When President Biden nominated attorney Andre Mathis to sit on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, it’s a fairly safe bet that neither man could have guessed that the prominent Memphis, Tennessee, attorney’s path to the federal bench would be stymied by a strangely racist dog whistle from Mathis’s home state senator. Well, that’s not entirely true, because the senator in question is Marsha Blackburn, one of the more enthusiastically unhinged Republicans in office today. But even by her admittedly low bar of awfulness — from homophobia to birtherism to general weirdo behavior —Blackburn’s attacks on Mathis during his confirmation hearing this week were a step beyond.
After opening her time with a series of questions regarding what she saw as Mathis’s lack of judicial experience and “woe is me” complaining about the nominating process at large, Blackburn made a hard right turn into non-sequitur territory, explaining that Mathis, who is Black, “has a RAP sheet with a laundry list of citations, including multiple failures to appear in court.” That term, “RAP sheet,” is one with a specific association with criminal acts (“Record of Arrest and Prosecution”).
