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Trump's Corruption of [The United States Judiciary]
ArcTangent
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
As you may or may not be aware, due to Senate Republican bullshittery, a ton of judicial positions went unfilled during the tail end of Obama's last term. Including, most famously, the Supreme Court position. If you want to talk about the SCOTUS, there's a thread for it already. Keep it there.
This is one thing that Senate Republicans and Trump have NOT let happen, and it's been one of the quieter things going on, as well as one of the more successful.
It is, obviously, being done massively among partisan lines, which has led this week to a MASSIVELY UNQUALIFIED clown being appointed (and the main thing I wanted to bring up that didn't fit anywhere else).
This is a pro-Trump FAAAAAR right wing nutjob blogger. He was voted out of committee on purely partisan lines, despite being completely unqualified for the position in every way. He still needs to be confirmed by the entire Senate.
But wait, there's more.
He's married to the chief of staff for the man overseeing his own nomination, and 'forgot' to mention it.
Trump and McConnell are filling the judiciary with younger, more unqualified, more partisan, and more overtly corrupt people than ever before. It's hard for me not to see this particular shitbag as a bellwether. If he gets through, then there's truly nobody too corrupt or too unqualified to pass, and they'll simply accelerate the process while they have the power to do so.
This is one thing that Senate Republicans and Trump have NOT let happen, and it's been one of the quieter things going on, as well as one of the more successful.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-one-area-where-trump-has-been-wildly-successful/2017/07/19/56c5c7ee-6be7-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html?utm_term=.9ca9e23df97bHow conservative are Trump’s picks? Dubbed “polemicists in robes” in a headline on a piece by Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, Trump’s nominees are strikingly . . . Trumpian. One Trump nominee blogged that Kennedy was a “judicial prostitute” for trying to find a middle ground on the court, and said that he “strongly disagree[d]” with the court’s decision striking down prosecution of gay people under sodomy laws. Another equated the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, upholding a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, to the court’s 19th-century Dred Scott finding that black people could not be U.S. citizens. Another advocated an Alabama law that denied counsel to death-row inmates.
It is, obviously, being done massively among partisan lines, which has led this week to a MASSIVELY UNQUALIFIED clown being appointed (and the main thing I wanted to bring up that didn't fit anywhere else).
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/us/brett-talley-judge-senate.htmlA 36-year-old lawyer who has never tried a case and who was unanimously deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association has been approved for a lifetime federal district judgeship by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
This is a pro-Trump FAAAAAR right wing nutjob blogger. He was voted out of committee on purely partisan lines, despite being completely unqualified for the position in every way. He still needs to be confirmed by the entire Senate.
But wait, there's more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/us/politics/trump-judge-brett-talley-nomination.htmlHe is married to Ann Donaldson, the chief of staff to the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II.
Mr. Talley was asked on his publicly released Senate questionnaire to identify family members and others who are “likely to present potential conflicts of interest.” He did not mention his wife.
He's married to the chief of staff for the man overseeing his own nomination, and 'forgot' to mention it.
Trump and McConnell are filling the judiciary with younger, more unqualified, more partisan, and more overtly corrupt people than ever before. It's hard for me not to see this particular shitbag as a bellwether. If he gets through, then there's truly nobody too corrupt or too unqualified to pass, and they'll simply accelerate the process while they have the power to do so.
+20
Posts
Impeachment by House and then conviction by Senate.
That's it.
There's a Yale law journal article making the argument that there are mechanisms baked into the origin of "in good behavior" through which one might remove a judge.
Condensed:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/removing-federal-judges-without-impeachment
Full:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/how-to-remove-a-federal-judge
He's still made far fewer appointments than his predecessor. If we can tilt the Senate, we can stop the madness.
Failing that, SCOTUS, however precarious, is still a check on these lunatics. Just gotta hope they hang in there.
One of them probably doesn't know how to behave as a judge at all. I'm prett sure most judges also object to their professional abilities and objectivity being reduced to some asshole who dunks on libruls.
I'm fine with them on the bench, making sound arguments. But if some zero experience conspiracy theorist does something batshit, I'd like to believe the judiciary would be happy to weild it against those using the bench to make a mockery of the institution.
Why? The political slant of the Federal Judiciary is a numbers game. Wikipedia says there's 850-900 federal appeals and district court justices at any given time. You're always going to have a wide spectrum of opinions you don't like; it's not the end of the world. Starting with Reagan, the two term Presidents have put up 280,380,320,360. Loons or not, one term of less competent Ted Cruzes shouldn't destroy the country for the foreseeable future.
Particularly if they can be removed for egregious shit. The goal needs to be to drag to public away from their regressive viewpoints. The judiciary can only do so much to hold us back.
Sure but they would then be impeached.
Plus its likely they would actually come down on that side because the impeachment process is a political process with no defined structure to say that it could not happen that way. Not only would it be easy to make the case that the people were not qualified and that extraordinary circumstances lead to their appointment but so long as you don't impeach every single one of them you've got a reasonable case.
Does it follow the same system as impeachment of the president? Because I'm pretty sure that it doesn't need to be a crime in that case.
It actually being a crime of course gives pretty solid justification, impeaching someone because they talk during a movie or wear ugly socks is obviously going to be an uphill fight, but it's come up in several previous threads that impeaching a president doesn't necessarily have to be over a crime.
Not to say that this would be easy either way, simply clarifying the mechanism in play.
But the Senate has long labored under a tradition of deference to the Executive's discretion in his appointees (a tradition that went curiously suspended while Obama was in office, funny that) and I am sure that McConnell does not give a tiny flying shit if an unqualified neophyte with the judicial solemnity of screeching parrot sits on the federal bench as long as it allows his caucus to serve its rich masters, so this is just one more area where the Constitutional check has been thoroughly subverted by Mitch McConnell
Have fun trying not to seat a child molester in the Senate, Mitch, you're the only one keeping the reputation of that august institution shimmering in the shit
NNID: Hakkekage
Yes, technically the House gets to define what is and isn't a crime for impeachment, but the doctrine of "House says it is a crime but US code doesn't say anything" has never been tested because it is obviously insane.
No. It’s not insane. And in fact has been done before all the way to the conviction stage. (Halsted L. Ritter). Multiple Judges have been charged with non-criminal impeachment behavior
A number of justices so charged had resigned before conclusion of the trial
Looking at the history of impeachment against federal judges, there's not a *lot* of history there, but only six of the fifteen stood accused of crimes (counting one who wasn't being impeached for the crime, but for refusing to resign after being convicted), and four of those six are the most recent four to be impeached, so the ratio was even more skewed a few decades ago. Most of the rest were for various misuses of the bench, one for being a dick, and one for being a drunk.
If you look at the Supreme Court, the only impeachment ever was for being a partisan hack, and the result of the trail established the precedent that justices are allowed to be partisan hacks.
See: the last 20 years.
We might want to correct that(probably not) and re-establish norms (most definitely) so that we can be in such a position. This administration is like puke on a rug. The whole thing is going to smell forever if we do not get every trace of it out of every fiber.
Judges can be arrested and overruled. It's just not easy.
Yeah, they are fucking dumb like that I guess.
The Judiciary doing nothing about or looking to fight against someone addressing the horribly partisan stacking of courts and violations of the spirit of the constitution is not gonna lead to good places.
The writings of the founding fathers support impeachment for not directly criminal actions, for example, one specific example for an impeachment given was inappropriate firing of a federal official, others are inappropriate use of the pardon power, theft or inappropriate use of public funds, etc. Arguably from reading the writings of those involved they intended impeachment to be much more of a check on the president that it has been, and would probably be surprised at some of the cases where it was not used.
I don't see how it is Reid's fault. McConnell had no compunction about killing the filibuster for Supreme Court; there is literally no evidence that he wouldn't do it to pack lower vacancies as well.
If nothing else, Reid's action resulted in fewer vacancies for Trump to fill.
It's another way to blame Democrats for Republicans behaving badly.
Well “nominated”. I doubt he’s even seen the list these people are being read off of.
your first point doesn't change the fact that removing the filibuster made this possible, and your second point is speculation. there's nothing wrong with the statement that Reid's move made this possible. it's just reality.
Disingenuous doesn't mean untrue. Ignoring the first part means that the problem would be magnitudes worse, either from the courts being extra double packed (if filibuster is then killed), or our judicial system careening towards collapse from a lack of appointees (if filibuster is not). Ignoring the second part is a naive assumption that flies in the face of every single thing said and done by McConnell so far, including killing an even more extreme judicial filibuster.
Besides which, Reid didn't make it possible. It was always possible. It wasn't done due to respect for the filibuster and norms, which had already been shit on by Republicans when they refused to let any through at all.
What aspect of eliminating the Filibuster forced Grassley to eliminate Blue Slips? Or places responsibility on Reid for Grassley's decision?
Grassley's argument is that Democrats were using blue slips to replace the filibuster.
Right, but seeing how Republican chairs of the Judiciary Committee have never consistently kept the Blue Slip rule and always change it to empower Republican Presidents and sandbag Democratic Presidents, that's bullshit.
If the Republicans had NOT removed the SC filibuster, then they could argue that this was just the bed Harry Reid made for Democrats. But thats not the world we live in.
Honestly, once we return to power the only option is just to do whatever is necessary to remove these judges. Regardless of how contrived. Hopefully we will return to power with a filibuster proof supermajority in both houses and 67 in the Senate somehow, and can literally just pass a law to say...
"Donald Trump was an illegitimate president and every appointment he made was illegal. You are all impeached, including you Gorsuch. Piss off."
But if we can't do that, we should do anything we can to remove as many of them as we can. Like, passing laws which say "Everything Judge Stevens says on the bench is immediately over-ruled by this law. None of his statements bind anyone, defendant or accuser. This law should be considered to read and enforce the strict opposite of everything he says and return things to the status quo"
We need to remind the people that the Republican party shouldn't be lauded for fixing the problems they created in the first place. Else the chucklefucks will just announce next year that Trump is filling more presidential appointments than any other president has in the 2nd year of their administration.
Edit: this is a Republican Senator from Louisiana asking the questions
This is like watching bad oral exam. It is a delicious, if possibly fleeting, joy.