Rebecca Taibleson is a federal prosecutor who attends Federalist Society galas and clerked for the patron saint of conservative juridical theory, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. But that’s not enough for the First Liberty Institute, which is about to become the first conservative group to oppose a judicial nomination from President Donald Trump.
The group says that Taibleson’s donations to Democrats, as well as her donations to Democratic Party-aligned groups, is cause for concern — in addition to the cases she has taken on.
“Although she has elite credentials, Taibleson has never demonstrated a commitment to the conservative legal principles or the conservative movement and there are a number of red flags in her background,” First Liberty Institute said in a report about her.
The group accused Taibleson and her husband of being “consistent Democrat donors” and pointed to her work defending former President Joe Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness policy from a legal challenge. It also said that she has donated to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, which supports J-Pride Milwaukee, “a group of greater Milwaukee lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning Jewish people, their friends and allies, wishing to share social, religious, political, educational, and cultural activities in supportive environments with the rest of our communities, families, and friends.”
The First Liberty Institute, which has been described by Americans United for Separation of Church and State as “a Christian Nationalist legal outfit with a deceptive name,” has long remained firmly in Trump’s corner. In May, the president nominated one of its former lawyers, Jordan Pratt, to serve as a federal judge in the Middle District of Florida.
The White House defended Taibleson in a statement to NOTUS.
“President Trump only selects the most qualified and talented judicial nominees who will uphold our Constitution and the rule of law, which is why he nominated Rebecca Taibleson to the Seventh Circuit,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said.
Taibleson, who is currently a federal employee at the Department of Justice, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Last month, Trump nominated Taibleson to fill a soon-to-be vacated spot on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, where conservatives hold a razor-thin majority on the Midwestern court — and could prove decisive when hearing challenges to Trump’s threatened military takeover of Chicago or electoral battles from the swing state of Wisconsin.
The Wall Street Journal called her a sigh of relief for concerned conservative judges hoping to retire who now know she’s “the type of serious nominee whom Trump might appoint to replace them.” A constitutional law professor writing for the libertarian magazine Reason similarly wrote that her “excellent nomination” stood in stark contrast to Trump’s recent decision to send his personal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to a federal appellate court in Pennsylvania after a short stint at the Justice Department, where he was known as “MAGA’s hatchet man” by friends and foes alike.
In a world where judicial nominees are barely known in the political arena, Taibleson actually made something of a name for herself in 2018 when she spoke out at the scandalous Supreme Court nomination hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, for whom she’d clerked for years earlier. Kavanaugh had a reputation for helping foster women’s legal careers. When Kavanaugh’s former childhood classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, publicly testified that he’d sexually assaulted her at a party decades earlier, Taibleson traveled to Capitol Hill to defend her former mentor and “recommended him for his character, his work ethic and his kindness.” In doing so, she played a role in saving Trump’s high court nominee — one whose conservative rulings have since helped Trump dodge a criminal indictment, removed checks on presidential power upon his return and endorsed racial profiling of Hispanics by deportation agents in Los Angeles.
Taibleson is currently listed as the co-chief of the appellate division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, and a NOTUS review of federal court records show her name on 86 different court cases. The Federalist Society lists her as a speaker at three events since 2013: one describing “life as a Scalia clerk,” another about “the Judge Kavanaugh I know” and a third about the judicial confirmation process.
Taibleson actually came close to a formal Trump nomination in 2019 and made it to a shortlist of six desirable candidates, back when his White House was in a spat over nominees with Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Last month, the progressive judicial nomination watchdog Alliance for Justice opposed Taibleson, accusing her of weakening worker protections (citing her defense of Veterans Affairs over a diabetic employee who said they were harassed for taking sick leave). The nonprofit also pointed out how Taibleson, as an assistant to the solicitor general in August 2020, defended the way Trump blocked users on Twitter by arguing to the Supreme Court it didn’t violate the First Amendment.
“The legal implications of Taibleson’s argument were significant: if the court had accepted Taibleson’s position, it would have given sitting presidents — and potentially all public officials — broad authority to exclude critics from digital spaces where government policy was announced, debated, and explained,” the group said.