In Front of Our Noses: Judicial Nominees and Their Public Obeisance
Loyalty tests on display by those seeking lifetime appointments to the bench.
At first glance, the following might appear to be nothing more than a boring hearing of politicians asking a bunch of questions of a panel of seemingly plain vanilla judicial nominees giving lawyerly answers. But what it really is is a grotesque display of obeisance to Donald Trump by a set of highly educated individuals who know exactly what they are doing as they dodge objective truth to get a job. This video shows four nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal bench who know that if they don’t answer as they did, their nominations would be pulled by Trump.
Note: their answers are technically correct; they are not actually lying. But they are also avoiding the question of who won the 2020 popular vote and who won the electoral vote. They further dodge the J6 question.
They are publicly performing a ritualistic loyalty test.
Speaking for myself, this video put a pit in my stomach when I watched it yesterday because of what it clearly shows: educated professionals seeking judgeships in the federal government knowingly dissembling over known facts because they have to please Donald Trump to get those jobs. And in doing so, they help add more credence to the Big Lie about 2020 to help Trump feel ever more emboldened on the topic and to allow supporters to further rationalize.
That clip is a direct manifestation of the cancer in the body politic that is Trump’s time in office.
Federal judicial nominees know that they have to pretend like they don’t understand the reality about an election to obtain the bench.
Put another way: they cannot affirm the known truth about 2020, but instead have to provide a dodge on the subject. And they also have to do the same thing about the events of January 6, 2021.
I know it is getting almost cliched to quote Orwell, but watching those four individuals do their little verbal dance made me think, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Certainly, Trump is commanding, indirectly of course, these four to deny what they almost certainly know to be true so as to get a job.
I must concur with Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes: Trump Is Building a Federal Judiciary of Delusional, Cowardly Loyalists.
On Wednesday, another batch of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees sat for their Senate confirmation hearings, which allowed them to join what has become an alarmingly crowded club over the past year: federal judicial nominees who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, or that (heaven help them) Trump lost it.
In previous hearings, when Democratic senators have asked about who “won” in 2020, Trump nominees have parroted the same carefully workshopped talking point, which is that Congress “certified” Biden as the winner, and that he served four years as president. You do not need to be a lawyer to understand how this sleight-of-hand works: Every nominee knows that publicly characterizing Biden as the “winner” would result in Trump hopping on Truth Social and pulling their nominations within minutes. By answering Democrats’ questions about 2020 in terms of what Congress did, nominees are saying something that is both technically correct, and also fully consistent with Trump’s beloved stolen-election conspiracy theories.
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The takeover of the federal judiciary by gutter bigots and January 6 sympathizers is, for many reasons, a moral and practical disaster with consequences that will reverberate for generations. The problem is especially acute at the district court level, because as Blumenthal pointed out, a very basic obligation of trial court judges is to decide cases—both those that are “political” and the many, many more that are not—according to objective facts. But for Trump judges, the only facts that matter are the ones that Trump authorizes them to believe.
Indeed. And add all of this to the long-term damage being done by this administration.
My opinion is that the second the Dems get sufficient senators, they just grinding out impeachments. They can’t continue to allow a judiciary that decides cases one way when the GOP is in charge and another when they are.
Start with Clarence Thomas, Emil Bove, and that Lunatic down in TX. Just clear them out and make sure to bar them from further government jobs. That’ll at least get a few more to quit to protect their ability to muck things up later.