6 days ago
Judge that restored NIH grants after Trump order echoed famous McCarthy-era lawyer from Boston
McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, smeared people left and right, using innuendo instead of evidence, acting — as Erwin Griswold, a former Republican solicitor general and dean of Harvard Law School put it — as 'judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.'
Welch was a partner at the Boston firm of Hale & Dorr and lived in Walpole. In the spring of 1954, McCarthy went after the Army, accusing it of lax security, leaving it open to communist infiltration. Welch took on McCarthy for the Army.
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For 30 days, Welch appeared before McCarthy's committee, making the Army's case, systematically showing that McCarthy's claims about the Army being soft on communism were unfounded.
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Frustrated by Welch's ability to show the paucity of McCarthy's claims, McCarthy waved one of his distractions, asserting that Fred Fischer, a junior associate in Welch's law firm, while a student at Harvard Law School had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which McCarthy called the legal arm of the Communist Party.
This violated an agreement that Welch and Cohn had made before the hearings, that Welch would not bring up Cohn's ability to avoid the draft in the Korean War, and the committee would not bring up Fischer having been associated with a legal organization that represented accused communists while in law school.
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Welch's response to McCarthy would go down in history as
'Until this moment, Senator,' Welch said, 'I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.'
When McCarthy tried to interrupt, Welch added this dagger: 'Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?'
Fast forward to another June, 71 years after Welch spoke those immortal lines, when US District Judge William G. Young, sitting in federal court in Boston,
On Monday, Young accused the Trump administration of discriminating against minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community and ordered the National Institutes of Health to restore hundreds of research grants that the Trump administration had dismissed as DEI-inspired 'woke' nonsense.
'I've sat on this bench now for 40 years. I've never seen government racial discrimination like this,' Young said. 'Is it true of our society as a whole? Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?'
'Have we no shame' sounds an awful lot like, 'Have you no sense of decency?'
Young said the cuts to grants that funded research into racial disparities in health care were 'arbitrary and capricious,' that they were based not on reasoned policy, but on pure bias.
The White House fired back, accusing Young of being, well, biased.
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'It is appalling that a federal judge would use court proceedings to express his political views and preferences,' White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. 'How is a judge going to deliver an impartial decision when he explicitly stated his biased opinion that the Administration's retraction of illegal DEI funding is racist and anti-LGBTQ?'
Casting Young as some lefty activist jurist is a stretch. Early in his career, he served as chief counsel to Massachusetts Governor Frank Sargent, a Republican. Young was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of modern conservatism.
Having watched Young in action for 40 years, I'd say he's biased mostly toward the Constitution.
Brittany Charlton, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and one of the plaintiffs that challenged the Trump administration's cuts, said the administration was accusing the judge of the very bias it showed in making the cuts in the first place.
She said Young's decision 'is an important step in protecting public health and allowing critical research to continue. Research that helps us understand and treat serious diseases should be based on science, not politics.'
In his ruling, Young made it clear that he believed the Trump administration's rationale for cutting research about racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people was unsupported by facts. Welch said the same thing about McCarthy's claims about the Army being soft on communists.
'This court finds and rules that the explanations are bereft of reasoning virtually in their entirety,' Young said. 'These edicts are nothing more than conclusory, unsupported by factual development.'
Young asked the Department of Justice attorney representing the Trump administration to explain how funding research related to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion led to 'unlawful discrimination.'
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'Where's the support for that? Any support? Any rational explanation?' Young said. 'I see no evidence of that. Point me to any particular grant or group of grants being used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race. From what I can see, it's the reverse.'
Young said the government was guilty of the very thing it claimed the research causes.
'I am hesitant to draw this conclusion, but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it, that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America's LGBTQ community,' Young said. 'That's what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.'
Like Welch, Young is a Harvard grad. Maybe the Trump administration can chalk all this up to Harvard's revenge.
Young's comments were not nationally televised, and they have not ignited the backlash against the Trump administration that Welch's remarks did against McCarthy.
Still, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Justice is inevitable. But it takes time.
Five years after dressing McCarthy down, Welch played a judge in Otto Preminger's film, 'Anatomy of a Murder.' His portrayal won him a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor.
But his best performance was on June 9, 1954, when he exposed a bully for what he was, inspiring a nation to do the same.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
