Photo by LD - Getty Images
US Supreme Court building
If Donald Trump wins the presidency again in November and Republicans regain control of the Senate, Trump will be free to appoint as many federal judges as it takes to destroy democracy forever. That is not a political exaggeration. Under Trump, Republicans are no longer a conservative political party supporting our constitutional democracy. Republicans have replaced traditional conservatism with a radical new ideology they publicly describe as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion in America.
To anyone who knows the definition of those three words that means Republicans now oppose equal rights for the overwhelming majority of Americans who are not White male Christians. Rightwing Republican judges call that constitutional originalism. All the rest of us call it racism, misogyny, antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Trump openly brags about appointing half of the rightwing Republican Supreme Court supermajority that destroyed a half-century of constitutional protection for the freedom of American women to make their own decisions about abortion based on their own life circumstances, health and religious beliefs.
Trump also appointed more than 230 other rightwing federal judges in district and appeals courts throughout America. Many are just as eager as Trump to roll back decades of legal and social progress that is finally chipping away at White male supremacy to create a multicultural democracy in our nation of immigrants with equal rights for all Americans regardless of race, gender or national origin.
Sabotaging Justice
Even worse, Trump appointees on the Supreme Court and a clearly unqualified federal judge he appointed are doing everything possible to sabotage Trump’s criminal prosecution for attempting to overthrow our democracy and for stealing top-secret government documents.
Trump knows all the damning evidence and testimony special prosecutor Jack Smith has to convict him for creating the violent mob insurrection that tried to overturn President Biden’s election and for hiding stolen secret government documents at Mar-a-Lago and lying about it.
|
|
But that hasn’t stopped Trump and Republican extremists from fantasizing that if he can just avoid being convicted for his crimes before the election, Trump can escape prosecution entirely by winning the presidency and ordering a corrupt attorney general to dismiss all his criminal indictments.
Giving Trump four more years to continue appointing judges to destroy nationwide protection for equal rights under the Constitution will make democracy as we have always known it totally unrecognizable.
Exhibit A of the kind of lawless judicial appointees Trump wants to keep rewriting the Constitution in a second term is Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon. She’s his appointee presiding over Trump’s trial for violating the Espionage Act by stealing highly classified documents including nuclear secrets and refusing to give them back. Legal experts have called Cannon’s pre-trial rulings in the case in which she goes out of her way to insult prosecutor Jack Smith “baffling” and “confounding.”
There’s nothing at all baffling about Cannon’s rulings. She’s either an ignorant, unfit judge who doesn’t understand the case assigned to her or Trump’s brazenly corrupt disciple openly auditioning in front of him for a promotion to the Supreme Court if he’s reelected.
After delaying for months to issue any rulings on most of the frivolous pre-trial motions Trump’s attorneys filed to try to prevent the trial from ever taking place, Cannon finally held a scheduling conference last week to set a new trial date and – surprise! – she refused to set one.
Instead, Cannon postponed the trial indefinitely. She declared it would be “imprudent and inconsistent with the court’s duty to fully and fairly consider … the myriad and interconnected” pre-trial motions that someone still needs to resolve before the trial can begin. Apparently, nobody ever told Cannon that was the job of the presiding judge.
Anyone who thinks the Supreme Court can’t get any worse than its 6-to-3 supermajority wiping out 50 years of constitutional rights for a majority of Americans is sadly mistaken. Trump himself is bitterly disappointed with what he considers his own wimpy Supreme Court appointees for failing to throw out the millions of American votes that elected Biden.
Even though his Supreme Court is doing everything it can to delay its ruling on Trump’s absurd claim that presidents should have total immunity to murder their opponents or commit treason without fear of prosecution, it’s unlikely any justices other than Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito will be crazy enough to agree.
Dodging Prosecution
Most Trump justices aren’t willing to destroy their own legal reputations by supporting Trump’s nonsensical legal claims, but they appear to have no shame about helping him dodge criminal prosecution for as long as possible.
No one else is coming to save us from the damage to our court system and democracy by Trump’s corrupt presidency. The majority of Americans who want to continue repairing Trump’s destruction of our democracy have to do it ourselves just like we did the last time.
