By Robert P. Bomboy
Of all the things that are happening in Washington, the
biggest and most frequent headlines every day go to the investigation into
President Trump's possible collusion with the Russians to undercut last
November's election.
Less often
recognized, perhaps, is the more mundane "business-as-usual" process
of government operations. We should pay more attention. As President Trump's
now-deposed henchman Steve Bannon has unabashedly pointed out, "It only helps us when . . . .
they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
What they're doing at the moment is trying to pack the
federal courts with young, extremist right-wing judges.
Since the beginning of his months in office Trump has
nominated 58 federal judges (16 in the past week alone). Senate Republicans
have so far confirmed for office nine of these judges and have been doing
everything they can to get the rest approved quickly.
If you don't think that's "packing,"
it's far more than any number of past presidents have nominated, and double the
judicial nominations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton,
combined.
It's not happening by chance. It's part of a concerted
plan. We've laughed when Trump has boasted that he's had the most success since
Abraham Lincoln. But if he's measuring his "success" by the new shoes
he's trying to put under the federal bench, think of this: If he keeps going
this way, by next year at this time one out of every eight cases in federal
courts could be heard by judges he's appointed. And they will serve for life.
"Conservative" rulings typically favor big
versus little; government and capital versus the individual; rich versus poor;
white versus black.
You can bet that the names of most of the judges Trump's
nominated have come from the same list he used to nominate Neil Gorsuch to the
Supreme Court last spring. As I wrote at that time, the list came to him from a
man named Leonard Leo, the longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society.
Since 2005 the Federalist Society and its extremely
powerful group of 75,000 conservative lawyers have been behind the appointment
of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court: John Roberts in 2005,
Samuel Alito in 2006, and, of course, Neil Gorsuch this year. Their
conservative bloc on the Supreme Court constitutes one-third of the court's
members.
Since the early 1990s the Federalist
Society has followed, most rigorously, its own master plan. Find very
intelligent students coming into law schools across the nation; help them in
every way to do well in law school; make sure these students graduate as
lawyers; then keep them interested and involved with conservative lawyers. The
Federalist Society has chapters everywhere, and they're not like the Odd
Fellows. Lawyers in the chapters work on the ins and outs of important legal
problems, participate in practice groups, take pro-bono legal cases where they
confer together, write articles for law journals, and create strong
relationships with the news media.
As the law school graduates advance in their careers, they
become known and recognized. Inevitably, with the support of the Federalist
Society, these conservative lawyers have risen to positions of prominence in
the courts, including the federal courts, where their conservative legal
philosophies have led them to render conservative decisions.
And now, with Donald Trump in the batter's box, they'll
soon be in a position to judge one out of every eight cases that come before
the federal bench.
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