Trump taps judge who helped gut voting rights for lifetime appeals court seat
President Donald Trump announced that he's nominating Lee Rudofsky to the U.S. Court of Appeals despite a questionable record.
On Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Rudofsky will be nominated to serve on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite his record as a federal judge who ruled that private citizens can't sue under the Voting Rights Act.
Trump described Rudofsky as a "distinguished" federal judge during his time in Arkansas. "Lee will be a rock-solid defender of the Constitution on the Eighth Circuit," Trump wrote. Trump appointed Rudofsky to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas in 2019.
The nomination would hand a lifetime appellate seat to a judge whose most consequential ruling narrowed how the landmark 1965 civil rights law can be enforced. In 2022, Rudofsky dismissed a redistricting challenge from the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, which argued that a new House map diluted Black voting strength.
Vox described the ruling as a threat to safeguards against racial discrimination in elections by making them "virtually unenforceable."
Rudofsky wrote that regular voters and civil rights groups can't file a suit at all based on the Voting Rights Act that bars racial discrimination in voting, and that only the U.S. attorney general can, according to reporting by Courthouse News Service.
Rudofsky conceded there was a strong case that some districts in the House map were unlawful, but he had no power to decide it, per Courthouse News. Voting rights advocates said the decision upended decades of practice in which voters and groups routinely sued to enforce the law, according to reporting by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. An official from the Arkansas Public Policy Panel told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Rudofsky's decision "flies in the face of 50 years of precedent."
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Rudofsky's reasoning in 2023, HuffPost reported, leaving voters across the circuit's seven states unable to bring claims like these themselves.