(MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Every time somebody like George Conway pops up on Twitter to decry the comportment or criminality of the Trump administration, you should remember that he is full of crap. You should remember that Conway, and any Federalist Society type who tries to virtue signal by objecting to some of the things Donald Trump does are actually helping Donald Trump to do his most long-lasting damage to the country. These people are not courageous for bemoaning Donald Trump’s mean tweets. They are selfish cowards for allowing Trump and Mitch McConnell to pack the federal judiciary with arch-conservative judges for a generation.
Almost all of those judges are white. Almost all of those judges are male. Almost all of those judges would be wearing MAGA swag underneath their robes if Trump issued ties instead of hats.
Last week, the Trump administration put forth its first new slate of names for federal judgeships in 2019. All six were men, and apparently all six were white, although the White House declined to answer any questions about their backgrounds. Should they succeed in seating these six prospective jurists, President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will gain the distinction of having seated only the 3,130th through 3,135th white men to be given lifetime appointments on the federal bench. Historic progress indeed. Late Tuesday, the White House also announced its intention to renominate 51 judges who did not get through the previous Congress. It seems the need to pick up the pace on seating judges is now desperate.
Tuesday was the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. That ruling is ever more under direct assault in the legislatures—the U.S. Supreme Court is now poised to narrow or deny a woman’s right to choose. As Trump packs the federal courts with judges who write openly about “the moral tragedy of abortion” or refuse in written opinions to call abortion providers “doctors” because “the object of their action is not healing but killing,” his defenders continue to claim that there is nothing shocking about the fact that the president’s record-shattering 84 confirmed judges are 76 percent male and 91 percent white, per the Federal Judicial Center. (For comparison, Obama’s confirmed nominees were 58 percent male and 64 percent white.) Not renominated this week was Thomas Farr, the mastermind behind North Carolina’s racist voter suppression laws who was tapped to fill seats for which two black women nominated by Obama were blocked by Republicans. Farr would have been only the 3,130th white man to sit on the federal courts, but his nomination was killed in December by GOP Sens. Tim Scott and Jeff Flake. Had either of these women been confirmed, they would have been the first black Americans to serve in a district that is 27 percent black.
This antebellum approach to picking and promoting judges has been the multi-generational project of the Federalist Society and Trump is delivering it to them. Even better, Trump does so much other racist and sexist and plum stupid nonsense on the reg, that people have largely been thrown off the scent of the Republican attempts to stack the courts with judges who will all but read the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution.
And they know what they’re doing. George Conway knows damn well that any executive order Trump signs can be repealed by the next president. He knows that the ruinous, deficit-exploding tax cuts can be revoked by the next Congress. He knows that even if Trump’s racist Wall is built, it will be torn down, slat by slat… before Roger Stone gets out of prison.
But they know that the judges are there for life. That’s what they “get” for allowing Trump to debase the country for four to eight years: a generation of white male judges who will arrest the project of racial and gender equality for the rest of their natural lives.
Which is why they don’t say anything about it. They want to show you the tweet trolling Trump for associating with criminals. They’ve suddenly got nothing to say when Mitch McConnell has a soft “whites-only” policy for judicial nominations. They want you to see their objection when Trump claims he can grab women by the p***y. But they get angry and offended when you suggest that a man accused of attempted rape should not be on the Supreme Court.
For women and minorities, Trump is the wolf at the door. He’s barking and scratching and (rightly) taking up a lot of our immediate attention. But the Federalist Society has cut the gas line and is slowly choking us out of our own home. When they come out front to say, “Hey, somebody should do something about that wolf,” know it’s just for show. They’ve already implemented more elegant ways to end your quest for equal rights.
Mitch McConnell Is Spending the Shutdown Confirming More Trump Judges [Slate]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.
Your Reminder That #NeverTrump Republicans Are Full Of Crap curated from Above the Law
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