Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Thursday that she’s cutting the American Bar Association (ABA) off from the judicial nominee process that it’s long participated in.
“For several decades, the American Bar Association has received special treatment and enjoyed special access to judicial nominees,” she wrote in a letter to ABA president William R. Bay.
“In some administrations, the ABA received notice of nominees before a nomination was announced to the public. Some administrations would even decide whether to nominate an individual based on a rating assigned by the ABA,” she added.
The American Bar Association has lost its way, and we do not believe it serves as a fair arbiter of judicial nominees.@TheJusticeDept will no longer give the ABA the access they’ve taken for granted. pic.twitter.com/ViqX9IRa7w
— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) May 29, 2025
The problem, Bondi continued, was that the ABA used these privileges to grossly benefit Democrats over Republicans.
“Unfortunately, the ABA no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications, and its ratings invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations,” she explained.
According to a National Review report written in 2018 by Judicial Crisis Network president Carrie Campbell Severino, the ABA has been mired in left-wing activism for decades.
“The ABA has a history of taking liberal positions on issues including abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and the Second Amendment,” Severino reported. “The organization’s ideological bias has long tainted its ratings of judicial nominees.”
“An entire book on the subject was written as early as 1965, Joel B. Grossman’s Lawyers and Judges: The ABA and the Politics of Judicial Selection. A 2006 Wall Street Journal editorial condemned the ABA’s ‘long history of . . . ideological sandbagging.’ A 2012 Political Research Quarterly study found ‘strong evidence of systematic bias in favor of Democratic nominees,'” she added.
By 2018, only two years into President Trump’s first administration, the ABA had already rated eight of his judicial nominees as “Not Qualified.” That was twice as many as received that same rating during former President Bill Clinton’s entire eight years in office.
More recently, the ABA has also taken several unnecessary swipes at the Trump administration’s executive orders:
In a blistering statement, the American Bar Association describes “attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship, the dismantling of USAID and the attempts to criminalize” diversity initiatives as “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.”… pic.twitter.com/SnyezndRRH
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) February 10, 2025
Bondi concluded her letter to ABA president Bay by dropping the hammer on the biased organization.
“Accordingly, while the ABA is free to comment on judicial nominations along with other activist organizations, there is no justification for treating the ABA differently from such other activist organizations and the Department of Justice will not do so,” she wrote.
“Specifically, the Office of Legal Policy will no longer direct nominees to provide waivers allowing the ABA access to non-public information, including bar records. Nominees will also not respond to questionnaires prepared by the ABA and will not sit for interviews with the ABA,” she concluded.
This move by the AG comes months after a group of Republican senators sent a letter to the ABA warning them that they intended to, one, push their colleagues to ignore the group’s judicial rating system, and two, urge the Trump administration to cut the group off.
“[We] conclude [that] the American Bar Association (ABA) is a biased and ideologically captured institution,” the senators wrote. “We call on our Senate colleagues to disregard the ABA’s recommendations, as well as ratings of judicial nominees and pending legislation.”
“We also call upon President Trump and the Department of Justice to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely,” they added.
The American Bar Association sat on the sidelines as our legal system was weaponized against normal Americans.
Now, they launch a pressure campaign against President Trump on day one.
We’ve had enough. It’s time to liberate our legal system from this failed institution. pic.twitter.com/C2XwX2Cb8w
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) March 7, 2025
As of late Thursday, the ABA had “no comment” on the administration’s move to cut it off from the judicial nominee process.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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