While nobody was looking, the Senate confirmed another real prize as a federal judge on Thursday, the 54th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, if you want to see how badly history can rhyme sometimes. Eric Murphy is 40 years old, so he'll likely be inflicting himself on at least the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for three decades.

He spent several years as the solicitor general for the state of Ohio. It was an eventful tenure there. From Cleveland.com:

He grew up in the Cincinnati area, graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and earned his law degree from University of Chicago. Before becoming Solicitor General, he practiced in the Columbus office of Jones Day. As Solicitor General, he successfully defended Ohio’s methods of culling its voter rolls before the U.S. Supreme Court. He also defended Ohio’s laws against gay marriage in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex nuptials nationwide.

This got Senator Sherrod Brown's attention.



Brown criticized Murphy for his arguments “against marriage equality” and his defense of a "voter purge that unfairly stripped Ohioans, innocent Ohioans, of their vote registration.” He also said Murphy defended the Trump administration’s ban on people entering the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. “I cannot support nominees who have actively worked to strip Ohioans of their rights,” said a statement from Brown. “Special interests already have armies of lobbyists and lawyers on their side, they don’t need judges in their pockets.”

I am sorry that we won't have Sherrod Brown's voice in the Democratic primaries this time around. But it's still an important voice in the Senate and in our politics.

Sherrod Brown Tom Williams Getty Images

Once, of course, Brown could've stopped this nomination just by virtue of his being one of Ohio's two U.S. senators. Under Barack Obama, during Pat Leahy's time as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Leahy required that both of a state's senators had to return the "blue slip" to pass on a nominee. That was a nice civics lesson, but Republican senators had field days stalling Obama's nominees. And now, with Republicans controlling the Senate, the blue slip tradition is less than a formality. And the decision by Harry Reid when he was majority leader to eliminate the filibuster for lower court judges has thrown the process into hyperdrive.

Eric Murphy Tom Williams Getty Images

As you might expect, Murphy's career is littered with arguments and writings that put him safely into the Federalist Society's comfort zone. His particular speciality seems to have been defending voter-suppression statutes and, unfortunately, he was pretty good at it. The folks at the Alliance For Justice put together a rap shee...er...record of Murphy's cases.

He defended Ohio’s voter purge in the Supreme Court case Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, 138 S. Ct. 1833 (2018). In that case, Murphy fought to allow the state to target infrequent voters for removal from the voter rolls and to deprive them of the fundamental right to vote. The Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s actions in a 5-4 decision. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent noted, the law Murphy defended will disproportionately disenfranchise people of color, veterans, and low- income and disabled people who face barriers that may prevent them from voting.

For example, it was used to remove 10% of voters in African-American areas of Cincinnati. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor lamented that the decision “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”5 In the same case, Murphy was also instrumental in pressing the U.S. Department of Justice, which had previously made clear that Ohio’s practice violated federal law, to take the “really rare” step of switching positions.

This is what's going on when we're not looking. This is why no Republican cares that the president would steal soup.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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