Here Come De Conservative Judges - 6

"This is my first order !"

This series began years ago in March of 2009 when I sensed a slow coup in the works (Here Come De Conservative Judges, 2, 3, 4, 5).

It is a coup that, like slow moving glaciers (see video below), moves so slow that the import of the movement cannot be detected by the everyday "nothing to see here folks" narrative (A Tale of Coup Cities, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

The body politic has been sleeping through a right-wing take over of the judiciary, the last bastion of civil liberties, moving like a slow train towards downtown authoritarianism (The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba , PDF).

In the first post of this series I quoted a Newsweek article that among other things, pointed out:

For the past quarter century, the courts have been conservative, but so has the government. Few new sweeping regulatory schemes became law. Now the Roberts Court has tilted markedly more conservative than the Rehnquist Court—at the same time the voters elected a more liberal set of politicians than they had in half a century. Republican presidents appointed seven of nine Supreme Court justices, as well as two thirds of the federal appeals judges who make most key rulings.

(Newsweek article, pointed out in Here Come De Conservative Judges, 3/16/09). As the D.C. world turns toward worse and worse choices as it moves along Highway 61 towards more wars, the judicial branch situation gets worse:

President Donald Trump has nominated more unqualified judicial appointees than any other president so quickly into his first term, a whopping four out of 58, according to the nation's preeminent legal group.

The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee of the Federal Judiciary, which has been evaluating judicial appointments since the 1950s, has assessed 53 of Trump's 58 nominees and found four "not qualified."

“It’s certainly unprecedented,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond law school and expert in judicial nominations.

(NewsWeek, Trump Is Nominating Unqualified Judges). The same magazine is still pointing out the grave danger and the congress is still approving them as if this is all business as usual.

A decision made yesterday by one of those Trump appointed judges, who had been on the bench only two months, is instructive (Even before court victory, Trump’s pick to lead consumer watchdog began reshaping agency).

I won't offer a way to stop this, because there may not a way to stop it at this stage of the slow moving coup.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Lyrics to the following song can be viewed here:

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