Baby Judges

It’s a pretty simple plan: nominate and confirm as many recently-post-pubescent federal court and administrative trial judges as you can – each accorded a lifetime guarantee in that appointed office – and make sure that those baby judges thus control lawmaking over a much-longer period into the distant future than you would otherwise have if those appointments were instead based on competence and experience. The only criteria would be (a) the nominee has a law degree, (b) he or she passes a socially and fiscally conservative litmus test, and (c) they are young… very, very young. Experience? Respect of their peers? Achievement? Competence? Forgetaboutit! No, it’s just the new GOP way of doing business!!!! Unless they clerked for an ultra-right wing justice. Then they can be older, but are more likely appointed to appellate benches.

For example, “Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal [trial] judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing ‘Hillary Rotten Clinton’ and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn. (He also happens to be married to the chief of staff for White House Counsel Donald McGahn, a detail he neglected to disclose when asked about possible conflicts of interest.)

“On [November 9th], the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench… Talley, 36, is part of what Trump has called the ‘untold story’ of his success in filling the courts with young conservatives… ‘The judge story is an untold story. Nobody wants to talk about it,’ Trump said last month, standing alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the White House Rose Garden. ‘But when you think of it, Mitch and I were saying, that has consequences 40 years out, depending on the age of the judge — but 40 years out.’” Los Angeles Times, November 10th.

The GOP’s job one: Control forever, even if the entire political spectrum of the United States changes. Pretty much guarantees that the United States will remain severely polarized for decades no matter if the complexion of our electorate changes dramatically. The handwriting is on the wall suggests this is both inevitable and in the near-term.

Indeed, it seems as if shifting demographics, which will be reflected in the 2020 Census, will confirm what most of us already know: The white-Christian-conservative movement – most clearly associated with Donald Trump’s base – will be a rather distinct minority, overwhelmed by a culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse majority. To preserve that white-rural-values powerbase as the “deciders and protectors” of American values at the expense of the diverse-urban majority, requires that exclusionary voter ID laws, gerrymandering and judicial support to minimize the power of that diverse majority and maximize that traditionalist white control over our future.

As a poll released on November 8th by South Carolina’s Winthrop University supports, too many white voters, particularly in the South, feel that they and their values are threatened: “When asked if white people were under attack, 46% of [southern] whites agreed or strongly agreed. And more than three-fourths of black respondents said racial minorities are currently under attack in the United States.”

Those white voters champion conservative districting and the appointment of conservative judges to hold government in check and to preserve their “majority” control of most of the state legislatures, governorships, the presidency and both Houses of Congress. Clearly, as the three million popular vote margin of Clinton over Trump voters illustrates, these white traditional voters could never win such federal elections or dominate as they do politically if a “one person, one vote” system were ever implemented. Instead, we have a system of government that accords rural-value voters in federal elections approximately 1.8 votes for every one vote cast by a diverse urban voter.

So to defend the indefensible – skewing elections to favor traditional white voters with much more voting power than the non-white traditionalist movement – they need a judicial system that continues that bias no matter how much their position may be in the minority in the future. They need baby judges to block their opponents long after their numbers have dwindled into a political minority with “litmus test right wing” appellate judges to uphold the rulings of these baby federal trial court justices. They hope that recent Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, will insure that gerrymandering remain intact for the foreseeable future and that voter ID laws finally find support in that high court.

Remember when, in the last two years of his term, Obama could not get his judicial appointments confirmed. With all those unfilled judicial vacancies, it’s just a field day for the conservative America to get that many more right wing judges into those lifetime appointments. “‘It’s such a depressing idea, that we don’t get appointments unless we have unified government, and that the appointments we ultimately get are as polarized as the rest of the country,’ said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. ‘What does that mean for the legitimacy of the courts in the United States? It’s not a pretty world.’

“For now, conservatives are reveling in their success. During the campaign, Mr. Trump shored up the support of skeptical right-wing voters by promising to select Supreme Court justices from a list [White House Counsel Donald McGahn, II] put together with help from the Federalist Society and the conservative Heritage Foundation. Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped deliver the president’s narrow victory. Now, he is rewarding them.

“‘We will set records in terms of the number of judges,’ Mr. Trump said at the White House recently, adding that many more nominees were in the pipeline. Standing beside the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, he continued, ‘There has never been anything like what we’ve been able to do together with judges.’” New York Times, November 13th.

By politicizing the courts like never before, insurance that current values will determine the future no matter how America may change, perhaps the Trump administration is undermining our system of government such that it cannot work in the future. Perhaps, he is planting the very seeds to destroy the nation he thinks he is supporting.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this pattern of judicial appointments is just one more existential threat that Mr. Trump is pushing onto the United States of America.