Collins Chosen to Bring Partisanship to the Bench

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 11, 2019 – Alliance for Justice today released a report on the record of Daniel Collins, one of President Trump’s nominees for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. AFJ President Nan Aron released the following statement:

“President Trump has made no secret of his intention to revamp the Ninth Circuit by packing it with hard-right ideologues.  Daniel Collins is the latest Ninth Circuit nominee hand-picked for his partisan loyalty by the White House to do its bidding and carry out the Trump agenda from the bench. We can find nothing in his record that suggests Collins would be a fair-minded arbiter as a judge, which is also why both of his home-state senators have declined to support his nomination.”

Among other things, the AFJ report finds:

• Collins’s nomination is taking place against the backdrop of President Trump’s repeated complaints about Ninth Circuit rulings, his attacks on the circuit’s independence, and his stated desire to obtain different rulings from the court.
• Both of Collins’s home-state senators from California, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, have witheld their blue slips on Collins’s nomination and have expressed concerns about his record.
• The Senate Judiciary Committee is once again discarding past practice and running roughshod over home-state senators in its determination to ram through as many ideological judges as possible in as short a time as possible.
• Sens. Feinstein and Harris, in stating their opposition to Collins, pointed specifically to concerns  about his “temperament and rigidity” that were raised during the vetting process.
• Sens. Feinstein and Harris also expressed opposition to Collins’s “history of taking strong litigation positions for no reason other than attempting to overturn precedent and push legal boundaries.”
• Collins’s record shows that he has fought to undermine civil liberties, weaken women’s reproductive rights, and criticized important Supreme Court decisions critical for a just criminal justice system.
• Collins has carved out a career as the go-to lawyer for a host of entities accused of discrimination, egregious human rights violations, and endangering the health and safety of persons in the U.S. and abroad.

The full report can be found here.