This Is Why Republicans Don’t Care What the President* Does, No Matter How Crooked or Barbaric
Published in Esquire
While nobody was looking, the Senate confirmed another real prize as a federal judge on Thursday, the 54th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, if you want to see how badly history can rhyme sometimes. Eric Murphy is 40 years old, so he’ll likely be inflicting himself on at least the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for three decades.
He spent several years as the solicitor general for the state of Ohio. It was an eventful tenure there. From Cleveland.com:
He grew up in the Cincinnati area, graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and earned his law degree from University of Chicago. Before becoming Solicitor General, he practiced in the Columbus office of Jones Day. As Solicitor General, he successfully defended Ohio’s methods of culling its voter rolls before the U.S. Supreme Court. He also defended Ohio’s laws against gay marriage in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex nuptials nationwide.
This got Senator Sherrod Brown’s attention.
Brown criticized Murphy for his arguments “against marriage equality” and his defense of a “voter purge that unfairly stripped Ohioans, innocent Ohioans, of their vote registration.” He also said Murphy defended the Trump administration’s ban on people entering the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. “I cannot support nominees who have actively worked to strip Ohioans of their rights,” said a statement from Brown. “Special interests already have armies of lobbyists and lawyers on their side, they don’t need judges in their pockets.”