Last month Fix the Court sent a letter to the Fifth Circuit asking them about an unresolved 2013 complaint against notorious S.D. Tex. Judge Lynn Hughes (right).

In the intervening years, there have been countless examples of Judge Hughes saying things in court that flout judicial ethics standards and common sense, but our thinking was let’s start with the oldest complaint, see if and how it was resolved, and then decide if we need to file a formal complaint stemming from the 2013 incident or any of the subsequent incidents.

As of today, we still do not know if it has been resolved but remain in touch with the circuit clerk on the issue.

Meanwhile, we also figured that given the judge’s widely publicized racist and sexist statements, Texas’ U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, would have weighed in to condemn those comments. Texas’ senators neither run FEMA nor do they sit on the House Judiciary Committee, where judicial impeachments begin, but as with any going concern, their words carry weight.

Sen. Cornyn has had a lot to say:
– Hughes has “promoted wild conspiracy theories and openly bashed people […] he happens to disagree with.”
– Called Hughes “combative and insulting” and “radioactive.”
– Said about Hughes, “We could all learn a little lesson here, I think, about increasing the civility and the way we treat each other in a very polarized country.”

Sen. Cruz added: “He seems to have been unusually prolific in that he seemed to go out of his way to try to piss everybody off.”

JUST KIDDING!

Those are the things that Sens. Cornyn and Cruz have said about OMB Director nominee Neera Tanden. (Switch the “he” to “she,” etc., in the above quotes.)

What we actually found from Cornyn and Cruz on Hughes: crickets.

Yet here are just a sample of Hughes’ racist and sexist statements:

Hughes discounted racists’ use of fried chicken as a racial insult and said, “That’s surprising to Colonel Sanders,” adding, “No Black individually and no Blacks collectively owns [sic] the sensitivity rights to fried chicken or anything else.”

Hughes told an Asian lawyer to “move to North Korea.”

Hughes was overturned on appeal for his decision that belittled the time women spend at work breast-feeding and wanting a private area in which to do so, flippantly saying “the law does not punish lactation discrimination.”

Hughes somehow confused “Caucasians” with “Aryans,” the term hijacked by Nazis to describe the “master race,” during a 2013 hearing  in which he also insulted a man of South Asian descent.

Hughes scolded a female attorney for a mistake she made and told her, “It was lot simpler when you guys wore dark suits, white shirts and navy ties. […] We didn’t let girls do it in the old days.”

Hughes commented about a university’s diversity director position, “And what does the diversity director do? Go around painting students different colors so that they would think they were mixed?”

We eagerly await proper condemnation from Texas’ senators.