The chairman of a congressional task force examining civil liberties abuses tells Just the News he plans to pursue legislation to strip the nation’s most powerful legal profession body of its ability to accredit law schools after a bombastic hearing over the group’s past promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.

“I do think that we ought to be stripping the American Bar Association of its status as a law school accreditor,” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, said Thursday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. “I think that they have proven themselves to be a fundamentally left-wing institution that is promoting leftism, that is discriminating against conservatives and against racial groups that the ABA disfavors.

“I think that they should have zero influence over the legal profession in this country,” he added.

Asked how Congress could act to strip the ABA of the role it plays in the private sector, Gill suggested legislation.

“That's something that we're looking into right now,” he said. “Now, various states can choose to work with the American Bar Association, but I think that we can that we can make that more difficult on a on a federal level.”

Gill is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuse and on Wednesday he interrogated ABA President Michelle Behnke, confronting her with specific examples of how her group imposed DEI mandates on law schools.

ABA has begun the process of rescinding its DEI requirements for law schools after President Donald Trump signed an executive order making such mandates illegal. But Behnke still defended the concept of DEI. 

“Diversity and excellence are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the opposite is true. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives enhance merit within the legal profession. When we have diverse teams, our profession is stronger,” she testified.

Gill argued such DEI mandates illegally discriminate against certain students and potentially undercut excellence in the legal profession.

“I think that the thing that was the most clear, more than anything else, was that the ABA and its president are utterly unable to defend any of their DEI practices,” he said. “…They have an enormous amount of influence on law schools across the country, influence over their admissions policies, where the ABA has been promoting DEI and all kinds of diversity mandates.

“They have influence over law school curriculum, where they've been pushing all kinds of left wing nonsense, and they also have a continuing legal education that they make their members go through, which is infused with some of the most far left ideology as you can imagine,” he added.