TRUMP ATTACKS THE COURTS ONCE AGAIN

By Robert P. Bomboy

As you know, in the past two weeks Special Counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian interference with our 2016 election, handed down grand jury indictments for key aides to President Donald Trump, and another pleaded guilty to federal charges. Trump's campaign manager faces 12 charges, including conspiracy against the United States, and more indictments are coming.

These indictments are tainting the Trump presidency. As our grandmothers always said, where there's smoke, there's fire.

After years of obstructing former President Barak Obama's judicial nominations, Senate Republicans have been speedily confirming President Trump's court nominees. By the first week of November the Senate had confirmed a total of 25 Trump nominees to federal courts and the Supreme Court.

Forty-six more of his nominees are standing in line waiting for Senate confirmation, including 10 for federal Courts of Appeal and 36 for federal District Courts. Sensing the danger for the Trump administration that the federal indictments imply, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to confirm as many of Trump's federal judgeship nominees as possible before it all falls down. McConnell has threatened to keep the Senate in session until the four judges he's ramming through now are confirmed.

            Trump's nominees are extremely conservative and, once confirmed, will serve for life. The impact of stacking the judiciary with right-wing extremists will impede progress in our country for generations. It's not happening by chance. It's part of a concerted plan.

If Trump and the Republicans keep going this way, as I've said before, by next year at this time one out of every eight cases in federal courts could be heard by judges Trump has appointed. And they will serve for life. Yet at this point there are strong reasons to believe that he and his 2016 election campaign colluded with a hostile foreign power, Russia, to steal the presidency. With that elephant in the room, there's no way he should be setting the longtime course for our democracy.

Since the very first days of his presidency Trump has, in fact, made a consistent effort to undermine the federal judiciary. He joined his attack again last week, denouncing our criminal justice system as a "laughingstock" and a "joke," against all evidence to the contrary.

The nation's most influential scholars, historians, economists, and political scientists at the highest levels of our best universities are gravely concerned by his continuing attacks on the federal courts, which - under the Constitution - represent the strongest of the checks and balances that undergird our democracy.

In last year's campaign and during his presidency he has lashed out at individual jurists calling them "so-called" judges and deriding their ancestry. In sum, these attacks have seemed like the instincts of a classic demagogue ready to profit from crisis.

"The lower his poll numbers, the more outlandish his lies, the greater the resistance from opponents within the bureaucracies, the thicker his scandals and chaos," says Mark Danner, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, "the likelier he will be to use a crisis and all the opportunities it offers to lever himself from a position of defensiveness to that of dominating power."