Family Research Council (FRC) and a coalition of more than 50 individuals and organizations sent a letter this week to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in opposition to the nomination of Nancy Gbana Abudu .
"She is a political activist not a jurist and is unfit to serve at the federal appellate level," the letter states bluntly.
Abudu is currently the strategic litigation director at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which FRC contends is infamous for its decades-long managerial corruption and notorious for unscrupulously designating its political opponents as "hate groups" or "extremists."
In fact, a press release from FRC points out that "in the first conviction under the post-9/11 District of Columbia terrorism statute, the convicted terrorist, who targeted FRC's headquarters, was shown to have been motivated by the SPLC's 'hate group' designation and related identifying information."
Tony Perkins, FRC president and host of the "Washington Watch" radio program, shared his impressions of the SPLC Wednesday afternoon.
"They have made a history of targeting conservatives and are more of a pit bull for the Left than they are an arbiter of who is in bounds or who can play or who cannot in the political arena," said Perkins. "The fact that [Abudu] works for them clearly shows that she has an agenda; she's an advocate."
He gets more specific in an op-ed, pointing out Abudu has been at the helm of SPLC's work regarding election subversion, "spending her days fighting common-sense laws like voter ID."
In addition, Abudu has been an advocate for "pre-clearance," something to which FRC's Mary Beth Waddell takes exception – and that the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.
"This idea of pre-clearance would require certain states to get approval from the Department of Justice before they can change their election laws," Waddell explained on the "Washington Watch" program.
"We just saw this in Georgia with the law that they passed for election integrity; and she's made all these various comments about things that she deems as 'voter intimidation' and 'voter suppression,' such as making sure that you're a citizen of the United States, making sure that you are who you say you are – and these should be ideas that we all should support."
In a press release announcing the nomination of Abudu, the White House said the choice continues to "fulfill the President's promise to ensure that the nation's courts reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country – both in terms of personal and professional backgrounds."
According to the White House, Abudu served as both a legal director and senior staff counsel during a 13-year stint with the American Civil Liberties Union (2005-2018) before joining the SPLC in 2019.
