Anti-LGBT judicial nominee faces Senate opposition

Jeff Mateer, a Trump nominee for a federal district judgeship in Texas, is running into opposition from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Senate Judiciary Committee chair. Mateer is currently Texas’ First Assistant Attorney General. LGBT+ activists and Democratic senators have criticized him for a series of strange comments.

Sen. Grassley told CNN that he is advising the White House to reconsider Mateer’s nomination.

In 2015 Mateer said in 2015 that transgender children are part of "Satan's plan." His home state senator, Republican John Cornyn, is taking issue with the fact that Mateer did not disclose the speeches where he made the eyebrow-raising remarks, according to CNN.

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In the past, he has also lamented that states were banning conversion therapy, and argued that sanctioning same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and bestiality.

Among other comments, he invoked religious crackdowns by the Nazis in Germany and other totalitarian regimes to describe the treatment of Christians in the US during three interviews in 2013 and 2014.

Mateer was general counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit religious liberty advocacy group known before 2016 as the Liberty Institute, at the time of those interviews.

Grassley also urged the White House to not proceed on another nominee, Brett Talley. He was nominated for a district judgeship in Alabama, even though he has no judicial experience. Since his Senate hearing an online comment he wrote in 2011 surfaced defending the early KKK. He also didn’t disclose his wife’s top White House job as a potential conflict of interest.

“Even with these nominees in peril, Democrats are still stung by the speed at which Republicans are moving other judicial picks through the process,” CNN reported. “So far this year, the Senate has voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and 10 circuit court nominees -- the most of any president in his first year since Richard Nixon. Neither of the embattled nominees is for those more powerful circuit court positions.

“There are over two dozen judicial nominees pending on the Senate floor.

“Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary committee, said in a statement Tuesday that Talley and Mateer ‘should not be federal judges’ and urged Grassley to slow down the process.”

"I would hope that Chairman Grassley's request that the White House pull these nominations leads him to reconsider the breakneck speed at which the Judiciary Committee has been considering nominees," Feinstein said. "Moving so quickly makes it more likely that senators will be caught by surprise and end up having to vote for someone whose record they weren't fully aware of."

Copyright The Gayly – December 14, 2017 @ 8 a.m. CST.