Trump’s takeover of courts has started to sting

The Guardian writes:

In the first televised presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, the sitting president was asked why voters should re-elect him to the White House. He gave a relatively obscure answer – it was all about the judges, he said.

He ended his single tenure having placed 231 men and women on the federal bench, including three on the US supreme court, 54 on appeals circuits and 174 on district courts.

Last week, the significance of Trump’s hyper-aggressive remodeling of the federal bench lurched into view. Aileen Cannon, who Trump nominated for the US district court for the southern district of Florida in May 2020, granted the former president his desire to have a “special master” handle thousands of documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

The ruling was greeted with astonishment by legal scholars who noted how convenient it was for Trump to give the special master control over highly classified materials. Cannon effectively erected a roadblock in front of the justice department’s criminal investigation into how national security intelligence had been illegally hidden in Mar-a-Lago.

Even William Barr, himself a former Trump appointee as US attorney general, had only harsh words. “Deeply flawed”, he said about the ruling.

But Cannon’s maverick decision is just the thin end of the wedge. From the supreme court down, the impact of Trump’s recalibration of the federal judiciary is now starting to sting.

The consequences of Trump’s three appointments to the supreme court are now well understood by many Americans. The evisceration of the right to an abortion; blocking government action on the climate crisis; rolling back gun control laws are just a few of the seismic changes wrought by the court’s new 6-to-3 conservative supermajority.

Less visible and much less well comprehended are the similarly drastic shifts that are being initiated in the lower courts by Trump-appointed judges like Cannon. “These appointments are not only tilting the law further right, they are starting to erode fundamental democratic protections,” said Rakim Brooks, president of the advocacy group Alliance for Justice.

Biden is doing what he can to push the needle back towards the center. A review by the Pew Research Center last month found that the Democratic president had managed to surpass Trump’s rate at seating federal judges, achieving more confirmations at an equivalent point in his tenure than any president since John Kennedy.

Today Biden has confirmed a total of 81 federal judges (80 if you discount the fact that he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson twice – first for an appeals court and then as the newest addition to the supreme court). Just how far the current president will be able to go in mitigating the rightward shift under Trump remains to be seen, with much hanging on the outcome of November’s midterm elections.

Apparently, my previous criticism of Democrats being slow about nominating federal judges was wrong. They are doing better than I thought. 

If the Dems lose control of the Senate after the 2022 elections, that will be the end of all Democratic judges being appointed to the federal bench.

Opinion: Democracy is inherently messy

A New York Times opinion piece makes some interesting assertions about the nature of democracy:

We may think that these clashes over the Mar-a-Lago search and over the state of our democracy are an aberration, a Trump thing. But they are actually the latest example — increased in intensity by the internet — of something that has been a permanent part of our politics, what we call the paradox of democracy.

Far more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is an open culture of communication that affords people the right to think, speak and act and allows every possible means of persuasion. That makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always potentially in the offing.

We ought to avoid the naïveté of liberal fantasy, which imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Because of changes to online platforms around a decade ago, wrote Jonathan Haidt recently, “People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogeneous tribes.”

But this is precisely what an unwieldy democratic culture looks like. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms, or it can devolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism and vitriolic partisanship.

And when communications devolve into propaganda and partisanship, a democracy can either end with breathtaking speed, as it did in Myanmar last year, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government, or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism, as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

Nothing forbids voters in a democracy to support an authoritarian or vote itself out of existence (as the ancient Athenian assembly famously did). The history of democracy is full of demagogues exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to turn people against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leveraged a celebrity name to run for president on a campaign of restoring order in 1848, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup to become emperor when his term was up.

According to one poll, only 21 percent of Republicans think the investigations into Mr. Trump should continue. However they arrived at that opinion, that they hold it at all matters. It gives conservatives not just the political cover to subvert the rule of law but also the power to create their own alternative reality.

Since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republicans have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections. You could say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself, but it’s really a glimpse of democracy shorn of liberal restraints.

It would be much better, of course, if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.

“Yet the truth is,” as the political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has written, “we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still do. Democracy is not static. It is not a given, it is not guaranteed, and it is not stable.”

Qs: Would it be much better if (1) democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people, and/or (2) we were guaranteed protection of democracy by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness?

Is it a liberal fantasy that imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech, or do some conservatives also want to limit free speech, particularly free speech that is critical of what conservatives want or that conveys inconvenient facts, truths and/or sound reasoning?

“Thoughts and prayers,” MAGAs

I know the following is two years old, but man oh man, does the author ever nail it!

 To Trump diehards still defiantly clinging to their nasty sore loser historic disaster shipwreck of the worst president ever, like the crusty barnacles on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, I feel sorry for you.

I mean that with all due respect, in a sarcastically caustic way, speaking Trumper language. I feel for you. My heart goes out. You are who you are.

You can’t help that as a Trump barnacle, you’re akin to an arthropod in the infraclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea. Be you. Be best. HuffPo says be whatever you want to be, damn the haters.

But like the barnacle-related crab and lobster that happen upon my dinner plate, roasted or boiled with plenty of butter and lemon with a snip of parsley, I feel tragically for the hardcore, hapless Trumpers:

1.I’m sorry you can’t handle Trump’s overwhelming, humiliating defeat and inability to handle it like the big man he told you he is.

2.I’m sorry you love a sore loser. It makes you sound like a sore loser. Nobody likes a sore loser. (Google “sore losers in sports.” Tragic.)

America especially hates a sore loser when he is the President of the United States and inspires the Senate Majority and the Republican Party to join in the sore losing, to the abject shame of decent Republicans.

3.I’m sorry that as a MAGA you take Trump’s loss personally when it’s really not personal at all.

You think Trump gives a f**k about you? If so, you poor dear. Funny how you never see a MAGA at Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps, hmmm, he might just be “leveraging” you for power and money? Sorry for the reveal.

4.I’m sorry you hate the majority of your fellow Americans who voted against Trump and feel the need to attack them. Just because of their temerity to vote against him because he made America much worse.

5.On a related note, I’m sorry you hatefully refer to Democrats as “DemoRats,” which confirms when you post that on Facebook that you’re slack-jawed stupid and lack the best words we learned in grade school English.

6.I’m sorry you’re ruining America by acting out whatever hates and resentments you harbor about your particular situation. It’s fun and easy to blame the libs, but like Trump you’re making America about you, personal, like the identity politics you hate on HuffPo.

7.I’m sorry you’re so suckered by Fox and the right-wing media and its bottom-feeding internet that is pandering to you for money, just like you think the professional mainstream media is doing to the libs.

8.Relatedly, I’m sorry you still prove P.T. Barnum was right that there’s a sucker born every minute to be taken for money.

9.I’m sorry you don’t know or care about our Constitutional rule of law and checks and balances and systems and processes and democratic norms. Or like your media does, you twist high-school civics into a greasy, sugary Auntie Anne’s pretzel to defend whatever Trump says and does.

10.I’m sorry you agree with, defend and/or salute whatever Trump says or does and his media salutes, like he’s your Fuhrer. Of course he’s not!

11.I’m sorry if you need to spread the smear that the duly-elected president-elect is disabled, demented, corrupt, a socialist tool and whatever other nonsense that pathetic loser hateful Trumpers spread on Trumpy social media. It makes you sound like a desperate loser.

12.I’m sorry that when it comes down to it, you seem to hate democracy unless it elects Trump and Republicans.

13.I’m sorry that I cannot send you real thoughts and prayers. I really tried to understand your mean, nasty, ugly behavior. That was stupid of me.

I don’t respect you anymore. I do not like you in your box. I do not like you with your Fox. I do not like you in a house or with a mouse. I do not like you here or there. I do not like you anywhere. So stay away from Washington.

14.I’m sorry: You are not really patriots. You are the opposite of patriots.

By loving Trump until his bitter end and bowing to whatever he says and does, you not only sound like a Russian troll, you also seem to hate America.

15.I’m sorry that as you wave the American flag in our faces, you spit on it every time you wave your Confederate flags, or accept those who do. I’m sorry you don’t care who you offend — you think it’s fun or funny. I’m sorry you lack basic decency and respect.

Sorry/not sorry if this piece sounds condescending.

But anyone still backing this duly defeated president — who might well stage a military coup to stay in office — deserves much worse than this attempt at bitter humor.

To be honest, I try to use humor to deal with my fear of MAGAs and what their goose-stepping to Trump is doing to the country I love.

https://jeffreydenny77.medium.com/thoughts-and-prayers-sweet-magas-25779a339f12 

 

Taiwan: A short history and the potential for American war with China

This 9 minute video by Al Jazeera (November 2021) explains some history about how Taiwan became the Republic of China. It mentions the possibility of the US getting into a war with China over a critically strategic interest the US has in Taiwan, namely production of critical microchips. At the time of the video, one expert said the possibility of US-China war was low but increasing. 

The video also points out how the Taiwanese people see the situation and what they want to do about it. Most want to leave things just as they are.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this video to my attention.