Senate GOP Set to Approve Judge Who Calls Property Rights ‘Racist’

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AP File Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Senate Republicans are preparing to approve Obama nominee Wilhemina Wright for the federal judicial bench in Minnesota. Wright currently serves on the Minnesota state Supreme Court. The Obama nomination would lift her to a lifetime appointment to the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.

Wright is only 52 and has been mentioned as a possible future nominee for the Supreme Court.

Set aside the question of whether Senate Republicans ought to be approving any Obama judicial nominations while the White House actively pushes the constitutional bounds of the President’s executive actions. The legal opinions of Wright ought to give even moderate Democrats pause, never mind conservative Republicans.

Writing in a law review questioning the constitutional protections of property rights, Write observed:

White people are running and hiding. Their mad scramble is aided by a Chief Justice [Justice Rehnquist] who owned racially restrictive property and a Presidential administration [President Reagan] that believes bigotry, poverty, and poor educational opportunities for most public school students are the unavoidable fruits of a “thriving” free market economy.

It is an incoherent paragraph even for a law student, never mind a prospective federal judge with lifetime tenure. Further in the review Wright said racism in America was built on “the sanctity of property and the belief in the hierarchy of races.”

Of course, the “sanctity of property” is one of history’s greatest bulwarks against racism or discrimination. Property rights, protected by government and the courts, are immune to the whims of malicious officials or individuals.

Adherents of the discredited “critical race theory” of which Wright at one time was a disciple miss this fundamental fact. Wright apparently believes that “property rights” are code for racism because, she observes, “whites own the vast majority of what Americans define as property.”

Wright even wrote that this concept of property rights is the source of opposition to affirmative action. She said that opposition to racial preferences was based on the belief that the lives and liberty of members of the Black race were worth less that the property of the white race.”

Wright, as she has gone through the Senate nomination process, has walked back most of these writings, saying they were “inartful” and made without “all of the training and experience that I have now.”

Wright was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the federal bench on a voice vote. She is expected to be approved easily by the Senate on Tuesday, as no Senate Republicans have registered opposition to her appointment.

Senate Republicans won control of the chamber in 2014, campaigning on challenging President Obama’s abuse of the constitution through sweeping executive actions. The President’s chief of staff recently noted that the White House plans “audacious” executive actions, testing the bounds of constitutional limits in the final year of Obama’s tenure.

In a political sense, the President can exercise whatever power Congress allows him. By continuing to confirm his judicial nominations, Senate Republicans send a clear signal to the White House that they don’t have the stomach to check his authoritarian ambitions.

The development goes a long way to explain the voter anger currently upending the Republican nomination for President.

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