American law would never be the same
Meanwhile Trump and the Evil Republicans are going to be able to pack the courts because the ERs got away with cheating.
If conservatives get their way, President Trump will add twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325). American law will never be the same.
…In the final two years of Obama’s presidency, Senate Republicans engaged in tenacious obstruction to leave as many judicial vacancies unfilled as possible. The Garland-to-Gorsuch Supreme Court switch is the most visible example of this tactic but far from the only one: Due to GOP obstruction, “the number of [judicial] vacancies . . . on the table when [Trump] was sworn in was unprecedented,” White House Counsel Donald McGahn recently boasted to the conservative Federalist Society.
Because they cheated.
Trump is wasting no time in filling the 103 judicial vacancies he inherited. In the first nine months of Obama’s tenure, he nominated 20 judges to the federal trial and appellate courts; in Trump’s first nine months, he named 58. Senate Republicans are racing these nominees through confirmation; last week, breaking a 100-year-old tradition, they eliminated the “blue slip” rule that allowed home-state senators to object to particularly problematic nominees. The rush to Trumpify the judiciary includes nominees rated unqualified by the American Bar Association, nominees with outrageously conservative views and nominees significantly younger (and, therefore, likely to serve longer) than those of previous presidents. As a result, by sometime next year, 1 in 8 cases filed in federal court will be heard by a judge picked by Trump. Many of these judges will likely still be serving in 2050.
But that’s not enough for them. Their next cunning plan? Create new judicial positions! Lots of them! A minimum of 260 and maybe as many as 447, a 30 to 50 percent increase.
Almost overnight, the judicial branch would come to consist of almost equal parts judges picked by nine presidents combined — Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama — and judges picked by one: Donald J. Trump. The effect on our civil rights and liberties would be astounding. And a continuation of the pattern of Trump’s nominees to date — more white and more male than any president’s in nearly 30 years — would roll back decades of progress in judicial diversity.
Not so much astounding as nightmarish.
Happy holidays.
Yup, I’m gonna see some variation of Jim Crow applied to various groups (possibly even mine) my entire adult life. Not looking forward to it…
This vandalism is essentially the end of the American experiment in democracy. Most of the arguments the left is having over any given issue, the Berniecrats and Still With Hers and the anarchists and trans activists and socialists and centrists, are pretty much irrelevant now. It’s the Republicans’ country. They’ve stolen it in plain sight and under cover of a tainted election, and they’re not going to give it up.
The midterms will be bushwhacked to such an extent that, even with a deficit of several million votes, Republicans will retain both Houses of Congress. If they don’t, they’ll just get the last four or five states to sign onto another Constitutional Convention and rewrite the whole fucking thing. Abortion has maybe another five years on the clock; gay marriage probably less. The tax bill, if it doesn’t pass now, will pass after the midterms. And after that, the economy’s going to collapse, and all those angry white men with guns will start using them.
I give the US another decade. Hopefully it doesn’t take the rest of the world with it.
It *is* possible that some of those angry white men with guns will decide to pull a Gabby Giffords on some of the Federalist Society’s little darlings.
Which is to say… this is where we are now… beyond the pale.
I don’t know how useful it is to provide a specific timeframe. The world “as we know it” (or “used to know it”, or “thought we knew it”) has already ended as far as I’m concerned († 08.11.2016). As for the smoking rubble, It could all end in a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, or gradually succumb to the slow nukes of climate change/ocean acidification (and the associated famines, diseases, wars etc.) over the course of a few decades. Either way the ship is sinking.
And we keep drilling more holes in the hull.
It isn’t a question of ‘being useful’. We’re a long way past that; in truth, we were past it when Bush the Elder’s jurists handed Bush the Lesser the election in 2000 and the country’s collective response was ‘Meh; football?’ Then the country essentially ignoring BtL’s outright theft of Ohio, and hence the second election, cinched the deal. Obama’s accession was in hindsight a twilight interregnum, a reflection on what was and what might have been rather than a promise of what might yet be. To be clear, Trump isn’t the cause of the decline; he and his Team of Risibles are simply the end-stage presentation of a disease that’s affected the American polity for decades.
Utility is beyond us at this point. Futility is where it’s at.
Seth, I think that is spot on. I started to recognize the rot with Reagan, but the occasional centrist, such as Clinton and Obama, help people believe that this isn’t a downward slide, only that we have these detours into the darkness for a while. But the other thing that has happened is to pull those Democrats who do manage to get anywhere to the right, to such a degree that Dwight Eisenhower now looks like a flaming liberal.
Really, anyone who could put Obama anywhere but the center is someone who has moved the center so far right that he looked like a true progressive, instead of a cautious moderate.
I also suspect the rot goes back further than Reagan, and maybe it traces back further than Nixon’s southern strategy that turned the Republicans from pro-business conservatives into rabid evangelicals, but if so, I suspect it might have been when Billy Graham started his White House crusade with DDE. It could have been sooner…but I think most of it was reaction to FDR and his policies that actually saved a lot of people and therefore could not be tolerated. They began to try to outdo each other to see who could be the most horrible, and each president has to go further into the lunatic fringe to outdo the one before.