OPINION
Even as President Trump was being impeached yesterday, his enabler-in-chief, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was providing yet more evidence that reveals why the Republican Party has sold its soul to the Devil. On Wednesday afternoon while Republicans in the House of Representatives were collectively scraping the bottom of the barrel to find reasons to oppose impeachment, including comparing it to the Crucifixion and the Salem witch trials, McConnell was forcing through the Senate an additional eleven federal district judge nominations.
As CNN suggested, “McConnell’s thrust is emblematic of what he sees as his crowning achievement. So far he has led the charge changing the landscape of the federal courts across the country with a record number of appellate court judges – currently 50 – and Supreme Court nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.” Some of these appointments have been made despite scathing criticisms of the nominees’ suitability by, among others, the American Bar Association. In one recent case it described a nominee as being “absolutely totally unfit to be a judge.” Republicans, however, took no notice and used their majority to appoint him nonetheless.
Lest there be any doubt about the importance in the American political landscape of the ability to control judicial appointments, Trump himself said on November 5, referring to the total of appointments since he took office, “We are going to be, I think, just about Number One by the time we finish – Number One of any president, any administration,”
This, then, is one of the main reasons why Republicans prostitute themselves by defending a demonstrably corrupt president: this in the same week that he was ordered to pay back $2 million that he bilked from his “charitable foundation” and announced to the world that the FBI is “scum.”
Most of the appointments are bestowed on conservatives who are well below the average age of historical judicial appointments, thus ensuring that the federal court system will be stuffed to the gills with right-leaning Republicans for decades to come. This is why history is likely to append an asterisk to the Trump impeachment by noting that his flawed presidency was deemed a price worth paying by those who stuck their heads in the sand while holding their noses.
In Canada, as in other Common Law countries, this practice of rigging the judicial system so as to stack the odds in favour of a particular ideological bias is out of the question. Here, judges are appointed by merit from the cream of the legal profession and only after being vetted by independent bodies. So, to this extent, Canadians can smugly observe that Americans are reaping what they have sown.
Perhaps of short term concern to Canadians is how President Trump will react to being impeached. Two of the most common adjectives used to describe him are “unhinged” and “spiteful,” and we should not forget that Prime Minister Trudeau was notoriously filmed mocking him at the recent NATO conference in London. Given his history we should perhaps contemplate what devious scheme Trump might concoct to get revenge while at the same time use as a distraction from the ongoing investigations of him.
Photo Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump commondreams.org
