HuffPost: Trump Court Pick Once Called For Bringing Back Literacy Tests In Elections
Issues
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on May 27, 2025.
One of President Donald Trump’s nominees to a federal judgeship, Josh Divine, argued in a college opinion piece that people should be required to take literacy tests in order to vote — despite such tests being outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they were routinely used to keep Black people from voting.
[…]
Some progressive judicial advocacy groups are already accusing Divine of being unfit to be a federal judge.
“Josh Divine’s op-ed advocating for literacy tests at the polls and arguing against the idea of democracy itself is one of the most disturbing writings we’ve ever seen in a judicial nominee’s record,” Jake Faleschini, the justice program director at Alliance for Justice, said in a statement.
“It should be unquestionable that a voter suppression tool rooted in the racism of the Jim Crow south has no place in our democracy,” said Faleschini. “He may have written some of them in college, but college wasn’t very long ago for Divine. He’s a radically young nominee to be a lifetime judge and doesn’t have even close to the minimal legal experience expected of federal judges.”