Justice by zealots
by Tom Sullivan
“He’s the, ‘Screw you, Washington’ vote,” one auto racing enthusiast told BBC in November 2016. Voters who elevated Donald Trump to the White House wanted someone from the private sector, untainted by politics, not a politician.
They got one. Someone with no experience (or real interest) in government. Trump’s qualifications for president were inheriting a fortune, a talent for self-promotion, a reputation for bigotry, a stint on reality TV, and experience running a corrupt family business with a history of bankruptcies and shady dealings.
More engaged Republicans wanted a candidate who would elevate conservatives to the federal bench. No experience there is a plus now, too.
HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery observed, “[I]n his entire eight years in the White House, President Barack Obama didn’t nominate anyone to be a lifetime federal judge who earned a ‘not qualified’ ABA rating.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled this morning to vote on Trump’s fifth, Sarah Pitlyk, for appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. “Ms. Pitlyk has never tried a case as lead or co-counsel, whether civil or criminal. She has never examined a witness,” the American Bar Association wrote in its letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Dahlia Lithwick elaborates:
Like many nominees who have been advanced before her, Pitlyk’s primary legal work has consisted of attacks on abortion rights, tempered by attacks on constitutionally protected contraception rights, leavened by other attacks on abortion, and supported with her work defending David Daleiden—the author of a vicious smear campaign against Planned Parenthood, based on fake videos of Planned Parenthood officials appearing to negotiate the sale of aborted fetal body parts. These are all claims that were later debunked by a Republican-led House Oversight Committee. Criminal charges were brought against Daleiden. Yet Pitlyk’s biography proudly notes that she was “part of a team defending undercover journalists against civil lawsuits and criminal charges resulting from an investigation of illegal fetal tissue trafficking.” In last year’s Box v. Planned Parenthood, Pitlyk made the transparently false argument in an amicus brief that abortion and birth control are based in the eugenics movement and urged that: “The eugenic origins of the birth-control movement—the progenitor of the abortion rights movement—are well-established” and “Given its strategic location of abortion clinics near minority neighborhoods and its blatant marketing of abortion to the minority community, the abortion industry’s claims to bear no responsibility for the staggering numbers of minority abortions beggars belief.” That claim has been roundly debunked as false.
Lithwick provides paragraphs more to demonstrate, in short, Pitlyk is a zealot.
Undoing the damage the unqualified (and corrupt) chief executive has already done to the republic will take decades, if ever. Teamed with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, the damage Trump and Republicans have already done — and mean to yet — wreak on the independence of the American judiciary will last for the foreseeable future.
Lithwick continues:
It’s easy to say that none of this merits our concerted attention because, until and unless Democrats gain control of the Senate—something that is suddenly less impossible to imagine but still, a long shot—there is absolutely nothing that can be done to slow the smash-and-grab pace of judicial nominations, which trucks along ever faster as Mitch McConnell gives up on doing any legislative work at all. Democratic presidential candidates aren’t talking about the decimation of the federal bench enough, even as Donald Trump has now seated one-quarter of the federal appeals courts and one-seventh of the federal district courts. My friend Elie Mystal is correct to say that there is no point in even talking about the Democrats’ plans for the Supreme Court, unless they have plans to thwart Mitch McConnell, because: “If you don’t have a plan to get your plan past McConnell, then you really don’t have a plan—you have a wish.”
Like their party’s avaricious leader, Republicans in Congress and in the states mean to stuff their pockets with whatever goodies they can before Humpty Dumpty crashes and burns, and their prospects for enduring power with him. This is why I hammer away at public fixation on the presidential contest. The real action is in the states. GOP gerrymandering gives the party representation in the House disproportionate to its support in the states. The Senate, by its design, gives Republicans disproportionate representation to their support nationally. “A majority of the Senate now represents 18% of the country’s population,” wrote Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report in August 2018. For the most part, that majority represent smallish, red states.
A long-term problem for Democrats: a majority of the Senate now represents 18% of the country’s population.— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 20, 2018
McConnell denied Barack Obama a Supreme Court seat. Team Trump means to deny anyone not of their tribe a fair and competent hearing before the federal judiciary, basically, for the rest of our lives. President [your favorite Democrat here] won’t have a prayer of doing anything about that so long as Republicans control the U.S. Senate. Should McConnell lose his seat, but Republicans retain the Senate in 2020, the Senate might get marginally less acrid. It is hard to imagine anyone who replaces him being as scruple-free. (Not that the party is not up to the challenge.) But it is worth helping him out the door next year and weakening his majority if not actually breaking it.