Attorney General Bondi’s demotion of the American Bar Association from pride of place in evaluating judicial nominees amounts to a blow against a legal establishment that has tilted left.

Ms. Bondi, in a letter, told the bar association’s president, William Bay, to fix “the bias in its rating process” in respect of candidates for the federal bench. She laments, “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.”  

While the attorney general insists that the ABA remains free to make its views known on judicial nominees, the DOJ “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.”  

Ms. Bondi adds on X: “The American Bar Association has lost its way, and we do not believe it serves as a fair arbiter of judicial nominees.” She notes, “For several decades, the American Bar Association has received special treatment and enjoyed special access to judicial nominees. 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.”

The ABA was established in 1878 at Saratoga Springs and now numbers some 400,000 members. Its first constitution committed the group to “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country.” The ABA’s website explains that when it was founded the “legal profession as we know it today barely existed. … Lawyers were generally sole practitioners who trained under a system of apprenticeship.”  

The ABA has since 1923 accredited law schools, though in 1995 the Department of Justice accused it of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in its accreditation proceedings. The issue was eventually resolved with a consent decree that the ABA later admitted it violated. It paid a fine of $185,000. 

Senator Lee, a member of the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee, accuses the ABA of amounting to a “radical left-wing advocacy group.” He has criticized the group for pursuing “woke initiatives” relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Republican resistance to the ABA is not new. President George W. Bush curtailed the ABA’s access to judicial nominees, as did Mr. Trump in his first term. 

Since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, though, the ABA and the administration have locked horns. The group has rated 10 of Mr. Trump’s judicial nominees as “unqualified,” though eight of those were subsequently confirmed by the Senate. The ABA sued Mr. Trump over cuts to the Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development, which deprived the group of tens of millions of dollars it gathered from those sources. 

Ms. Bondi has also asserted that the ABA’s diversity standards for law schools are unconstitutional in the wake of Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the use of race in college admissions. In March the ABA released a statement — not naming Mr. Trump but alluding to his administration — condemning “efforts to undermine the courts and the profession.” It added: “We will not stay silent in the face of efforts to remake the legal profession.”

The ABA has rated as “well qualified” — it’s top grade — every Supreme Court nominee in recent decades save for Justice Clarence Thomas. He was reckoned to be merely “qualified,” with a minority of the judging committee finding him to be “not qualified.” Justice Thomas is now the high court’s senior jurist and widely respected on the court and off. 

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, criticized the move as “a seismic change in the judicial nominations process — an unjustified and blatantly political move by the Trump Administration.”