One big side effect of the Donald Trump special master judge debacle
When Donald Trump went running to a federal judge he appointed and asked for a special master to be appointed to oversee the sorting of the evidence seized from his home, after the DOJ had already finished sorting it, the whole thing felt like a bad punchline. When the judge ruled in Trump’s favor in gibberish fashion, it set off alarm bells.
I’ll once again state my expectation that this ruling really doesn’t matter when it comes to the DOJ’s criminal case against Trump. If this judge were trying to help Trump, she’d have given him a far more subtle win, within the bounds of what might be able to stand up on appeal. Instead the judge gave Trump exactly what he asked for, even though the law doesn’t work that way, and criminal probes don’t work that way. She might as well have ruled that Merrick Garland must transform himself into a koala. It’s just not going to be a legally binding thing that survives even the slightest bit of appeals court scrutiny, or for that matter, causes much if any real delay. All that said, an interesting side effect of this ruling is now playing out.
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell installed a whole lot of federal judges. Up to now the general public has only focused on the three deranged and unqualified extremists they put on the Supreme Court, and that alone is having a major impact on the midterms. But the general public has paid very little attention to the federal judges that Trump and the Republicans installed at the lower court levels, if only because those judges have largely behaved – until now.
Because so many Trump-appointed judges have spent the past several years routinely ruling against Trump’s legally baseless court filings, it hasn’t particularly stood out that Trump has been essentially asking his own appointees to do him legally invalid favors. But now that this obscure federal judge down in Florida has handed Trump such an obviously corrupt and legally insane ruling, it’s suddenly generating a national conversation about just how many other judges Trump has put in place.
Shortly after Trump left office, Pew Research calculated that 28% of the federal judges who were actively on the bench at that time had been put there by Trump. That number has since dropped, of course. In fact Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have been moving forward with federal judge appointments so aggressively, they’re actually eclipsing the pace that Trump and McConnell set. But Trump and McConnell ended up getting four years to keep putting judges in place, because the Republicans kept the Senate in the 2018 midterms.
Even as everyone from the mainstream media to congressional committees will surely dive in and attempt to uncover just what Donald Trump is holding over the head of this federal judge down in Florida so that she can be impeached for it, it’s now more crucial than ever that the Democrats keep the Senate in the midterms. It’s the only way Biden can keep putting legitimate federal judges in place, to outnumber Trump’s potentially compromised federal judges. If the Republicans win the Senate, McConnell might well go two full years without confirming a single Biden-appointed federal judge. And God forbid if the Democrats lose the Senate in the midterms and then a Supreme Court Justice passes away; McConnell would keep that seat vacant as well.
So perhaps it’s a good thing that the nation is now finally talking about the fact that so many of the current federal judges were put in place by Donald Trump. It’s not even about Trump’s own fate; no gibberish ruling from a rogue judge is going to keep the DOJ from putting Trump in prison. But the need for Biden and the Democrats to continue their record-setting pace of appointing federal judges is one of the most powerful arguments yet for why we must put in the work to make sure the Democrats win the Senate in the midterms. It’s not just about the Supreme Court. It’s about the entire court.
