He Defended North Carolina’s Voter Suppression Law. Now He’s Set to Become a Federal Judge There.

Thomas Farr will get a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

In July 2013, North Carolina enacted one of the country’s most restrictive voting laws. The measure required certain forms of government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot, cut the early voting period, and eliminated same-day voter registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration for high school students. The North Carolina NAACP called it a “monster” voter suppression law, filing a lawsuit against it for intentionally discriminating against voters of color.

The GOP-dominated North Carolina legislature hired Thomas Farr, a prominent Republican lawyer based in Raleigh, to defend the law. “I strongly deny that the legislature engaged in intentional discrimination,” he told a federal appeals court during a hearing in June 2016. “It was not a nefarious thing.”

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals strongly disagreed, striking down the law a month later for targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The court said the legislature had requested data on the voting methods African Americans were most likely to use and then curtailed those very things, like early voting and same-day registration. The judges called this evidence “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times” and blocked “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.”

Farr appealed to the Supreme Court, saying “the decision insults the people of North Carolina and their elected representatives by convicting them of abject racism.” The court declined to hear the case, leaving the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in place.