For the 21 years he’s been practicing law, DC attorney Stuart Kyle Duncan has been a movement lawyer for the hard right: waging legal warfare against the rights of multiple groups of Americans — women, African-Americans, juveniles and the LGBTQ community.
So perhaps it’s not too surprising that the Trump White House nominated him for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District. After all, every one of the administration’s judicial nominees, most of them young, white and male, has been very conservative. But Duncan isn’t just conservative. He has embraced right-wing zealotry and uncompromising views in a way that would be uniquely threatening were he to be confirmed to the federal bench.
Women, in particular, have felt the sting of his zeal. Duncan is the “Hobby Lobby lawyer” who fought against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. His efforts as lead counsel for the chain of craft-supply stores in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby gave for-profit corporations an option to deny much-needed contraception insurance coverage to millions of women employees. Duncan even opposed a Washington State law requiring pharmacies to stock some forms of birth control.
In an amicus brief, he supported Texas’s restrictions on abortion, which the Supreme Court found placed an undue burden on the rights of women.
Duncan’s record on LGBTQ rights is no better. Not only did he author briefs opposing marriage equality, but when the Supreme Court affirmed it in Obergefell v. Hodges, he lashed out — questioning the legitimacy of the Court itself.
He has supported Louisiana’s and Virginia’s discriminatory “Defense of Marriage Laws” and repeatedly attacked the rights of same-sex couples to adopt children.
It was Duncan who made the case for the Gloucester County, VA School Board when it sought to keep a transgender student, Gavin Grimm, from using the bathroom that conformed to his gender identity. And the argument he advanced, that transgender people are mentally ill, was prejudice masquerading as science.
Duncan extended his deplorable record to voting rights, unsuccessfully petitioning the Supreme Court to support a restrictive North Carolina election law that the Fourth Circuit said was intended to discriminate against “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” He also filed an amicus brief defending Texas’s strict photo ID law.
Not even young people have been spared from Duncan’s bias. He challenged the retroactive application of the Supreme Court’s decision that mandatory life sentences for juveniles, without the possibility of parole, were unconstitutional.
Duncan showed his views on immigrants when he filed an amicus brief against President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, arguing that “[m]any violent criminals would likely be eligible to receive deferred action under DAPA’s “inadequate standards.”
And it’s not just his record that makes Duncan a bad choice for a federal judgeship. It’s also the company he keeps. He has spoken multiple times to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized as a “hate group” that “has supported the recriminalization of homosexuality…has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people aboard; has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and claims that a “homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christian society.”
Duncan is so entrenched in his views that he has indicated he may not follow judicial precedent if he disagrees with it.
The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, once said of an Obama judicial pick that “[t]he President’s nominee can’t be so committed to political causes, and so committed to political ideology, that it clouds his or her judgment.
It’s as if the Republican Senator were talking about Stuart Kyle Duncan.
