Senators Urge Colleagues, Trump To Disregard Leftist ABA

The American Bar Association has long been a hive of leftist thought and activism. But while the nearly 150-year-old “national voice for the legal profession” claims it’s comitted to to “defending liberty and pursuing justice,” it fails on both counts. The ABA has stood silent as far-left allies weaponized the government against their political enemies, and it has rallied around discriminatory policies in the name of “social justice.” 

Now a group of lawmakers led by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., is urging Senate colleagues to “disregard ABA recommendations on pending legislation or nominees.” 

“It is a failed institution that is incapable of impartially rating nominees and making legislative recommendations,” states a letter from six conservative senators to American Bar Association President William R. Bay.  “As such, we will not consider any ABA recommendations on pending legislation or nominees, and we call upon our colleagues to do the same.”

The letter, first obtained by The Federalist, is signed by Schmitt and fellow senators Mike Lee, R-Utah, Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio. It hammers a hypocritical legal association that has been on a crusade against Trump 2.0 for what the ABA bills as “wide-scale affronts of the law,” even as it cheered on President Trump’s leftist predecessors for trampling the Constitution. 

Because it is a “biased and ideologically captured institution,” the senators assert the ABA has — in legal parlance — no standing in advising Congress, particularly in its ratings on judicial nominees and pending legislation. The lawmakers also are calling on the president and the Department of Justice “to remove the ABA from the judicial nomination process entirely.” 

As the letter notes, for more than 70 years the ABA has played a role in rating judicial nominees, evaluating candidates as “Qualified or Not Qualified.” 

“As we saw during the Biden Administration, the ABA’s ratings were little more than political endorsements for the most radical, left wing partisans,” the senators argue. “The ABA endorsed patently unqualified judicial nominees as ‘Qualified’ or ‘Well Qualified’ time and time again—including nominees that were so partisan that even the Democrat majority in the Senate could not confirm them.”

‘It is Questionable’

In a series of grandstanding op-eds, the left-wing organization has lashed out at the Trump administration, gassing on about “defending judges and the courts … Adhering to the Rule of Law, and Respecting the Separation of Powers and the three co-equal branches of government with distinct duties and responsibilities.” The ABA’s Bay has pontificated at length on the “values that guide us.” As the senators note in their letter, the ABA has trampled on those same alleged values and principles. 

The organization has railed and fought against the administration’s attempts to trim the fat from a bloated federal bureaucracy through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In particular, the ABA has sprung to the defense of the criminally wasteful U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The agency has dumped billions of taxpayer dollars into suspect-at-best foreign aid initiatives. Last month, the ABA rejoiced in winning a temporary restraining order against the administration’s move to cut the funding. 

“The actions of the president and other executive branch officials to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was established by Congress to administer billions of dollars of foreign assistance funding, is unprecedented,” Bay said in a press release. 

ABA lawyers have good reason to fight so hard for USAID. As the senators note in the letter, the association has failed to disclose that it has “received millions of dollars in funding from USAID.” A federal spending database shows the ABA has raked in more than $18 million over the past two decades. That represents about 46 percent of the total $39.4 million federal funding the Bar has grabbed between fiscal years 2008 and 2025.

“It is questionable whether the ABA is committed to defending liberty or its own sources of funding,” the senators write.  

‘Cover for the Biden Administration’

While Bay and the ABA lecture on the rule of law and protecting the courts, the senators ask where was the Bar when the Biden administration was attacking both. As Biden rolled out “a major initiative limiting” the Supreme Court and his fellow Democrats pushed to pack it, the ABA hosted a podcast musing about how doing so “could actually bring balance” to the Supreme Court.

Curiously, the Illinois State Bar Association in a 2018 article lauded the ABA for sending “some of its best lawyers in Washington to help those fighting against [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] FDR’s plan” to pack the courts to preserve his New Deal agenda. The times sure have changed. 

When constitutionalist Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a would-be assassin following incendiary leftist rhetoric, and when pro-abortion radicals fired off death threats against conservative justices after the court tossed out Roe v. Wade, the ABA “was silent, opting, instead, to cover for the Biden administration by targeting single judge divisions,” the senators note. 

If the association cared about the rule of law, the letter argues, it would have been as vociferous when Biden defied the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down his unconstitutional student loan bailout. 

“The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt. But they didn’t stop me. I’ve relieved student debt for over 5 million Americans. I’m going to keep going,” Biden declared in open defiance of the third branch’s authority — and crickets from the ABA. 

And where was the American Bar Association when the Biden administration was singlehandedly obliterating U.S. immigration law? As the senators note, Trump’s predecessor spent four years lawlessly driving “mass illegal immigration policies” in defiance of “Congress’ explicit demands” that the executive branch enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Double Standard

Most significantly, the senators assert, the ABA was nowhere to be found as the Biden Department of Justice was engaging in the “unprecedented lawfare campaign” against the left’s No. 1 political enemy, Donald Trump. 

In his recent screed attacking Trump, the ABA’s president self-righteously insisted his organization rejects “the notion that the government can punish lawyers who represent certain clients or punish judges who rule certain ways.” The senators call B.S. 

“If the ABA ‘reject[ed] the notion that the government can punish lawyers who represent certain clients,’ then it would have stood up for the scores of attorneys who found themselves on the wrong side of the Biden Administration’s lawfare campaign against President Trump and anyone who dared defend him and advance his legal arguments in court,” the letter argues. 

Say their names, ABA: John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, James Troupis, Christina Bobb, Republican attorneys general, and many others. The leftist association has, not surprisingly, echoed the Democratic Party’s talking points in amping up the lawfare campaign against Trump and his representatives. 

‘ABA Does not Speak for a Majority of Americans’

Not only is the ABA partisan, it is deeply out of touch with the electorate, the senators contend. In his op-ed, Bay arrogantly insists that “Americans expect better” than the policies Trump has pursued. 

“But President Trump won both the electoral and popular votes. It seems Americans expect — and want the Trump administration,” the letter challenges, adding that the ABA “disrespects the 77 million Americans who happily voted for President Trump by branding ‘Americans’ as only those individuals who align with the ABA’s views. The ABA does not speak for a majority of Americans.” 

Polling shows that a majority of Americans do not align with the Bar’s views on forced and divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies. As the senators’ letter notes, the ABA has endorsed everything from men competing in women’s sports to pushing racial quotas. 

As attorney W. Dyer Halpern opined last year in The New York Post, DEI is coming for lawyers. He noted the ABA’s 2022 mandate requiring member attorneys take the woke training. 

“New York’s mandatory DEI trainings are purveying the same rank racial ideology found in our universities. These ‘educational’ sessions teach that the profession has been corrupted by white people, and that white supremacist culture must be actively routed out of the practice of law to make progress,” Halpern wrote. 

‘Ideologically Captured’

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson recently announced a new policy barring FTC political appointees from holding leadership roles in the ABA, participating in association events, or renewing their ABA memberships. And the independent federal agency will no longer cover Bar memberships or participation in ABA activities for FTC staff members. 

In a letter last month to FTC employees, Ferguson noted the “cozy relationship” between federal antitrust enforcers and the private antitrust bar — “facilitated by the Antitrust Law Section of the American Bar Association “ The ABA’s history of leftist advocacy and attacks on the Trump administration “have made this relationship untenable,” Ferguson wrote. 

The senators praised Ferguson’s actions, urging more administrative agencies to follow his lead. In short, the lawmakers contend, there is no saving the ABA from its deep leftist biases. 

“Unfortunately, the ABA has shown itself to be an ideologically captured, leftist institution, as many warned in the first Trump Administration,” the letter charges. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.