Trump Nominates Judge in Alabama Who Has Never Tried a Case
President Donald Trump’s nominee for a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship in Alabama has never tried a case in his life and has only been practicing law for three years, said The Washington Post on Sunday.
Brett Talley, 36, is an attorney and aspiring horror author whose nomination to the federal bench was approved this week by the Republican-dominated Alabama Senate Judiciary Committee. Now it will proceed to a vote by the full state senate.
“Talley is the latest federal judicial nominee to draw scrutiny for what some say is his limited experience in practicing law and the level of partisanship he had shown on social media, on his political blog and on several opinion pieces he had written for CNN. He has also received a ‘not qualified’ rating from the American Bar Association, which vets federal judicial nominees,” wrote the Post‘s Kristine Phillips.
Talley’s social media presence is rife with references to “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and exhortations to join the National Rife Association (NRA).
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) has come out in favor of Talley’s nomination, saying that he does not consider “extensive trial experience” to be necessary for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge.
“Mr. Talley has a wide breadth of various legal experience that has helped to expose him to different aspects of federal law and the issues that would come before him,” said Grassley.
Democrats, however, worry that the legal neophyte is unqualified an obvious political partisan.
“How can you claim to be qualified for a lifetime appointment to supervise federal trials on a daily basis when you have never yourself tried a single case?” asked Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). “Do you think it is advisable to put people with literally no trial experience on the federal district court bench?”
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