Trump 44: Finally on Trial

[WiseGirl]

Just here for my bimonthly rant against 45. You all get it. What  the hell is a Merry Christmas rally anyway? A rally with a speech given by a hateful, bigoted man who has absolutely no moral compass? Boy does that does sound like Christmas to me.  */sarcasm/*  I can't with this idiot I just can't. 

Edited December 18, 2019 by WiseGirl

[EyesOpen]

2 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Just here for my bimonthly rant against 45. You all get it. What  the hell is a Merry Christmas rally anyway? A rally with a speech given by a hateful, bigoted man who has absolutely no moral compass? Boy does that does sound like Christmas to me.  */sarcasm/*  I can't with this idiot I just can't. 

This is to pander to his evangelical base and distract from the real news... but it’s ok cause his base doesn’t actually research any real news. I’m just at a loss

[Becky]

I expect to hear all about the War on Christmas, and how Christians in the US are under attack.  I know where I live in the USA, Christmas is barely recognized and people insist on wishing me Happy Holidays - so terrible.     

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm sure tonight's pep rally in Michigan will be more insane than usual.

[GreyhoundFan]

So he's moved from toilets to dishwashers...

[fraurosena]

Pelosi is ?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "Trump wallows in hate, befuddles his fans"

Spoiler

The Post reports on the two-hour “meandering and free-associating riff” that President Trump delivered on Wednesday in Battle Creek, Mich., which took place during the impeachment debate on the House floor:

The president’s furious visage — red-faced to the shade of burnt sienna, sweat beading on his upper lip — belied the image aides had scrambled to project all week of a leader in high spirits even as he faced a historic low point. ...

Trump’s tone was also particularly nasty at times. He joked that Bill Clinton perhaps refers to his wife simply as “Crooked” and imagined a conversation between the couple, with the former president berating his wife during the 2016 campaign for not visiting swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

Worse, he sneered at the widow of beloved Michigan congressman John Dingell, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), venting that he had accorded her late husband the “A-plus treatment” during his memorial services, only to see her vote for impeachment, as if his eminence’s largesse had earned him her loyalty. He then suggested the late congressman resides in hell, as The Post reports:

“So she calls me up: ‘It’s the nicest thing that’s ever happened, thank you so much,’” Trump said at the rally, mocking the congresswoman’s voice while recounting their call. (Dingell’s office said Trump is the one who called.) "’John would be so thrilled. He’s looking down.' … 'I said, ‘That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.’

And then: “Maybe he’s looking up, I don’t know.”

The crowd seemed unsure how to respond to Trump’s insult. Some groaned. Some cheered and clapped. Trump quickly added, “But let’s assume he’s looking down.”

There is no five-dimensional chess at work here — no strategy in crudely mocking the widow of a fixture in Michigan politics. The angry replies flooded in from both Democrats and Republicans, including Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.):

Most poignant was Debbie Dingell’s reply:

In a CNN appearance Thursday, she said: “We need more civility in this country. Some things should be off limits. And you know what, we’re all human beings.” She added: “I don’t want to politicize my husband. I don’t want to politicize his death.” You wonder whether first lady Melania Trump, who is so very worried about bullying, has asked her husband why he cannot refrain from taunting teenagers and widows. (“Be best!")

Boy, now is the time to recall lawyer Joseph Welch’s famous remarks at the Army-McCarthy hearings to the Wisconsin Republican demagogue: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” In the case of Trump, the answer is plainly, no.

Trump’s feral instinct for finding and exploiting weakness, and his delight in cruelly wielding his power over others, serves him well in disorienting political opponents and endearing him to voters eager to have a bully on their side. However, operating without awareness of normal people’s sensibilities and values (i.e. empathy), he wanders off not infrequently into rhetorical minefields. His followers are momentarily dazed when their great leader’s inhumanity is weaponized not against “liberal elites” but against one of their own. It is then that they fleetingly recognize that he is missing a critical component of adult human beings: a conscience. One wonders whether any of his evangelical idolaters are the least bit sheepish.

As Trump lingered on stage Wednesday night in the cereal capital of America, delaying the inevitable moment when he would leave the stage and face the reality of being only the third impeached president, he occasionally sounded downright loopy. “Remember the dishwasher? You’d press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later, you open it up, the steam pours out,” he said. “Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me ... You know, they give you four drops of water.” Was he referring to some regulation? Many in the crowd seemed to stare bug-eyed at Trump, as if waiting for a punchline that never came.

His remarks echoed his recent complaints about plumbing: ”We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on — and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water," he told reporters this month. “You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once."

You might simply try to ignore a relative who babbled this way. And yet, rather than deny him attention as a mother would when her child says a naughty word, Trump’s followers lionize him.

As you feel inclined to scream into your pillow or rail at the TV screen when his image appears, remember women all over America see how he treats women (and children and other innocents). Their revulsion will fuel their determination next November to throw him out of the Oval Office.

 

[thoughtful]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Boy, now is the time to recall lawyer Joseph Welch’s famous remarks at the Army-McCarthy hearings to the Wisconsin Republican demagogue: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” In the case of Trump, the answer is plainly, no.

I've thought about that moment almost daily since Trump got elected. I think I've posted video of it here at least once.

[apple1]

Jennifer Rubin absolutely nailed it in that article.

BTW The Christianity Today piece also hit the nail on the head.

I am not convinced that either one will change anything - but both spoke truth to power.

[smittykins]

19 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

So he's moved from toilets to dishwashers...

Admittedly, when Trump mentioned dishwashers, I thought he meant people who wash dishes, like at restaurants.

[Howl]

Was reading through a thread about Trump trashing Christianity Today's endorsement of the impeachment process.  Lots of Trumper Xtians chiming in.  Here's one, that pretty much sums up the Trumper Xtian viewpoint and why they are still unshakable in their belief in Trump: 

It encapsulates the belief that Christians have been under attack from the evil liberals just FOREVER and Trump is their savior from the heathens who are trying to destroy them in the culture wars. 

It's important to pay attention to this because these are people who are committed to the US being, literally, a Christian country -- Dominionism is alive and well.  

Edited December 20, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

Trump being owned by George Conway is good, but that hashtag really does it for me.

 

[Dandruff]

A little OT, but...what happens when Trump's minders need to take a vacation?  I'm sure none of them would want to be blamed for a verbal or tweeted "blowout" while they weren't on the job.

[Ozlsn]

5 hours ago, Howl said:

It's important to pay attention to this because these are people who are committed to the US being, literally, a Christian country -

Ah but which variety of Christian? Would Catholics count? Orthodox? Mormons? Episcopalians? Baptists?

[fraurosena]

Somebody thinks he's being clever. 

 

[fraurosena]

Well, that's what happens when one's arrogant orange ass thinks the acquittal for this impeachment thing is in the bag, and then his blindsided when is corrupt scheming is thwarted.. 

Trump legislative director says Trump is "baffled" by Pelosi

Quote

President Trump's legislative director says Mr. Trump is "baffled" by the possibility that Speaker Nancy Pelosi might withhold articles of impeachment from the Senate for an extended period of time. Pelosi said Thursday she would not send the articles to the Senate, and the House would not vote on impeachment managers until the Senate finalizes its plans for the impeachment trial. 

"I think the president is completely baffled at the theory that Nancy Pelosi appears to have that somehow holding back impeachment articles will leverage some sort of specific behavior out of the Senate," Eric Ueland told CBS News chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett in an interview for this week's episode of "The Takeout" podcast. 

The House voted to impeach Mr. Trump on two articles — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — on Wednesday. Since the House finished up its final votes on Thursday, any vote on impeachment managers will not occur until January — which means that the articles will not be delivered to the Senate until next year. Ueland suggested that holding the articles could be "constitutionally questionable." He also said it would be "extraordinarily unprecedented" if articles were to be withheld in order to force a legislative outcome.

Ueland also talked about his role in helping the president draft a scathing six-page letter to Pelosi, in which Mr. Trump soundly condemned the impeachment process and the speaker.

"You are the ones interfering in America's elections," Mr. Trump wrote in his letter. "You are the ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain."

Ueland said that the president dictated and edited the letter and that the final version "clearly reflects his views."

"The president wants to record for history his thoughts, his opinions, his feelings on a very unfair process," Ueland said.

He also talked about the process in creating such documents, saying that the president calls staff members into the Oval Office to discuss the drafts.

 

 

 

Edited December 20, 2019 by fraurosena
riffle

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s rage at Christianity Today gives away his scam"

Spoiler

President Trump just erupted in a rage at the magazine Christianity Today over its scathing, moralistic call for his removal over the Ukraine scandal. In so doing, Trump shed light on his understanding of the oft-debated oddity that millions of evangelical Christians remain loyal to the most hateful, depraved, self-dealing and self-aggrandizing individual to occupy the Oval Office in modern history.

In an unwittingly self-revealing moment, Trump responded to the magazine’s indictment of his profound moral failings with an argument that is thoroughly transactional and megalomaniacal: How dare you criticize me, after all the power I’ve granted to your movement? You’re breaking our deal, and now you’re dead to me.

Trump raged:

The magazine’s core indictment is that Trump “attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader” to “discredit” one of his “political opponents.” It adds that Trump “abused his authority for personal gain” in a “profoundly immoral” manner that damages the presidency, the country, and “the spirit and the future of our people.”

This depiction is unequivocally correct. The White House’s own summary of the July 25 call captures Trump doing just this: While withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from a vulnerable ally, Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation that would smear potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden with an entirely fabricated narrative.

Trump’s response again called this “perfect” conduct, reminding us that he is thoroughly unrepentant about all of it.

Christianity Today also indicts Trump’s personal immorality, his nonstop lies and his serial degradation of others, concluding that Trump is “morally lost and confused.”

This nonbeliever will not grapple with the deep spiritual currents underlying this phrasing, and will only note that Trump plainly hasn’t spent a second wrestling with the morality of these actions or their impact on others, and that his only discernible reigning ethic is that if you can get away with grabbing something, it’s rightfully yours.

Indeed, the transactional cast to Trump’s rage over this is particularly instructive, once you understand that Trump and his top advisers have consciously enlisted the nation’s evangelicals as an army of Trump defenders in the war against impeachment, which is widely depicted in the evangelical movement as a kind of epic persecution of Trump carried out by the godless and the damned.

As Sarah Posner details in a terrific piece, this effort is concerted, multifaceted and highly organized. Numerous high-profile evangelicals regularly depict impeachment as a disruption of God’s plan for America to be governed by Christians in accord with “biblical” values.

Impeachment is merely the weapon that the secular, satanic left is wielding to carry out its broader pro-abortion, anti-religious-liberty agenda, which requires the removal of Trump, the savior of Christian America, all to keep the persecution of Christians going at full throttle.

And on top of all that, as Posner notes, Trump is giving evangelicals unprecedented power and access:

With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts.

For all these reasons, the Christianity Today editorial won’t diminish Trump’s evangelical support. As Ezra Klein notes, the conviction that evangelicals are on the losing end of the “post-Christian culture war” is powerfully and deeply felt.

The result of this, according to Robert Jones, a longtime tracker of evangelical attitudes, has been a broad shift of evangelical opinion from Bill Clinton’s time, when personal morality in leaders was a central preoccupation of the movement, to the present.

“In theological terms, Trump has been able to convert evangelical political ethics from an ethic of principle to a consequentialist ethic, where the ends justify the means,” Jones, the author of “The End of White Christian America,” told me.

Trump’s promise to evangelicals, Jones added, was to “restore power and dominance to the Christian churches” at a time when “the demographics of the country are changing, you’re on the losing end of that, I’m going to turn back the clock, I’m the only one who can do that.”

Responding to this whole controversy, Christianity Today’s editor in chief, Mark Galli, has now directly engaged with this bargain that many evangelicals have made with Trump.

As Galli noted, there is no longer any way to avoid acknowledging Trump’s moral and temperamental unfitness for the presidency. Continuing to look the other way to get more judges and so forth is no longer worth the moral and spiritual costs to Christianity itself.

“The moral scales no longer balance,” Galli told the Atlantic. “We’ve been a movement that has said the moral character of our leaders is really important,” Galli continued, adding that the association of evangelicals with Trump will do “horrific” damage to their ability to share the Gospel with others.

It’s perversely revealing that Trump’s response to all this is to rage that evangelicals are indeed getting a good deal out of their bargain with him.

But this transaction — as Trump himself defines it here — also requires pretending along with Trump that his conduct was “perfect."

This is the rub. As Galli puts it, the problem that should be staring evangelicals in the face is that what we’ve all discovered about Trump’s corruption and amorality “is actually true.”

Trump has granted evangelicals power in exchange for their unwavering support, but the bargain now includes a requirement that they pretend Trump’s wretchedly corrupt subversion of the country’s interests to his own simply isn’t happening, or that it’s absolutely fine.

For some evangelicals, at least, this bargain has crossed over into a species of scam that they can no longer accept.

 

[thoughtful]

3 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Ah but which variety of Christian? Would Catholics count? Orthodox? Mormons? Episcopalians? Baptists?

In order, I'd say: yes if not liberal, maybe, maybe, only if they are rich and not liberal, and absolutely.

Some of the Baptists may have to pretend they haven't been calling the Catholic church the Whore of Babylon for decades.

 

[smittykins]

Episcopalians have been called “Catholic-lite,” so probably not. ?

As the late, great Robin Williams said, “All of the ritual, none of the guilt.”

 

[Dandruff]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Somebody thinks he's being clever. 

 

Golly.  I think the reasons we're not impeaching Nancy Pelosi are that what she's doing is legal, ethical, and befitting of her office.

[fraurosena]

The complete blindness to how this looks— no how this shows his complete submission to Putin, is mindblowing. Putin says so, therefore it is true. 

 

[Smash!]

I'll leave it here [emoji846]

[GreyhoundFan]

This is terrifying: "1 in every 4 circuit court judges is now a Trump appointee"

Spoiler

After three years in office, President Trump has remade the federal judiciary, ensuring a conservative tilt for decades and cementing his legacy no matter the outcome of November’s election.

Trump nominees make up 1 in 4 U.S. circuit court judges. Two of his picks sit on the Supreme Court. And this past week, as the House voted to impeach the president, the Republican-led Senate confirmed an additional 13 district court judges.

In total, Trump has installed 187 judges to the federal bench.

Trump’s mark on the judiciary is already having far-reaching effects on legislation and liberal priorities. Just last week, the 5th Circuit struck down a core provision of the Affordable Care Act. One of the two appellate judges who ruled against the landmark law was a Trump appointee.

The Supreme Court — where two of the nine justices are conservatives selected by Trump — could eventually hear that case.

The 13 circuit courts are the second most powerful in the nation, serving as a last stop for appeals on lower court rulings, unless the case is taken up by the Supreme Court. So far, Trump has appointed 50 judges to circuit court benches. Comparatively, by this point in President Obama’s first term, he had confirmed 25. At the end of his eight years, he had appointed 55 circuit judges.

Trump’s appointments have flipped three circuit courts to majority GOP-appointed judges, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York. The president has also selected younger conservatives for these lifetime appointments, ensuring his impact is felt for many years.

The executor of this aggressive push is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is almost singularly focused on reshaping the federal judiciary, twice ramming through Senate rule changes to speed up confirmations over Democrats’ objections.

“Leave no vacancy behind” is his mantra, McConnell has stated publicly. With a 53-to-47 Senate majority, he has been able to fill openings at breakneck speed.

That philosophy did not seem to apply in 2016, when McConnell refused to allow Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia, a confirmation hearing, let alone a vote.

McConnell insisted on waiting until after the 2016 election, a gamble that paid off when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump appointed conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch for that seat.

McConnell has repeatedly described blocking Garland as one of his greatest achievements.

Before leaving town for the holidays, Senate Republicans hailed McConnell’s success.

“You didn’t think @senate­majldr would leave town without confirming more judges, did you?” the Senate Republican Communications Center tweeted Friday, with a breakdown of the number of judges confirmed since 2017. “. . . Merry Christmas, America.”

While Trump has wavered on some conservative policies during his tenure, he has reliably appointed judges in line with conservative ideology.

“I’ve always heard, actually, that when you become President, the most — single most important thing you can do is federal judges,” Trump said at a White House event in November celebrating his “federal judicial confirmation milestones.”

The three circuit courts that have flipped to Republican majorities this year have the potential to not only change policy but also benefit Trump professionally and politically.

The 2nd Circuit, with its new right-leaning majority, will decide whether to rehear a case challenging Trump’s ability to block critics on Twitter, as well as one regarding Trump’s businesses profiting while he’s in office. The 11th Circuit, which handles appeals from Georgia, Florida and Alabama, is set to take up several voting rights cases.

Trump has facetiously thanked Obama for leaving him so many judicial vacancies.

“Now, President Obama was very nice to us. He gave us 142 empty positions. That’s never happened before,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday. “But, as you know, that’s said to be the most important thing that a President has.”

When Fox News host Sean Hannity made a similar remark while interviewing McConnell on his show recently, the majority leader made clear that Obama didn’t leave those vacancies intentionally.

“I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration,” McConnell said, laughing.

“I will give you full credit for that, and by the way, take a bow,” Hannity responded.

In April, McConnell limited debate on Trump nominees from 30 hours to two hours, which has allowed him to push through judges at warp speed. Before that, McConnell did away with “blue slips,” which allowed senators to contest judicial nominees from their home states.

Republicans say Democrats started this trend when then-Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) eliminated the filibuster for most nominees in 2013, a tool the minority party could use to block or delay a confirmation. When the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, McConnell gained the power to stall Obama nominees, leaving Trump with plenty of vacancies.

The fast clip of judicial confirmations has no doubt shifted the courts rightward, said Russell Wheeler, a judicial branch expert at the Brookings Institution, calling it “a significant impact but not a revolutionary impact.”

At least not yet. Two-thirds of the 50 circuit court judge slots filled with Trump appointees were previously held by other Republican-appointed judges.

There is only one circuit court vacancy left for Trump to fill, but more could open up next year. And if Trump wins in November, there will certainly be vacancies in his second term. There’s also the potential for additional openings on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, is 86 and has had health problems. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, another Clinton pick, is also over 80.

Chris Kang, chief counsel of Demand Justice, a group that supports liberal judicial nominees, wants Democrats to recognize just how high the stakes are for 2020.

“Republicans have been using the courts to achieve policy priorities that they couldn’t achieve through the democratically elected legislative branch of government,” Kang said. “These federal judges serve for life; that’s a point we take for granted, but not a way a lot of Americans understand it. Trump’s imprint on this country will be felt for decades through his courts.”

Democrats have long been reluctant to talk about the courts in a political way, Kang said. But, with Republicans choosing judges with far-right ideologies, liberals can’t “cling to romantic notions of our courts as impartial,” he added. “That’s not the reality and not how Republicans see it.”

The issue came up at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) was asked whether Trump’s appointees would make it harder for her as president to enact her agenda.

Though she didn’t answer that question directly, she said the next Democratic president will “have to immediately start putting judges on the bench to fill vacancies so that we can reverse the horrific nature of these Trump judges.”

Wheeler worries that the polarization of appointments will cause the judiciary to lose public trust, similar to what has happened with other institutions.

“We could be in for a situation if we have a rock-hard conservative majority on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court overturning a lot of decisions by a [future] Democratic president and Congress — you could be in for a situation where the courts’ legitimacy is called into question,” he said.

 

[formergothardite]

48 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is terrifying: "1 in every 4 circuit court judges is now a Trump appointee"

  Hide contents

After three years in office, President Trump has remade the federal judiciary, ensuring a conservative tilt for decades and cementing his legacy no matter the outcome of November’s election.

Trump nominees make up 1 in 4 U.S. circuit court judges. Two of his picks sit on the Supreme Court. And this past week, as the House voted to impeach the president, the Republican-led Senate confirmed an additional 13 district court judges.

In total, Trump has installed 187 judges to the federal bench.

Trump’s mark on the judiciary is already having far-reaching effects on legislation and liberal priorities. Just last week, the 5th Circuit struck down a core provision of the Affordable Care Act. One of the two appellate judges who ruled against the landmark law was a Trump appointee.

The Supreme Court — where two of the nine justices are conservatives selected by Trump — could eventually hear that case.

The 13 circuit courts are the second most powerful in the nation, serving as a last stop for appeals on lower court rulings, unless the case is taken up by the Supreme Court. So far, Trump has appointed 50 judges to circuit court benches. Comparatively, by this point in President Obama’s first term, he had confirmed 25. At the end of his eight years, he had appointed 55 circuit judges.

Trump’s appointments have flipped three circuit courts to majority GOP-appointed judges, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York. The president has also selected younger conservatives for these lifetime appointments, ensuring his impact is felt for many years.

The executor of this aggressive push is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is almost singularly focused on reshaping the federal judiciary, twice ramming through Senate rule changes to speed up confirmations over Democrats’ objections.

“Leave no vacancy behind” is his mantra, McConnell has stated publicly. With a 53-to-47 Senate majority, he has been able to fill openings at breakneck speed.

That philosophy did not seem to apply in 2016, when McConnell refused to allow Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia, a confirmation hearing, let alone a vote.

McConnell insisted on waiting until after the 2016 election, a gamble that paid off when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump appointed conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch for that seat.

McConnell has repeatedly described blocking Garland as one of his greatest achievements.

Before leaving town for the holidays, Senate Republicans hailed McConnell’s success.

“You didn’t think @senate­majldr would leave town without confirming more judges, did you?” the Senate Republican Communications Center tweeted Friday, with a breakdown of the number of judges confirmed since 2017. “. . . Merry Christmas, America.”

While Trump has wavered on some conservative policies during his tenure, he has reliably appointed judges in line with conservative ideology.

“I’ve always heard, actually, that when you become President, the most — single most important thing you can do is federal judges,” Trump said at a White House event in November celebrating his “federal judicial confirmation milestones.”

The three circuit courts that have flipped to Republican majorities this year have the potential to not only change policy but also benefit Trump professionally and politically.

The 2nd Circuit, with its new right-leaning majority, will decide whether to rehear a case challenging Trump’s ability to block critics on Twitter, as well as one regarding Trump’s businesses profiting while he’s in office. The 11th Circuit, which handles appeals from Georgia, Florida and Alabama, is set to take up several voting rights cases.

Trump has facetiously thanked Obama for leaving him so many judicial vacancies.

“Now, President Obama was very nice to us. He gave us 142 empty positions. That’s never happened before,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday. “But, as you know, that’s said to be the most important thing that a President has.”

When Fox News host Sean Hannity made a similar remark while interviewing McConnell on his show recently, the majority leader made clear that Obama didn’t leave those vacancies intentionally.

“I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration,” McConnell said, laughing.

“I will give you full credit for that, and by the way, take a bow,” Hannity responded.

In April, McConnell limited debate on Trump nominees from 30 hours to two hours, which has allowed him to push through judges at warp speed. Before that, McConnell did away with “blue slips,” which allowed senators to contest judicial nominees from their home states.

Republicans say Democrats started this trend when then-Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) eliminated the filibuster for most nominees in 2013, a tool the minority party could use to block or delay a confirmation. When the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, McConnell gained the power to stall Obama nominees, leaving Trump with plenty of vacancies.

The fast clip of judicial confirmations has no doubt shifted the courts rightward, said Russell Wheeler, a judicial branch expert at the Brookings Institution, calling it “a significant impact but not a revolutionary impact.”

At least not yet. Two-thirds of the 50 circuit court judge slots filled with Trump appointees were previously held by other Republican-appointed judges.

There is only one circuit court vacancy left for Trump to fill, but more could open up next year. And if Trump wins in November, there will certainly be vacancies in his second term. There’s also the potential for additional openings on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, is 86 and has had health problems. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, another Clinton pick, is also over 80.

Chris Kang, chief counsel of Demand Justice, a group that supports liberal judicial nominees, wants Democrats to recognize just how high the stakes are for 2020.

“Republicans have been using the courts to achieve policy priorities that they couldn’t achieve through the democratically elected legislative branch of government,” Kang said. “These federal judges serve for life; that’s a point we take for granted, but not a way a lot of Americans understand it. Trump’s imprint on this country will be felt for decades through his courts.”

Democrats have long been reluctant to talk about the courts in a political way, Kang said. But, with Republicans choosing judges with far-right ideologies, liberals can’t “cling to romantic notions of our courts as impartial,” he added. “That’s not the reality and not how Republicans see it.”

The issue came up at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) was asked whether Trump’s appointees would make it harder for her as president to enact her agenda.

Though she didn’t answer that question directly, she said the next Democratic president will “have to immediately start putting judges on the bench to fill vacancies so that we can reverse the horrific nature of these Trump judges.”

Wheeler worries that the polarization of appointments will cause the judiciary to lose public trust, similar to what has happened with other institutions.

“We could be in for a situation if we have a rock-hard conservative majority on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court overturning a lot of decisions by a [future] Democratic president and Congress — you could be in for a situation where the courts’ legitimacy is called into question,” he said.

 

This is what is truly scary because no matter what happens in the next election, Mitch McConnell has used Trump to get his wish. The court system is changed for decades. They are stacking it in their favor so that they can control things even if they are voted out. 

I personally think having such a powerful position for life is always a bad idea but now we are seeing how bad it really is. A corrupt government can fill the court system with corrupt judges to spend decades doing their bidding.

[GreyhoundFan]

I have a feeling his "presidential" library will consist of a couple of grease-stained KFC menus and a Russian mail order bride catalog.