CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD— The president made what he thought was a slighting remark towards a judicial decision -- referring to the judge as being the result of an Obama appointment.
This caused Chief Justice Roberts to fire off a critical response to the effect that there are no Obama judges or Bush judges. According to Roberts, judges are independent and, it was implied, not bound to the presidents who appointed them. Liberals cheered the Roberts remarks as a slap across the Trump cheek. In this case, I won't agree with Trump, but I won't agree with Roberts either.
Roberts does have a point, in that the Constitution allows federal judges to serve essentially until they die. The exception is an impeachable offense, and this requires the same complicated process of trial by the U.S. Senate as it would take to remove a president. It has not happened very many times in our entire history. At the federal level, judges are pretty much independent in the sense that a new president can't just reach down and remove them -- judges are not cabinet officers.
But it is obviously a double edged sword we are talking about. Federal judges can be curmudgeonly, temperamental, and even a little incompetent. They can also be prejudiced and politically motivated. None of these attributes has ever been treated as an impeachable offense by the American government.
And this is where Roberts is not only wrong but even a little disingenuous. Presidents such as George W Bush, Trump, and Bush Senior have gone out of their way to find and appoint hard right thinkers to the Supreme Court and the appellate bench. It's not a secret and it's not even implicitly a crime. That's why we talk so much about the importance of the presidential election in terms of Supreme Court appointments.
This is why the liberal hurrahs over the Roberts comments seem to be off track. What Roberts was doing, it seems to me, is to try to make a defense for the packing of the federal judiciary with hard right ideologues by Trump and the Mitch McConnell Senate. Roberts understands full well that the refusal by the previous senate to consider Obama's supreme court appointment has cast a negative light on the judiciary as a whole. The two Trump appointments have done their own work in reducing respect for the Supreme Court. So Roberts writes a seemingly heartfelt defense of the heroic independence of the federal judiciary.
What's missing from the Roberts argument is one simple thing. If a new appointee such as Kavanaugh is already a rock-solid conservative then there isn't much possibility of hoping for a miracle of intellectual independence on his part. We have every reason to believe that this is an accurate description of the new justice. In fact, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo referred to Kavanaugh as having been grown in a test tube, a suggestion that he was selected out of a process by which solidly conservative men are educated and, as it were, developed to be the kinds of people who will make the kinds of judges most friendly to business and to the right wing.
This is less independence than it is the authoritarian personality brought to power.
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It's a curiosity of this era that a shooting incident resulting in the seizure of Ukrainian ships and sailors by Russia is getting so little attention. Sure, our U.N. ambassador made a few pro-forma remarks, but does anyone expect Donald Trump to challenge Putin? That doesn't seem likely, does it? What would have incited a firestorm of protest from the right had this happened under a Democratic president is all but unmentioned by the Trump defenders in congress. We seem to have gone through a period in which Trump's fealty to the Russians has been overlooked.
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There is one other item that has nearly dropped out of the national discussion, but may be of critical importance within a short period. We are speaking here of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. There have been inklings that Mueller has the goods on the whole Trump family in terms of collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign. Perhaps Mueller is moving slowly but steadily to complete the encirclement, but there aren't very many witnesses left to co-opt. We could be in for another Mueller bombshell before the end of the year. (Some pundits are suggesting action within the next few days.) The alternative is that Mueller is playing an even deeper game than previously recognized, and is allowing Trump's loss of public respect to settle as low as possible before dropping a report or perhaps indicting a presidential family member.
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There's a lot of chatter on the left in the aftermath of the blue wave election we've just enjoyed. When Mimi Walters and Young Kim can lose in what were once solidly Republican seats, and to do so by margins approaching ten thousand votes, that says a lot. But the argument has been taken to another level by some, who are suggesting that maybe this is the time that Trump will finally dissolve in his own bile juices.
All manner of misbehavior and bad manners have been pointed out, from Trump's refusal to go out in the rain to commemorate the end of WWI to his petty fights with the press and his pathetic tweeting. Is it possible that the loss of power in the congress will be what drives Trump into insanity or resignation from office? It's obviously hard to tell, considering that Trump has been showing similar behavior all along -- lying and abusing since his first day in office. He doesn't seem to be acting much differently at this point. He doesn't go to work very much, he overreacts to criticism, and he continues to pound on the racial and ethnic tensions that he thinks appeal to his base.
But there is a sense that his actions and speech have gone further along the pathway to absolute craziness. If nothing else, he has failed to develop the ability to present gravitas that we have become used to from previous presidents. He is basically a nasty guy without a lot of self control, and he is getting worse.
What's also missing is any sense that he has developed the ability to learn. His knowledge of foreign affairs (or even the wording of the Constitution) continues to disappoint. What's also concerning is that -- much as he campaigned on the slogan that we don't give away our strategies to the foreign opposition -- Trump doesn't seem to have any concern about protecting either strategy or the national secrets. For all we know, the Russian embassy is still listening to his cell phone conversations.
Shortly after Trump's election, there was all manner of conjecture about how long he would last before either quitting or being impeached. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking (the smart money is on this view) but perhaps the pressure will finally get to Trump like it got to Nixon.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
