entitlements.”
These angry white men feel obsolete and marginalized in a changing America, frustrated by globalization and excluded by a more cosmopolitan country. But their anger is misdirected toward the groups they perceive to be receiving “special treatment.” Their collective anger would be better directed at men who look like them but who have created social inequality, injustice and immiseration in America and around the world.
President Biden should stick to his guns and nominate a talented and deserving Black woman. It’slong, long overdue! And, he should pay no attention whatsoever to the outrageous, totally disingenuous laminations of privileged guys like Cruz, Wicker, and Kennedy who have already “achieved” far above the level of their demonstrated merit, ability, or positive contributions to the common good.
We need Federal Judges and Justices who are wise, fair, talented, experienced contributors to society; we don’t need the advice or “stamp of approval” of insurrectionists and dividers who rely on racially biased myths to cover for their own all too obvious human inadequacies!
Sherrilyn Ifill, 54, is a lawyer living in Maryland and New York. She became the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund just after President Obama was sworn in for his second term. Below, she discusses our current political situation, what gives her hope and more.
On the Justice Department under the Trump administration: “During the Obama administration I was trying to push [Obama] further than whatever the administration was already doing in the civil rights space, because that’s kind of my job. But there’s no question that the Obama administration really worked in many instances as a partner. That is not the case now. Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has made clear that he has no intention of investigating police departments for patterns and practices of discrimination. The Justice Department has essentially all but abandoned civil rights as a priority, and so they are no longer working as a partner with us.
That means that our work has increased. We have had to function as a kind of private DOJ, trying to take up the slack. The DOJ and the attorney general should be the chief enforcer of the nation’s civil rights law. But what we see with Attorney General Sessions is no attempt to prioritize civil rights. In fact, to the contrary, working against us, working against civil rights implementation, working against the progress of civil rights that we’ve achieved.”
On what she would say to President Trump if he invited her to the White House: “I cannot imagine what the circumstance of that invitation would be, so it’s an impossible question to answer. I don’t do ceremonial visits. I’m interested in substance. So there would be a lot I would have to know in advance about what was going to happen. The president has been so explicitly hostile to civil rights and racial justice that I would have to have a very clear understanding of what reversals he was prepared to make to his policies. And in the absence of those, I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would attend such a meeting.”
On Trump’s comments that black Americans are doing better economically than ever before: ”He does state that, and I think the figures that he uses are convenient in terms of job numbers. But look more closely at wage stagnation and, in fact, wage decreases. Look at the ways in which the failure to invest in infrastructure has left African American communities stranded in terms of transportation. Look at the voter suppression that disempowers African Americans from being able to even control their own destiny in the places where they live. Look at the assault on education and the ways in which the Department of Education is prepared to leave students who are victims of for-profit colleges stranded. Look at the ways which they are seeking to fight and undercut affirmative action. All of these are also part of economic opportunity. And the president conveniently leaves that out of the narrative. Those are things that are necessary to give African Americans a chance.”
On her book about the legacy of lynchings in America, and what the country needs to heal: “What America does not need, in my view, is one national conversation. The book really makes the case for the importance of local communities engaging in truth and reconciliatory processes. The recognition that racial discrimination, and particularly acts of racial pogroms, which essentially is what happened in the period in which lynching was so prevalent in this country, that those local communities need to deal with that, grapple themselves with that history and themselves take on the responsibility for how you stitch back together a community that has been broken for decades, how you confront a painful truth.”
On what gives her hope: “I’m excited to see the continuous mass mobilization that people have engaged in, beginning with the Women’s March and continuing since then, in which people understand the need to come out of their homes to see one another and to say what they believe in. I’ve also really been encouraged by the ways in which the rule of law, for the most part, has held despite President Trump’s excesses. The crisis of this administration’s governance has compelled people to reimagine what it means to be a real citizen in this country. And that gives me optimism, because I think the other way was not sustainable. The benign citizenship performance that most Americans were engaged in was simply not sustainable. Now people understand that they are needed. Their voice is needed, every vote is needed, their engagement is needed.”
Undoubtedly, our Civil Rights Laws were passed to protect African-Americans and similarly situated individuals so that they could enjoy the same advantages and benefits once accorded only to Whites. But, Jeff Sessions believes that civil rights are just about protecting White Power & Privilege against African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals and other “uppity” minorities.
Similarly, the Bill of Rights was adopted to protect individual rights against Government overreach. But, Jeff Sessions believes that the right of police to enforce the law using brutality and unnecessary and indiscriminate force is superior to the individual Constitutional rights of people of color.
The solution to restoring reason and the true rule of law (not the perverted “rule of Sessions”): regime change!
