ARepublican U.S. Congressman complaining that President Joe Biden isn’t appointing enough straight white men to the federal judiciary has a long history of racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who has spent the past three decades as an elected official, stood on the House floor Thursday to discuss what he called a new “study” that showed out of 97 judicial appointments President Biden made in his first two years in office, just five were “white guys,” and “two were gay.”
“A study was done a little while ago on the federal judiciary. I wish we had these studies for all other appointments by the Biden administration,” Rep. Grothman says. “And apparently in his first two years, President Biden had appointed 97 federal judges. Of the 97 federal judges, I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were white guys, because I know President Biden wasn’t heavy on appointing more white guys.”
“Five of the 97 judges were white guys of those, two were gay. So almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay apparently to get appointed,” the Wisconsin Republican lawmaker complained.
The video, posted to Twitter Thursday afternoon, has quickly gone viral, garnering 1.2 million views in just four hours.
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Grothman’s history of bigotry has been well-documented over the years.
“In 2010 Grothman, who believes that homosexuality is a choice, proposed banning Wisconsin public school teachers from mentioning homosexuality in sex education classes because some teachers had an ‘agenda’ to turn kids gay,” as Mother Jones reported.
In 2015 Grothman responded to the U.S. Supreme Court decision the found same-sex couples have the same constitutional rights and responsibilities to marriage as their different-sex peers. Grothman said the Obergefell ruling, as Right Wing Watch reported, “was an affront to the Americans who died in the Civil War because it was ‘a strong religious war to further a Christian lifestyle by getting rid of slavery.’”
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In 2019, he was one of 53 members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives who urged the U.S. Supreme Court, in writing, to rule against LGBTQ people. The lawmakers, all Republicans, said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not – and should not be interpreted to – protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.
In 2021, Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) blasted Grothman after he claimed Black Lives Matter “doesn’t like the old-fashioned family.”
“If you just look up Glenn Grothman, he has a history of making remarks about ‘welfare mommas,’ just very racist remarks throughout his time,” Placket later told MSNBC.
Last year Grothman, who ran unopposed for his seat, was one of 33 House Republicans who sponsored a federal vigilante “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
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Back in March, all 26 Republicans on the House oversight Committee, including Grothman, refused to sign a simply two-sentence statement denouncing white supremacy.
“We, Members of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, together denounce white nationalism and white supremacy in all its forms, including the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. These hateful and dangerous ideologies have no place in the work of the
United States Congress or our Committee,” the statement from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) read.
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Also in March Rep. Grothman was one of just eight members of the House – all Republicans – to vote to suspend normal trade relations with Russia, in response to Vladimir Putin ‘s illegal war against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, many on social media reacted to Grothman’s complaint there are not enough straight white men on the federal bench by pointing to various statistics to show the Wisconsin Congressman that the vast majority of Donald Trump’s appointees to the federal bench were straight white men.
According to Pew Research, in his four years as president, just 16% of Trump’s massive number of judicial appointees were not white. Just 24% were women.
“Glad to see someone standing up for that repressed and beleaguered demographic,” tweeted Steve Metz, sarcastically. Metz is an author and professor of national security and strategy at the U.S. Army War College.
“Republicans are the only party brave enough to dream of an America where white men are finally given a voice on the federal judiciary,” mockingly claimed CREW’s research director Robert Maguire. Maguire posted charts showing the lack of racial and gender diversity in the nation’s federal courts.
“For the first 139 years, all federal judges were white males,” noted a Twitter user whose bio says they are an attorney. “The first woman was appointed in 1934, the first black man in 1950. Even now white males are over represented, 71% of the judiciary versus 61% of the general population. Biden is trying, but we aren’t there yet.”
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Another Twitter user observed, “This is what the GOP war on Woke is all about! The GOP is terrified that their white dominance in society is eroding.”
