This year, 2025, will end in a swirl of sorrow, soaked in blood. While the stock market is up almost 14 percent, so are inflation and unemployment. With the Supreme Court’s help, Donald Trump will raze the administrative state. 

The rule of law is being rubbished. The president pardons criminals with relish, including the January 6 mob, and indicts critics with not so much as a sugarcoat of impartiality. Meanwhile, his “Department of War” is in the eyes of many as committing extrajudicial murder on the high seas. 

Some of us may be immunized to the Grand Guignol of Trump’s tantrums, but the bloody December of recent days truly shocks the conscience. We recoil in horror at the killing of two students at Brown University, the massacre of at least 15 Jews at Bondi Beach outside Sydney, Australia, as they celebrated Hanukkah, and the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, allegedly by their son, who has substance abuse and mental health histories. 

Of course, it is too early to know the Brown attack motivation. We know more about Bondi Beach. The Australian authorities say it had to do with antisemitic Islamic State ideology, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, vowing even tighter gun control, proclaimed antisemitism was “a scourge, and we will eradicate it.” 

Eradicating antisemitism is a fraught goal for those who care, let alone those who have been cavalier like the government in Canberra. Antisemitism is a centuries-old virus. Jews represent “other,” a vulnerable, identifiable people at the center of conspiracies. Before the state of Israel, Jews had no army and no means of defense. Their reliance on others’ goodwill proved misplaced. 

Bondi Beach was no isolated incident. The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) documented 5,118 antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2025 as of October 1, with over 5,000 in the United States, 1500 in the United Kingdom, and incidents in Australia reaching historic highs. 

In 2025, Trump said he wanted to eradicate antisemitism in American universities by withholding needed research grants from such iconic learning institutions as Harvard and Columbia. The effectiveness of such an approach has been seriously questioned, and the damage to American scientific leadership is profound. Trump’s motives seemed to have less to do with protecting Jews on campus than pandering to his anti-intellectual base. 

The Brown horror, like Bondi Beach, provokes the usual Kabuki “thoughts and prayers” calls for more gun control and more psychiatric support. At least 75 school shootings have unfolded this year in the United States. And Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” drastically cuts overall Medicaid and federal health spending, impacting behavioral health significantly through nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, leading to potential loss of coverage for millions, including those needing mental health services. 

Jew hatred long rested on prominence in finance or the killing of Christ. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, such shopworn, virulent antisemitism was replaced by the conflation of Israel with Jews. 

To justify attacks on Australian Jews based on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is specious. Last I checked, Bondi Beach is not in Israel. Nor are Washington, D.C., or Boulder, Colorado, sites of other antisemitic slaughter. 

The Holocaust occurred before there was an Israel. Violent antisemitism is not caused by anything Israel does or doesn’t do, which, of course, does not insulate the Israeli government from just criticism. 

The depressing truth this holiday season is that unalloyed rage seems everywhere. Social media has become the conveyor belt for virulent racism. So is the presidential podium. 

President Trump used alleged fraud by Minnesotans of Somali origin as a pretext to demonize American Somalis. There is no answer for this other than to speak out. John Lewis, the late congressman, who was knocked unconscious on the Selma bridge, famously said, “When you see something awful happen, you’ve got to speak up. You’ve got to stand up. Democracy is not a state of being. It’s an act.” 

While Trump has declared war on drugs, he has pardoned or reprieved primary drug dealers. One, quite notably, is former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took millions in bribes and used his police and military to protect drug shipments and crush rivals. He was convicted, but Trump allowed Hernández to walk free from a 45-year prison sentence. 

Because it’s all about him, Trump mocked the Reiners, harshly blaming the killings on the victims’ “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” posting on social media that Rob Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused by others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction.” Trump’s callousness inspired rare pushback from conservative lawmakers. In 2025, add those who cheered or would not condemn the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Murder, which in 1967 was characterized by the Black militant H. Rap Brown as “American as cherry pie,” is today politicized. 

As Stephen Bush writes in The Financial Times, those “from across the political spectrum” have “created the conditions for old hatreds to flourish freely in the 21st century.” It’s a murderous December. 

The post Brown, Bondi Beach, and the Reiners: The Murderous December  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, resisted political pressure to pardon Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin because “he never apologized for what he did.” Donald Trump has abused his prerogative, granting pardons right and left, even to people who never apologized. 

Among the sweeping authorities granted to the president by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution is the “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States…”  

The power is absolute and unreviewable. According to the Supreme Court, the pardon power is intended as a tool for justice and mercy and to further “the public welfare.” As one federal court has held: “The President, who exercises that power as the elected representative of all the People, must always exercise it in the public interest.”  

On the eve of his 2024 campaign, The Washington Post, following an investigation of all clemency acts during his tenure, concluded: “Never before had a president used his constitutional clemency powers to free or forgive so many people who could be useful to his future political efforts.” This included a record number of pardons for white-collar criminals who would provide political and financial support to the former president. 

It is astounding that Trump has granted clemency to 1,600 people since his January 20 inauguration. Most presidents have granted pardons just before they left the White House. Joe Biden’s 4,245 acts of clemency—including a roster of people serving lengthy sentences for drug offenses, as well as his son—were also rear-ended to his four-year term. By contrast, Trump has issued a spate of head-spinning pardons in the first year of his second term. 

Trump had already exercised the pardon and reprieve power in ways that raised eyebrows. During his first term, he pardoned Charles Kushner, his daughter’s father-in-law. During his second term, he appointed Kushner as ambassador to France. 

There used to be a procedure for these things. There was a pardon attorney in the Department of Justice who recommended pardons only after an investigation, including contact with the prosecutor, the sentencing judge, and prison officials. Most pardons were granted after completion of the sentence.  

“This president views the pardon power as a personal tool that he can use when it benefits him personally, politically, or financially, without assessing whether the use of the pardon power benefits the American public,” Elizabeth Oyer, a former senior Justice Department attorney under Trump told The Washington Post. The “traditional rules and procedures about pardons have been thrown out the window,” she said. 

Trump short-circuits the Justice Department and grants reprieves often on the recommendation of the White House pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson, who was herself granted clemency during Trump’s first term after serving 22 years of a life sentence for cocaine trafficking. Her sponsor was Kim Kardashian. 

Many of the Trump 2.0 pardons had a champion in Trump’s inner circle, such as former Representative Trey Gowdy, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Roger Stone, who in 2020 received his own presidential pardon. 

Consistency is unimportant to the president, as my colleague Bill Scher has noted on these pages. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York said former Honduran President  Juan Orlando Hernández  took millions of dollars in bribes and used Honduras’s police and military to protect drug shipments and crush rivals. He was convicted, but powerful advocates helped Hernández walk free from a 45-year prison sentence thanks to Trump’s pardon. 

Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road online drug bazaar, who was serving a life sentence for distributing narcotics and conspiring to launder money, got out of jail free. His mother campaigned for the pardon at Bitcoin and Libertarian conferences. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2023, the Libertarian Party’s chair told Trump over dinner that he needed to free Ulbricht if he wanted Libertarian support. 

Other drug pardons involve convicted traffickers serving lengthy sentences, including the Sotelo brothers of Fort Worth, Texas, and Anabel Valenzuela. 

Trump is obsessed with pardoning those who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. On his first day in office, he pardoned anyone “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the Capitol on January 6, 2021, commuted 14 sentences, and ordered all pending cases related to the riot dropped. The Justice Department suspended two prosecutors who referred to those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “a mob of rioters.” Trump had described January 6 as “a day of love.” The January 6 proclamation covered at least 1,500 people.  

In at least two instances, Trump has issued second pardons for January 6 defendants. One was Dan Wilson, who had pleaded guilty to firearms crimes that took place in 2022, when six guns and about 4,800 rounds of ammunition were seized during a search of his home related to a January 6 investigation. 

As broad as the president’s pardon powers are, Trump is determined to push them beyond the Constitution’s express limitations. This month, the president said he had pardoned jailed Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted in state court of felony charges related to unauthorized access to election machines. 

Peters was accused of sneaking Conan Hayes, a purported computer expert, into her office in 2021, using someone else’s security badge so that he could copy Dominion Voting Systems’ hard drives. She was convicted of charges including attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and is serving a nine- year sentence of imprisonment.  

The issue with Peters’ pardon is that the Constitution grants the president the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” The Supreme Court has interpreted that language as applying to federal crimes, not those prosecuted by state authorities. How this new claim of presidential power will unfold in the courts remains uncertain. 

More than half of the acts of clemency for named individuals relate to prosecutions initiated and pursued by the Biden Justice Department —in addition to the January 6 cases. 

Then there are the white-collar criminals.  

Nikola founder Trevor Milton, a Trump supporter, was convicted of fraud in federal court for allegedly lying to investors about his zero-emission trucks. He styled himself as a political victim of the Biden administration—and Trump agreed. 

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao can cause the world’s largest crypto-trading platform to return to the U.S. Zhao and his company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering rules. Trump has claimed not to know who he is, which is either a sign of cognitive decline or prevarication in the extreme. 

Trump pardoned Joe Lewis, the former owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in the U.S. last year. Lewis, like so many of the other recipients of Trump’s grace, was a political supporter. 

Trump last month freed David Gentile, the convicted fraudster who ran a firm known as GPB Capital, just days into a seven-year sentence. GPB held itself out as a private equity fund for Main Street and raised roughly $2 billion. Prosecutors said its executives were using the money to fund lavish lifestyles. Gentile authored a scheme that defrauded thousands of investors, many of whom were retired citizens living on fixed incomes. 

Reality TV couple Julie and Todd Chrisley blended celebrity and conservative appeal. They had been sentenced for conspiracy to defraud banks out of more than $30 million in fraudulent loans by submitting false documents. 

In 2024, their daughter, Savannah, spoke at the Republican National Convention, framing their prosecution as politically motivated. 

Not every pardon involved a Biden-era case. Just this year, Trump pardoned people prosecuted by the Justice Department during his first term—or whose prosecution started during the Biden administration but continued in Trump’s second term. 

The president’s own appointees charged sports executive Timothy Leiweke during the current Trump administration. 

Leiweke was accused of conspiring with a rival to rig the bidding process for a new basketball arena in Texas, a claim he denied. 

Trump has pardoned elected officials on both sides of the aisle. 

Leading the list of four  Democrats is U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, who were charged last year with taking nearly $600,000 in foreign bribes. 

Trump said Cuellar, representing a competitive district in Texas near Mexico, had been punished for speaking out against Biden’s border policies. Following the pardon, Trump expressed seller’s remorse. He went after Cuellar days later on social media, saying he showed a “lack of loyalty” by filing for reelection as a Democrat, amid speculation that he might switch parties. 

Democrats in Congress welcomed Cuellar with open arms. The House Appropriations Committee promptly voted to return him to his leadership position on a powerful spending panel. 

Trump loves celebrities. Former Major League Baseball star Darryl Strawberry pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 1995, with a history of substance abuse. He got a pardon. How can anyone argue with that? 

But there is a sleaze and a foul aroma to these promiscuously issued Trump pardons, and it’s only the first year of his second term. Could Trump actually sell pardons? Given the Supreme Court’s ruling giving the president almost unlimited immunity for offenses he may have committed in office, we wonder.  

One cannot help but be reminded of the old Yiddish expression, “Petty thieves are hanged, big ones are pardoned.”  

The post Trump’s Pardon Power Abuses  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Department of Justice has declared war on the federal courts, conveniently omitting the Supreme Court. This is not the surmise of some liberal pundit. It is not an inference drawn from the rant of Emil Bove, now a federal judge, once Trump’s personal lawyer and a high-ranking Justice Department figure. Bove is said to have told his colleagues, after they had ruled against the government in a Venezuelan deportee’s case, “F… the courts.” Bove’s behavior raised eyebrows at the time, but the criticism largely subsided after the Senate confirmed him for the Third Circuit bench.  

But when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told the Federalist Society in November that we must declare war on the courts for bad decisions, there is reason to fear that the independence of the judiciary is seriously undermined. 

Specifically, Blanche attributed the Trump administration’s myriad losses in the lower federal courts to “rogue activist judges,” claiming that these “liberals” are “more political or certainly as political as the most liberal governor or D.A.” As Blanche continued, “There’s a group of judges that are repeat players, and that’s obviously not by happenstance, that’s intentional, and it’s a war, man.” Blanche called it a “war” three times in his speech.” He said we have a “travesty when you have an individual judge able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so.” But isn’t that precisely what judges are supposed to do? Nevertheless, Blanche thundered, “So, it’s a war.” 

The “war” is being fought on many fronts. Blanche speaks for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who filed a senseless misconduct complaint against Chief Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. district court; White House Rasputin Stephen Miller intermittently decries each adverse ruling against the Trump administration as a “judicial insurrection”; and, although it has been postponed, the Senate Judiciary Committee had been set to convene a hearing on claims of misconduct by two district judges.  

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said at a conference of judges and lawyers last May, “These attacks are not random; they seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. “And they ultimately risk undermining our constitution and the rule of law.” Jackson called on the judges in the room to show “raw courage” and dispense justice without fear of any outside consequences. “I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service.”  

Court orders must be obeyed unless and until reversed. This is a particular duty imposed on Justice Department lawyers sworn to uphold the Constitution. When this obligation is repudiated, tyranny reigns. There is no reason for the executive branch to delegitimize the judicial branch unless it fears that judges will hold it accountable. Judges today face calls for their impeachment, threats of violence, and instances where their orders are not obeyed. 

One would have thought that political impeachment of judges was settled in 1805, when the Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson sought to impeach the Federalist Justice Samuel Chase. Chase had been a founding father and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Pre-Chase, there had been one prior Senate impeachment of a judge; in that case, the jurist was removed for drunkenness and insanity. The Chase case required the Senate to explore the meaning of impeachable crimes. 

The Senate record refers to Chase as “a staunch federalist with a volcanic personality.” His fiery rhetoric often drew public attention and criticism, particularly from the Democratic-Republicans who controlled Congress. His conduct, especially his partisan commentary during jury charges, further fueled calls for his impeachment. 

Jefferson became incensed when he learned that Chase had charged a grand jury in a way the president believed had an unfair political slant. So, he wrote to the House and asked them to impeach. The bill of impeachment accused Chase of acting with bias. The articles also addressed rulings he made in cases involving treason and sedition, including refusing to dismiss allegedly biased grand jurors and excluding or limiting defense witnesses in politically sensitive cases. The House impeached Chase for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and he stood trial in the Senate, declaring that he was being prosecuted for his politics rather than for any crime. The Senate presided over by Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr, who was a fugitive from justice, having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel the preceding year, failed to convict, even though Jefferson’s party held a super majority. Chase resumed his judicial duties.  

The failed impeachment set a precedent. A federal judge, appointed for life, does not sit at the pleasure of the Senate. We have learned that the Constitution requires judges to tell us what the law is. They should not be impeached for rulings with which the party in power disagrees. Judges should be impeached for outright criminal behavior, such as, to use a true-to-life example, receiving extravagant gifts from parties with business before the court.  

Stephen Vladeck, the Constitutional scholar, called Blanche’s statements “shamelessly hypocritical; and profoundly dangerous.” He wrote in his Substack One First, “The galling part is that Blanche never actually explains which of the more than 100 federal district court judges (to say nothing of the dozens of circuit judges) to rule against the Trump administration are ‘rogue activist judges.’ And all he really could provide as support for why they are “rogue activist judges” is because they are … ruling against the Trump administration.” Blanche said that “these Article. III judges [are] literally telling the president, the executive, what he can and cannot do.” 

And that is precisely what Article III judges are supposed to do. Blanche reminds us of Louie, the corrupt police chief in Casablanca who cynically said as he collected his winnings in Rick’s café, “I am shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in here.”  

Blanche is parroting the “unitary executive theory” that the president has total power over the executive branch, and even the entire government. Nothing in the Constitution says that. The argument is that an untrammeled executive is implicit in the Constitution and is gathered from the provisions of Article II that the “executive power shall be vested in the president;” that he is “commander-in-chief” of the Armed Forces; that he has the appointment power; and that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” These powers, however, are qualified. The appointment power often requires the consent of the Senate. The treaty-making power is subject to ratification by 2/3 of the Senate, and the power to declare war belongs to Congress, not Todd Blanche and not Pam Bondi. And until now, whoever heard of one branch declaring war on another? It is certainly no accident that these attacks on lower courts coincide with decisions that have proven to be the most effective brake on the lawless behavior of the Trump administration. 

 Autocracy is just around the corner. Checks and balances are a toothless tiger. A supine Congress has demurely handed over its authority to the president, and the Supreme Court has been Trump’s handmaiden. Consider that the oral argument this week presages that the Court may overturn a 90-year-old precedent and bless his firing of independent agency appointees under the unitary executive theory, which it has vastly overblown. Maybe it will come to its senses over Trump’s usurpation of tariff powers. And maybe not.  

But if there is war, only the lower courts, including judges appointed by Trump himself, have manned the ramparts. 

The post Our Heroic Lower Court Judges  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I recently spoke at Jesus College, Cambridge, to about 200 students, professors, and media figures about “Autocracy in America: Law and Politics in the Second Trump Administration.” The teaser for the event in a local blog was “US lawyer comes to Jesus,” which made me reassure my friends and family that the reports of my conversion were exaggerated. 

I reviewed the shocking departure from constitutional values and presidential norms of the second Donald Trump administration. In just 10 months, in a manner reminiscent of the Argentine junta of the 1970s, he has sent masked ICE agents in unmarked vans to seize presumed undocumented immigrants and deport them without due process to horrific prisons in El Salvador or to failed African states where they cannot speak the language. With a green light from the Supreme Court, many of these deportees were targeted based on skin color or their accents. He has unlawfully deployed the National Guard to U.S. cities. There are also the extrajudicial killings in international waters.  

The Brits I spoke with were most concerned about the drift toward autocracy in America, especially the targeting of political opponents, political gerrymandering, and the weakening of our constitutional system of checks and balances. Until the recent flap over the Jeffrey Epstein files release, Trump had full control over Congress, and it seems over the supermajority in the Supreme Court. Hopefully, nevermore. 

Slipping in the polls, stunned by fissures within the MAGA ranks, and set back by Democratic gains in the recent election—where Democrats won governorships by overwhelming margins and some local races by astonishing totals—Trump is pivoting like a whirling dervish. Under pressure from MAGA allies in Congress, he changed his position on releasing the Epstein files. Unless Pam Bondi succeeds in redacting some of the most embarrassing details, we may finally learn what happened in his 15-year relationship with the convicted pedophile.  

He turned to Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City on an affordability platform. Trump must realize that it is the high cost of living across America that, more than anything else, helped him beat Kamala Harris. And it is affordability more than anything else that explains the poor performance of Republicans earlier this month and Trump’s decline. The latest poll numbers show that Trump’s approval is below water. Only 33 percent of US adults approve of how he is managing the government, down from 43 percent in March.  

So, after labeling Mamdani a “communist,” he now tries to align with Americans who voted for him a year ago and supported Mamdani earlier this month. Trump loves winners and hates losers.  

Of course, affordability is a problematic issue for Donald Trump. To hang the bell on the cat, his inflationary tariffs have caused the economy to reach a point where healthcare and basic living expenses will be beyond many Americans’ means. 

Trump has fluctuated on Ukraine, and the negotiations are constantly changing. First, he thought Zelensky wasn’t sufficiently grateful. Then, while flying to Israel on October 12, he told reporters that, “if the war is not settled, we may very well transfer Tomahawk missiles to Zelensky. But at a meeting with Zelensky in Washington on October 17, five days later, Trump rejected the request. Later, after the Pentagon approved giving Ukraine the Tomahawks, he reconsidered and said he would sell Ukraine Patriot missiles, which can deter missiles and drones targeting military sites and civilians. Ultimately, he shifted back to calling Zelensky “ungrateful,” giving him until Thanksgiving to accept a 28-point “peace plan” that benefits Putin’s aggression, or face losing further U.S. support.  

November 30 marks Winston Churchill’s birthday. The deal Trump proposed is another Munich, rewarding aggression. Would Churchill have ever said that Trump brings us “peace in our time?” 

Foreign affairs expert Richard Haass is shocked by the Trump proposal. In a special edition of his newsletter “Home and Away,” he writes: 

The plan is extremely pro-Russian and one-sided. It favors, rather than punishes, Russia for this aggressive war of choice. It also requires Ukraine to rely not on itself but on Russia and the United States for its safety. The plan never should have been proposed; it definitely should not have been put into action. One can only wonder what influenced the American envoys—Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll—when they created and promoted it. 

There is, as well, a sordid quality to it all. The United States is to receive compensation for any guarantees it provides and share in the profits generated by infrastructure projects in Ukraine funded by frozen Russian assets. It also pledges to sign an economic cooperation pact with Russia covering just about anything and everything. 

The position the President is putting Ukraine in is simply unconscionable. 

But get this last pivot. Last week, Trump said the plan was not America’s “final offer,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to distance Washington from it before insisting just hours later that the US had authored it. In a Truth Social post, Trump strangely declined to blame Russia for the Ukraine conflict, instead aiming his ire at Kiev and European allies for failing to endorse his truce proposal. 

Meanwhile, a joint Ukraine-US statement says there’s now a whole new deal in play, which it calls an “updated and revised framework document”. The Financial Times quotes one of the delegates, though—Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya—who talks of a new 19-point plan with “very little left” from the original draft. If the rewrite is sensible, it will likely be unacceptable to Putin. Security guarantees for Ukraine are what’s key here. If negotiations break down, Trump may pivot again and supply the Tomahawks, or not.

Given the English parliamentary system, many at Cambridge were surprised that Trump could survive. Britain is accustomed to frequent changes in government. Between 2016 and 2024, it had four prime ministers. When it was revealed that its Defense Secretary John Profumo had an extramarital affair with Christine Keeler, who was also the mistress of a Soviet agent, Profumo was forced out, as was the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan in the next election.  

France likewise has a chaotic form of government. It has elected five prime ministers in the past two years. And they still do not have a budget. 

One of the chapels in the newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral is dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, Saint Genevieve. Beneath a statue of Genevieve is the inscription, which we would do well to take measure, “In Saint Genevieve the spirit of strength restores law and justice when they are flouted.”  

We need a Saint Genevieve in America. We have Trump for at least three more years, assuming he chooses to leave office in 2029, as the Constitution requires.  

British lawyers I spoke with were bewildered by the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where summary orders that are said to be interim become law without explanation, opinion, or even revealing which justices voted for the final decision. 

Then, there are the pardons. The rule of law is under serious challenge in the United States. Trump has pardoned violent criminals convicted and serving out their sentences over the events of January 6 as though they were Thanksgiving turkeys. His recent pardon of Joe Lewis, the former owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, who pleaded guilty to insider trading in the U.S. last year, is a case in point, and of great interest in the U.K. The move was the latest in a series of high-profile pardons by Trump. Last month, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of crypto exchange Binance, who had pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. He also commuted the sentence of former Republican congressman George Santos, who was convicted of wire fraud and identity theft. He pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law and appointed him ambassador to France. 

“This president views the pardon power as a personal tool that he can use when it benefits him personally, politically, or financially, without assessing whether the use of the pardon power benefits the American public,” Elizabeth Oyer, a former senior Justice Department attorney under Trump told The Washington Post. The “traditional rules and procedures about pardons have been thrown out the window,” Oyer said. She called Trump’s use of the pardon power a “crisis.” 

But there is some cause for optimism. Looking at the signs of recent events, we see what was once unimaginable just a few months ago. Trump may be losing his hold on the Republican Party. One of the most telling signs was the announcement by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, that she is resigning her House seat rather than allowing herself to be treated by Trump like what she called “a battered wife hoping it all goes away and gets better.” 

For years, Greene was, of course, one of Trump’s most loyal and high-profile hard-right supporters, but she has recently broken with him. That included issues like health care and the government shutdown, as well as pushing for the release of Justice Department files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Because of her betrayal, Greene has become a target for Trump, who has repeatedly attacked her on social media, calling her “a traitor” and “a ranting Lunatic” who has gone “Far Left.” Early Saturday, he wrote on social media that her decision to leave Congress was based on “PLUMMETING Poll Numbers and not wanting to face a Primary Challenger with a strong Trump Endorsement.”  

As John Lewis, the great civil rights leader and Congressman, famously said, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” Trump is blinking; hope may be on its way.  

The post An American Comes to Jesus  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Pundits of varied political flavors see “rot” permeating our country. Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post rightly chronicles a “crisis of faith” in our institutions, like the Supreme Court, to call honest balls and strikes. “Until we can believe again that the referee is trying to be fair,” he writes, “we will keep shouting ‘Ref, you suck!’ at our own democracy—and then wonder why the game no longer feels worth playing.” In the New York Times, David Brooks laments, “There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation—the loss of the convictions, norms and habits of mind that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.” Peggy Noonan, writing lyrically in The Wall Street Journal, has a queasy feeling: “Are we maintaining our republic? Is our equilibrium holding? The last nine months, a lot of lines seem to have been crossed … There are many areas in which you’ve come to think: Isn’t the executive assuming powers of the Congress here? Why is Congress allowing this? The executive branch assumes the authority to bend its foes and defeat them. You ask: Is all this constitutional? The president “jokes” that he may not accept the Constitution’s two-term presidential limit. Are you laughing?”

The cure must come from the vote of the American people, but the right to vote is being diluted as we watch, the constitutional principle of “one man, one vote” dishonored, and the will of the people traduced with partisan and even racial gerrymandering.

This week’s Democratic wave is significant, but it doesn’t obviate Trump’s pressuring Republican legislatures to redraw their congressional districts. This power grab could make it easier for the GOP to retain control of the narrowly divided House of Representatives, which is central to our democracy. The House is a safety valve. With complete turnover every two years—only one-third of Senate seats are up for grabs biennially—it can respond relatively quickly to national shifts in public sentiment. If Trump rigs it to keep the House, the consequences would be monumental. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a Voting Rights Act case from Louisiana last month that could lead to cataclysmic changes in how districts are drawn in Black and Latino communities, giving Republicans extra advantages, perhaps far more than their norm-violating mid-decade gerrymandering frenzy will yield, maybe as many as 20 seats. California’s passage of Proposition 50 could lead to Democrats picking up five congressional seats, but that may be swamped by the fallout from ripping up Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The redistricting march goes on. North Carolina recently redrew its congressional map, with Republican senators endorsing a new map. The state House of Representatives followed suit the next day. “The motivation behind this redraw is simple and singular: drawing a new map that will bring an additional Republican seat to the North Carolina congressional delegation,” state Senator Ralph Hise, the Republican who prepared the map, told colleagues this week: “President Trump has called on Republican-controlled states nationwide to redraw congressional districts. This map answers that call.”

Trump quickly praised North Carolina’s “improved” map last week on Truth Social, saying it would “give the fantastic people of North Carolina the opportunity to elect an additional MAGA Republican in the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Before the gerrymander, Republicans controlled 10 of the Tar Heel state’s 14 congressional districts, and the new map would give Republicans a good shot at winning another, and maybe more. The district held by Representative Don Davis, a Democrat, already leans three percentage points toward Republicans, and the new map would give the GOP an 11-point advantage in that district.

Throughout the debate, Democrats decried the map for carving up Black communities. “By dismantling this district, Republicans aren’t just redrawing lines, they are erasing history, silencing voices, and turning their backs on decades of progress,” said State Senator Val Applewhite

Under North Carolina’s Constitution, Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, lacks the authority to veto the measure. “If I did have that power, I assure you I would veto this map,” Stein responded after the vote. “Republican legislative leaders are abusing their power to take away yours. They’re afraid they will lose in the midterms and afraid to say no to the President, so they’ve turned their backs on you to silence your vote in the 2026 election.” North Carolina’s Democrats have little recourse. Of course, they could turn to the federal and state judiciary, but good luck with that. Whatever happened to “one man, one vote,” a salutary legal principle, now in the ashcan of history?

North Carolina is not the only state being redrawn. In August, Texas (which started this orgy of redrawing) approved a map aimed at gaining five House seats for Republicans. A month later, Missouri Republicans followed with a distorted map that shifted Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s district to be Republican-leaning.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Kansas and Indiana are considering drawing new district lines. And GOP-controlled Ohio is required to draw new lines this year after passing its last map without Democratic support.

The vote in North Carolina took place two weeks after Republicans in Utah approved a map in response to a court ruling that could give Democrats a chance to win one or two seats. A judge is reviewing that map and may order changes.

Republicans are also considering drawing new maps in Florida and Kansas. In Indiana, the Republican governor is in favor of redrawing the boundaries but hasn’t convinced the GOP-controlled statehouse to adopt it.

Democrats are pushing back. California voters approved Proposition 50, while Maryland Governor Wes Moore announced the formation of a commission to review redistricting, indicating that the heavily Democratic state is ready to participate in mid-decade redistricting.

The significant shift of Hispanic votes toward Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey suggests that the Texas experiment that started this madness may ultimately fail. The Republican statehouse is drawing its new map, assuming Donald Trump’s strong performance in South Texas in 2024 meant Hispanics would reliably vote Republican. However, my colleague Bill Scher pointed out back in August that this was a dubious bet. After nearly a year of aggressive ICE raids and masked agents, it’s turning out to be very risky. Perhaps there’s still a chance to slow the decline.

The post Redistricting, Supreme Court Should Worry Democrats About 2026 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Supreme Court has a fateful choice this week, arguably as daunting as any in its history. Of the 28 prior applications from Donald Trump’s administration that landed on its shadow docket, Trump v. Illinois is the most important. While supposedly temporary, the outcome could establish the rules for deploying National Guard troops to enforce the law anywhere in the country. 

Here’s the deal. On October 10, Joe Biden-appointed District Judge April Perry in Chicago issued a temporary restraining order preventing the use of federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago. 

Less than a week later, a Seventh Circuit panel, consisting of one judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, one by Barack Obama, and one by Trump, unanimously kept the critical part of the injunction intact—denying Trump’s request for a “stay.” 

“We conclude that the district court’s factual findings at this preliminary stage were not clearly erroneous, and that the facts do not justify the president’s actions in Illinois … even giving substantial deference to his assertions,” the panel wrote. “The administration remains barred from deploying the National Guard of the United States within Illinois.”

The “clearly erroneous” rule serves as the gold standard that appellate courts rely on to review a lower court’s findings of fact in a civil case. This standard is highly deferential to the fact finder, and an appeal rarely succeeds solely based on challenging a factual determination.

Now, the Justice Department has petitioned the Supreme Court to do just that—not just to stay the district court’s injunction pending appeal, but to issue an immediate “administrative stay “to prevent ongoing and intolerable risks to the lives and safety of federal personnel while this Court considers this application.” The government has not made any factual showing of “federal personnel,” masked or unmasked, killed or seriously injured in Chicago, because there haven’t been any. Trump’s papers are riddled with overstated and overblown claims about the alleged violence and lawlessness in Chicago. Having learned that I had recently been to Liverpool, a Londoner said, “A real Chicago, Liverpool is.” Cities get reputations which die hard to shake, some true, others exaggerated.

Title 10 U.S.C. § 12406 is the federal law that establishes the key legal test. The statute grants the president the authority to activate the National Guard for federal service under specific conditions, including invasion, rebellion, or when the president cannot enforce federal laws using only regular forces. Once federalized under this law, the Guard is no longer under state control. It comes under federal authority and is subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from being used for domestic law enforcement.

Judge Perry highlighted the rather significant gap between the “facts” as portrayed by the Trump administration and the detailed affidavits from local and state officials:

 [There is] a troubling trend of Defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots and a lack of appreciation for the wide spectrum that exists between citizens who are observing, questioning, and criticizing their government, and those who are obstructing, assaulting, or doing violence … The lens through which we view the world changes our perception of the events around us. Law enforcement officers who go into an event expecting “a shitshow” are much more likely to experience one than those who go into the event prepared to de-escalate it. Ultimately, this Court must conclude that Defendants’ declarants’ perceptions are not reliable.

With a credibility gap in Trump’s submissions, Judge Perry correctly concluded that the statutory requirements for invoking § 12406 had not been met. As the Seventh Circuit summarized her findings, “There was insufficient evidence of rebellion or a danger of rebellion, nor was there enough evidence that the President was unable with the regular forces to enforce the laws of the United States.”

Though the Seventh Circuit rejected most of the government’s appeal, it agreed with Trump to the extent of issuing its own administrative stay of Judge Perry’s order insofar as it barred the federalization of National Guard troops; but, most importantly, it left the lower court order intact regarding their deployment.

Regarding the merits, the panel upheld the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling in Newsom v. Trump that ‘the President should be granted a great level of deference’ on whether one of the statutory predicates exists. However, it also concluded that the Trump administration was unlikely to succeed, mainly because the district court’s key factual findings—that Trump’s submissions lacked credibility—were not “clearly erroneous.” 

Based on those findings, they wrote, “We see insufficient evidence of a rebellion or danger of rebellion in Illinois. The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority.” And most telling:

There is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws. Federal facilities, including the processing facility in Broadview, have remained open despite regular demonstrations against the administration’s immigration policies. And though federal officers have encountered sporadic disruptions, they have been quickly contained by local, state, and federal authorities. At the same time, immigration arrests and deportations have proceeded apace in Illinois over the past year, and the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area.

The Seventh Circuit disagreed with Judge Perry only to the extent that she prohibited blocking the mobilization of federalized National Guard troops. As it explained, “we conclude that the harm to plaintiffs of permitting Guard troops to remain temporarily under federal control, without deploying, as this case further progresses appears to be relatively minimal.”

In 1956, Justice Hugo Black elaborated the lesson of history drawn from the Founders’ era:

The Founders envisioned the army as a necessary institution, but one dangerous to liberty if not confined within its essential bounds. Their fears were rooted in history … [but] the generation that adopted the Constitution did not distrust the military because of history alone. Within their own lives, they had seen royal governors sometimes resort to military rule. British troops were quartered in Boston from 1768 until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War to support unpopular royal governors and intimidate the local populace.

As for why Trump v. Illinois presents the Court with an inflection point, we might say what it would mean if the full Court were to grant Trump’s request.

• It means the Court clears the way for Trump to send troops anywhere in the country to strengthen immigration enforcement, and it suggests that federalized National Guard troops could start accompanying ICE officers on immigration raids—even if they’re not doing the arrests themselves. If this doesn’t resemble Germany in the 1930s, it certainly comes close.
• Since we all know, face it, summary dispositions without opinion on the shadow docket become the law of the land, at least for the foreseeable future. If the Court grants Trump relief in Chicago, what will stop Trump from deploying national guardsmen nationwide to supplement the ICE program in enforcing immigration laws? And then, based on some pretext that there is a rebellion, posting troops at select polling places nationwide to intimidate voters during the midterm elections? 

As Stephen Vladeck wrote this month, the fundamental questions in these cases are not about the federal government’s legal authorities but the facts. Appellate courts, bound by the “clearly erroneous” rule, are supposed to review, not find facts. If it sides with Trump, the Court would endorse pretextual domestic military deployments.

Mark Twain famously said, “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In Korematsu v. United States, the Court accepted representations from the executive branch that later proved false. Three justices dissented, with one calling the decision “legalization of racism.” The Court authorized the government to intern roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were U.S. citizens. This decision is regarded as one of the darkest moments in the Court’s history. Let this shame not be eclipsed by Trump v. Illinois.

A ruling is expected as early as this week.

The post Supreme Court Set to Rule on National Guard Troops in Chicago appeared first on Washington Monthly.

During Joe Biden’s administration, Donald Trump denounced what he claimed to be “lawfare,” the weaponization of the law by the elites to throttle political dissent. Now, Trump wants to use the justice system to retaliate against his enemies and stifle political dissent. Having narrowly avoided jail himself, Trump continues to threaten his enemies with imprisonment. In a Truth Social post the other day, he mused that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson would “land in jail.” Pritzker is the scion of a billionaire hotel baron family of the Hyatt chain, with whom Trump has historically enjoyed a fractious relationship.

Will Pritzker have to share a cell with Jim Comey? With Adam Schiff? Or maybe John Bolton? Is this America?

Trump’s post came a day after Texas National Guard troops arrived in Illinois, despite fierce opposition from Democrats. The president has been vocally advocating for sending troops to Chicago for weeks. He has described Chicago as a “killing field,” a “hell hole,” and “the murder capital of the world,” and has said he will deploy National Guard troops to “solve the crime problem fast.” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson stated that “JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson have blood on their hands” and accused them of “standing idly by while innocent Americans fall victim to violent crime repeatedly.” Chicago’s violent crime rate decreased by 11 percent last year compared to 2023 levels and is about half of what it was in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. According to BBC Verify’s analysis of FBI data, the city ranks near the bottom among U.S. cities with populations over 500,000, placing 29th out of 37. While a federal district court halted Trump’s Chicago troop surge, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on Friday.

The courts have blocked Trump from deploying troops in Chicago and nearby areas. However, they have approved the administration’s request to keep the National Guard under federal control in Illinois instead of sending them back to their home states.

The White House statement did not answer questions about what crimes the president thinks Johnson and Pritzker committed, or whether the White House plans to have federal agents arrest them.

This isn’t the first time Trump, 79, has dealt with the Pritzker family. Animosity between the Trumps and the Pritzkers runs deep. In 1977, Trump reached out to the bankruptcy trustees of the Penn Central Railroad to buy an option on the 1,800-room Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Station. The Pritzker family was a clan of seasoned billionaire hotel developers who successfully managed 777 hotels in 54 countries. During his first major real estate deal, Trump convinced the Pritzkers that he was a valuable partner for a new 1,400-room hotel called the Grand Hyatt on the site of the old Commodore. The Grand Hyatt would be the first hotel in New York City owned by the Pritzker family, who financed the project. This deal put Trump on the map. The Pritzkers invested the money, making Trump a 50 percent owner of a multimillion-dollar property without contributing a dime. 

The relationship between Trump and the Pritzkers was fractious from the start. Over the years, the parties became embroiled in at least three arbitrations. The results of the arbitrations are kept from the public by court order, so we lack details. We know that Trump accused the Pritzkers of negligent property management and failing to maximize revenue. The strained relationship festered, eventually erupting into full-scale litigation. In 1993, Trump, seeking triple damages, sued the Pritzkers in federal court under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. He alleged that the Pritzkers had “systematically looted tens of millions of dollars from the Grand Hyatt through theft, fraud, waste, and mismanagement.” The Pritzkers vehemently denied these accusations and quickly moved to dismiss. Their motion was never resolved because Trump eventually dropped the case. The suggestion that such seasoned and successful hotel operators had done a “horrible job” defied credulity

Trump was a big supporter of RICO suits. Prominent law firms, well-known accounting firms, and even Fortune 500 companies have all been named in complaints alleging civil RICO violations. Most of these claims are dismissed by courts as without merit. RICO remains a powerful legal tool because the stakes are intimidating. Lose the case, and you face significant damages along with the winning side’s legal fees, which can be substantial. Trump told the New York Post that he filed the RICO case against the Pritzkers because “the rich have a very low threshold for pain,” and “I don’t like being pushed around, and now they’re beginning to learn it.” 

Trump claimed that the Pritzkers aimed to force him out of the partnership. This covered Trump’s real goal of getting money from the clan. 

In 1994, the Pritzkers sued Trump in federal court for violating their partnership agreement by failing to stay solvent, using his stake in the hotel as collateral for bank loans without the Pritzkers’ approval, and refusing to pay his agreed-upon share of necessary renovation costs. Trump defended his dealings with the banks, saying, “Every ‘i was dotted, and every ‘t’ was crossed.” He described the renovations proposed by the Pritzkers as “irrational and foolish.” In an interview with the New York Times on May 29, 1994, he stated of the Pritzkers, “They’re spending money like drunken sailors.” 

Telling his story to the press, Trump said of the firestorm, “I see this ending when they give up the hotel management. This is a fractured relationship. I think Hyatt has done a horrible job in the management of the Grand Hyatt, and I want them out. That is the goal of my lawsuit.” But the Pritzkers had enough of Trump’s lawsuits and wanted a divorce. The “fractured” 17-year relationship ended in 1996 when the Pritzkers bought out Trump for $140 million.

When Trump was interviewed at a meeting of the Economic Club in Washington in December 2014, he did not criticize the Pritzkers and called the Grand Hyatt “very, very successful.” Sure, it was “successful”—for him. He had contributed practically nothing to the hotel’s construction or maintenance costs, and by intimidating his partners with a failed racketeering charge, he walked away with a cool $140 million. 

And, as it happens, Penny Pritzker, JB’s sister and the former Commerce Secretary, is Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the board responsible for the university’s operations. Harvard is a Trump bête noire, one of the most visible liberal institutions on Trump’s enemies’ list.

If you don’t think Trump remembers his grudges, ask Jim Comey, Letitia James, or John Bolton. Now Trump is back at the Pritzkers again. Asked during a White House event if he had urged the Justice Department to investigate potential charges against Pritzker and Mayor Johnson, he reaffirmed his statement from his Truth Social post.

“I’ve seen the law. And when you have a group of people where the police call off the safety for ICE officials, I’ve understood that, and I’ve read it today in numerous journals, that that’s illegal,” Trump said. I would really like to know what journals he was referring to.

Governor Pritzker, 60, a teenager when the feud with Trump began, responded to the president’s Truth Social post by writing on X, “I will not back down.”

“Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power,” he wrote. “What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Later, Pritzker told reporters that Trump is “a coward.” “He likes to pretend to be a tough guy,” Pritzker said of the president. “Come and get me.”

Illinois has, of course, sued to prevent the White House from deploying federalized troops to Chicago. April Perry, a Biden-appointed judge who graduated from the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University, held a hearing and issued a preliminary injunction, which currently blocks the deployment. The judge said the deployment was “likely to lead to civil unrest.” Trump is certain to appeal her ruling. Attorneys for the government argued that the courts should be “highly deferential” when reviewing a president’s judgment, stating that it is within the scope of the authority granted to the executive branch by the Constitution and statutes. Mayor Johnson called the ruling “a win for the people of Chicago and the rule of law.” But if the Supreme Court’s past rulings are any indication, they’re likely to uphold the troop surge while they wait to hold oral arguments.

Trump previously argued that deploying the National Guard was necessary to “protect federal assets and personnel” and prevent “attacks on law enforcement.”

He initially deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles despite California Governor Gavin Newsom’s objections, following protests in response to immigration raids. Then, the president ordered the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., framing it as a move to combat crime.

The administration also tried to send federalized National Guard troops from California to Portland, Oregon. Still, a judge issued a temporary restraining order to stop the move while the case is considered in court. A Pentagon spokesperson said the troops would have worked to “support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal personnel performing official duties, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”

In Chicago, a frequent target of the president, Mayor Johnson signed an executive order on Monday to block immigration agents from using city property during their operations in Chicago.

“We will not tolerate ICE agents violating our residents’ constitutional rights, nor will we allow the federal government to disregard our local authority,” Johnson said in a news release marking the so-called ICE-Free Zone executive order.

Pritzker has emerged as a leading critic of the Trump administration as his state faces the president’s ire, and he is expected to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. Trump has compared Chicago to a “war zone,” and Pritzker said recently on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “they’re just making this up.”

“Then what do they do? They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone,” Pritzker said, appearing to refer to federal agents. “And they, you know, get people on the ground who are, frankly, incited to want to do something about it, appropriately.”

Recently, Pritzker has also said that he believes that Trump should be removed from office.

“There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked,” he said, referring to a process for removing the president from office.

House Speaker Mike Johnson did not say whether he believed Mayor Johnson and Gov. Pritzker should be jailed when asked by NBC News about Trump’s post.

“Should they be in prison? Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison?” Johnson responded. “I’m not the attorney general. I’m the speaker of the House, and I’m trying to manage the chaos here. I’m not following the day-to-day on that.”

On Tuesday, Pritzker was asked during an event whether he believed he could be arrested.

“I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador,” Pritzker joked, referring to the horrific prison where the Trump administration has deported some immigrants.

An aside: From a historical perspective, it’s interesting to compare our justice system with that of England, from which we inherited it. In England, the executive branch is essentially a clone of Parliament and is closely tied to it. The Prime Minister and all cabinet members are also members of Parliament. There, it would be unthinkable for Keir Starmer to order the Director of Public Prosecutions to jail his political enemy, Nigel Farage. We have a separation of powers that protects us from authoritarian rule. Yet, Trump violates all presidential norms since Watergate by declaring himself the “chief law enforcement officer” of the nation and blurring the lines between his role and that of Attorney General Pam Bondi in politically charged cases. 

When the framers granted the president significant power under Article II of the Constitution, they were thinking of George Washington, not Donald Trump. We are well on the path to becoming a banana republic.

The post Family Feud: Donald Trump and the Pritzkers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

We’re in danger. The partisan Supreme Court is our only real check on Donald Trump, and it has completely abdicated its duty. 

Forget about prominent Republicans like George W. Bush or Mitch McConnell. Their virtual silence on the president’s repeated violation of norms and his undeviated pattern of executive overreach speaks volumes that they will do nothing.

Forget about the Democrats. They can’t decide whether to embrace or marginalize Zohran Mamdani.

Forget about Congress. Conservative Republican senators, led by Barry Goldwater, may have been a band of brothers forcing Richard Nixon out of office in 1974. But it’s no coincidence that Profiles in Courage is such a thin book. In today’s spiteful political climate, brave Republicans like Goldwater are gone, and those in Congress are too cowardly to oppose presidential overreach.

And forget about the MAGA-dominated Supreme Court, of course. Repeatedly, district and appeals court judges have shown courage, blocking Trump’s dangerous and unprecedented policies, only for the Supreme Court to overturn them with a summary order on its emergency shadow docket. Since his return to office, Trump has won nearly all the Supreme Court’s rulings on the shadow docket.

The decisions made on the shadow docket have real-world consequences. For now, Trump can withhold certain congressionally approved funds, discharge transgender service members from the military, send undocumented immigrants to dangerous locations like South Sudan, use race as a factor in immigration stops (but not college admissions), fire thousands of government employees, and all of this is enabled because of emergency orders.

But the big development occurred last week with the astonishing New York Times survey of dozens of federal judges, many of whom were sharply critical of the Supreme Court’s handling of emergency applications, especially in Trump-related cases. You heard it, not from liberal pundits or liberal professors, but from federal judges—some even Trump-appointed—who believe the Supreme Court has gone too far. These sitting judges with life tenure warn of a “judicial crisis,” caused by a spate of opaque orders without opinions in cases related to the Trump administration. The orders have left them bewildered about how to proceed.

Sixty-five judges responded to a Times questionnaire sent to hundreds of federal judges nationwide. Of those, 47 said the Supreme Court had been mishandling its shadow docket since Trump returned to office. The judges were nominated by both Democratic (37) and Republican (28) presidents.

Forty-two judges went as far as to say that the Supreme Court’s emergency orders caused “some” or “major” harm to the public’s perception of the judiciary. Among those who responded, nearly half of the judges nominated by Republican presidents believed the orders had hurt public respect for the judiciary.

The judges delivered a strong rebuke as they shared their concerns about threats to the courts’ legitimacy with the Times. Quoting the Times story, the judges described the Supreme Court’s shadow docket orders as “mystical,” “overly blunt,” “incredibly demoralizing and troubling,” and “a slap in the face to the district courts.” One judge compared their district’s current relationship with the Supreme Court to “a war zone.” Another said the courts are in a “judicial crisis.”

The survey apparently galled the Supreme Court’s right-wing defenders, who have rubbished the survey’s methodology and denigrated the participating judges as engaging in unethical—if not impeachable—misconduct. 

For its part, the Supreme Court’s liberal wing has deemed the majority’s pro-Trump rulings to be “misguided,” “dangerous,” and an “existential threat to the rule of law,” as well as “overly blunt,” “incredibly demoralizing and troubling,” and “a slap in the face to the district courts.” Chief Justice John Roberts had previously chastised the liberal wing of the court in July 2023: “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decision with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” Oh, please!

Federal district court judges must be commended for their independence in an age of craven politicians. There have been roughly 300 cases aimed at stopping executive overreach, and the litigation has slowed Trump down. The main pattern is that lower federal courts often rule against the administration, with many judges being appointees whom Trump chose, and the Supreme Court frequently reverses these decisions quickly on its shadow docket without giving a full opinion. So far, there have been only three major majority opinions regarding the Trump administration’s requests for emergency relief—along with 10 rulings that did not explain at all (the rest have involved brief explanations that the Court itself calls “orders,” rather than “opinions of the Court”).

Federal district judges play essential roles in our society. Their positions are not mere stepping stones to appeals courts or the Supremes. Most stay their entire career or leave for something else entirely. District Judge George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, was tapped for the U.S. Senate when his fellow Mainer, Senator Edmund Muskie, became Jimmy Carter’s second Secretary of State. But some MAGA justices have sternly rebuked lower court judges in language more appropriate for a scolding schoolmarm. In August, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh reprimanded seasoned Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Young, an 85-year-old appointee of President Ronald Reagan and an Army veteran who has served for over 40 years on the bench, was criticized for what they saw as the mortal sin of applying an emergency ruling in one spending case to another. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” they wrote.

That view resonated with one of their retired colleagues, Jeremy Fogel, a federal judge for 20 years. Judge Young, he said, “has been at it for so long. He’s done the toughest cases, and he’s done them well. For a guy like that to get bench-slapped for not reading the tea leaves properly? That’s just not fair.”

And one district judge found himself vulnerable to Trumpworld retaliation. For stopping Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members, he was criticized as a “troublemaker” and an “agitator.”

When Trump said he wanted the jurist impeached, and a bill of impeachment was introduced in Congress against the judge, this piece of Trumpery was too much even for Chief Justice Roberts. Without daring to mention Trump by name, Roberts thundered, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” 

At a September hearing, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said his court was “out here flailing” as it tried to apply vague emergency rulings from the Supreme Court that left judges “in limbo.” Ruling on a different case, Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts noted that the emergency orders “have not been models of clarity.”

It is “of surpassing historic significance” that so many sitting judges have chosen to weigh in publicly on the Supreme Court, said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal judge who served in the administration of George H.W. Bush.

Trump’s allies argue without cogency that lower court judges overstepped their authority in blocking presidential actions, interfering with what they call a popular mandate. One judge, a Trump appointee, shared that view and praised the Supreme Court for “flushing out anti-democratic rulings” with its emergency orders.

Most judges’ main complaint was not what the Supreme Court decided but how it did so. They said the Court was leaving them without standards or guidelines by issuing shadow docket orders in just a few sentences, with little or no reasoning.

Despite the justices’ brevity and lack of reasoning, the Supreme Court has become more persistent in asserting that its emergency orders serve as precedents for lower courts. In an unsigned emergency order from July, the Supreme Court noted that although emergency orders were “not conclusive,” district court judges should still consider them in “like cases,” which is the exact opposite of what Justice Samuel Alito publicly stated as recently as September 2021.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, a highly regarded jurist and Reagan appointee, was less certain. Wilkinson mentioned that the Supreme Court was prim at the mercy of factors beyond its control: a high volume of urgent challenges to a presidency that “would put its foot on the pedal, because it has an agenda, and it’s sensitive to the fact that electoral mandates are perishable.”

Supreme Court scholar and law professor Stephen Vladeck makes a strong point, which is how much the defenses of the Court’s recent behavior in Trump-related cases rely on some combination of these kinds of attacks on the critics and the knocking down of straw men (like in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appearance the other day on Fox News Sunday). He indicates that those who don’t see anything concerning in the Court’s behavior “would do well to actually respond to the criticisms rather than attacking the critics or caricaturing their concerns.” 

Justice Barrett, specifically, when asked to respond to criticisms of the Court’s handling of Trump-related emergency applications, gave the misleading answer that “If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue.”

Vladeck argues that the Court can easily craft an opinion that doesn’t predetermine any future outcome if the case returns on the merits. It can clearly state that it isn’t definitively ruling on the merits—something it often emphasizes in non-Trump cases. Lawyers refer to this as a disclaimer or a caveat.

Maybe in the land of Oz, one can justify the Court granting emergency relief more frequently than ever, especially in cases with greater real-world and structural impacts. However, it is hardly justifiable for the Court to break the traditional balance of equities to serve partisan interests, as they did in December 2000 when their 5-4 decision to halt the Florida recount handed the election to George W. Bush. Curiously, does the Court go that way only in cases where Trump is a party and no others? 

The recent fast-track shadow rulings by the Supreme Court have completely undermined its credibility. Does a self-styled institutionalist like Chief Justice Roberts care? The American people do.

The post Federal Judges Are Worried About the Supreme Court appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As the Supreme Court begins its new term this first Monday in October, it’s worth noting that an important anniversary went largely unnoticed on September 29. It was the 20th anniversary of John Roberts being sworn in as chief justice of the United States and the beginning of the Roberts Court. There have been only 17 chief justices—some very memorable, like John Marshall, and others far less beneficial, like Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, which held that Black people were not citizens, making March 6, 1857, the darkest day in the Court’s history.

Roberts’s appointment came during George W. Bush’s annus horribilis—a year after the president’s 2004 reelection, when his administration mishandled Hurricane Katrina, watched its invasion of Iraq unravel, and made an ill-fated run at partially privatizing Social Security. Roberts was initially tapped to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had announced her pending retirement on July 1, 2005. However, when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in September 2005, Bush only waited two days to tap Roberts for the Chief’s seat and his White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, for the O’Connor vacancy. In case you’ve forgotten or are too young to remember, Miers withdrew after conservatives decried her lack of experience and worried about her right-wing bona fides. Bush got the message, dispensed with appointing another woman (or cipher) to the Court, and named a right-wing favorite, Samuel Alito of the Second Circuit, to fill the associate justice’s seat.

Twenty years into the Roberts Court, the Court’s public approval is close to its lowest since such measures began.

During Roberts’s tenure, the law has shifted significantly toward fulfilling many of the conservative legal movement’s main priorities, such as the doctrine of the “unitary executive,” which it has nearly fully embraced. This weakens the separation of powers that has served as a check and balance against a “man on horseback” for over 230 years. The largest number of Americans ever surveyed says the Court is now too conservative. Iconic liberal Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and William Brennan must all be turning over in their graves. Justices who favored a humble, modest court that deferred to legislatures wherever possible, such as Felix Frankfurter, must also be spinning.

Now, the Roberts court may be tilting even further to the right. The doctrine of stare decisis has always been the keystone of our common law, which we inherited from England. Stare decisis means that courts must stand by what they decide. The doctrine ensures consistency and predictability in the law.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia recognized stare decisis as a guiding principle. Famously describing himself as a “faint-hearted originalist” who would abandon the historical meaning of the Constitution when following it was intolerable, he proclaimed that “stare decisis is not part of my originalist philosophy; it is a pragmatic exception to it.”

Stare decisis is sensible because, among other reasons, it protects those who have organized their affairs based on a court’s existing rulings. Why make a will or cut a business agreement unless you are confident the courts will enforce its provisions? Why marry someone of the same sex if you believe the Court’s decision that such a marriage is constitutionally guaranteed is vulnerable to being scuttled just a few years later? 

Justice Clarence Thomas questions the strong foundation of stare decisis. Days before the Court’s term begins, Thomas told a Catholic University audience that he feels no duty to follow “totally stupid precedent if I find it doesn’t make any sense.” How does he determine what is “totally stupid,” the text, the original understanding, or just his gut feeling? 

Thomas continued his harangue, “I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis,” Thomas said. If it’s “totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.”

He added: “I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel,” Thomas said during the rare public appearance. “And I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something, not just something somebody dreamt up, and others went along with.”

Settled legal precedent in the U.S. is not “gospel” and, in some instances, may have been “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with,” but stare decisis is a venerable principle of the common law, and judges since Magna Carta in 1215 have venerated the doctrine. It doesn’t mean every precedent stands forever. Still, when the Court overturns one, as it did in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, overturning racial segregation in public schools, it does so sparingly. It begins to signal its objections in prior cases. Brown was preceded by other cases overturning racial discrimination, such as Texas’s all-white Democratic primary.

Thomas’s remarks are especially troubling now that the Court is considering a request to overturn the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court decision that guaranteed marriage rights for same-sex couples, along with issues like birthright citizenship, the independence of regulatory agencies—which have been part of our government since the late 19th century—presidentially imposed tariffs, transgender rights, voting rights, campaign finance law, religious rights, and capital punishment.

Given Roberts’s record and Thomas’s remarks, there’s reason to fear stare decisis is disappearing. It didn’t stop the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and decades of case law on regulation. Just last week, the Court ignored stare decisis, almost overruling the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor by allowing Trump to remove, at least temporarily, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission—the same agency involved in that New Deal-era decision.

Humphrey’s Executor involved President Herbert Hoover’s nomination of Humphrey as an FTC commissioner, which the Senate confirmed. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested Humphrey’s resignation. When Humphrey refused, Roosevelt fired him despite the FTC Act stating that a president could only remove a commissioner for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” none of which applied to Humphrey. The unanimous Court ruled that the FTC Act was constitutional and that Humphrey’s dismissal on policy grounds was unjustified. The Court reasoned that the Constitution has never granted the “illimitable power of removal” to the president. Unless, as this Roberts Court interprets it, the Constitution gives the president that power when their name is Trump.

This week, the Court allowed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to keep her seat temporarily while Trump attempts to fire her. It will review the utterly concocted case against her, which is notable since just weeks earlier, the Court emphasized that members of the central bank deserve greater protection from removal than, for example, members of the National Labor Relations Board. No wonder virtually every living Federal Reserve chair and Treasury Secretary has begged the Court in an amicus brief not to permit the president to fire a Fed governor over an unproven charge of mortgage fraud. (Speaking of amicus briefs, it’s shocking and little noticed that in her new book, Listening to the Law, Justice Amy Coney Barrett states she generally does not read amicus briefs because they focus on policy issues rather than purely on the law. More on that in a minute.)

In 2013, the Roberts Court didn’t strike down the Voting Rights Act, but just a few years after Congress nearly unanimously renewed some of the statute’s temporary provisions, and President George W. Bush signed it in 2006, in Shelby County v. Holder, it neutered the law’s preclearance provisions. John Roberts wrote the opinion.

These provisions require states with a history of voting rights abuses to obtain federal permission from the Justice Department or the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before changing their voting practices, such as redrawing district lines or relocating polling stations. Roberts wrote the decision invalidating decades-old precedent; he allowed the Section 5 preclearance tool to survive (I bet at the insistence of the Court’s moderate swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy) but struck down the Section 4 standards that governed where Section 5 could be used. Congress and the president had frequently updated those standards over the decades to keep pace with changing conditions so states could get out of the penalty box. No matter. The Roberts Court substituted its judgment for that of multiple Congresses and presidents.

Now the Court seems ready to go after Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a permanent nationwide provision of the 1965 statute that bars electoral practices with a discriminatory “effect.” The Rehnquist Court upheld the discriminatory effect standard that Congress wrote into Section 2 in 1982, and that President Ronald Reagan signed. The Roberts Court seems eager to strike it down 43 years later.

Sustaining the Voting Rights Act is the acknowledgement that if states violate the Constitution when they draw congressional district lines to dilute minority (and especially Black) votes, then it ought to follow that Congress can enforce the Constitution by requiring states to draw districts that don’t so discriminate—even if that requires states to consider race when doing so. Otherwise, this critical constitutional principle would be a dead letter. But the justices may further trash the statute Roberts gutted in Shelby and decide otherwise.

In 2005, when Roberts, then a jurist on the D.C. Circuit, faced confirmation hearings to become chief justice, he likened his judicial role to a baseball umpire. “It’s my job to call balls and strikes,” he famously said, an aw-shucks response meant to prove that he would be a humble chief justice. Since he’d spent most of his career as a litigator instead of an ivory tower jurist, this seemed plausible.

Roberts won plaudits as an institutionalist when he was the deciding vote upholding the Affordable Care Act in 2012. Still, he has often shown himself as a hard-right justice in institutional drag. He voted to uphold a Mississippi law banning abortion, although he refrained from the coup de grâce, and did not join Alito’s gleeful opinion eviscerating of Roe v. Wade, a super precedent for almost half a century. His Court, with his complete agreement, dismantled the “Chevron deference” in regulatory cases, a 1984 doctrine established and supported by Republican-appointed justices to emphasize that regulations created under President Reagan couldn’t be easily overturned. He sided with his Court’s conservative wing to consider numerous cases on the shadow docket and has voted to vacate injunctions to allow illegal conduct to continue. As cases wind their way to a conclusion, he has also voted to decide cases on an interim basis—even when he didn’t need to—and, under the guise of issuing temporary orders, has often resolved weighty legal issues at earlier stages of litigation. So, regardless of your opinion of Roberts, don’t naively label him as an institutionalist. 

Most importantly, Roberts has blessed the expansion of presidential powers to the point where even if the chief executive ordered Seal Team Six to murder his opponents, in the words of one appellate judge, it would not expose the president to any charges, even after leaving office. Hence, Trump’s myriad felony convictions and federal prosecutions became one big nothingburger.

With Thomas ignoring the precedents and Barrett saying she doesn’t read most amicus briefs because they address policy issues rather than the law, we have at least two justices, influenced by a conservative ideology, who will focus on legal principles of their own choosing. I doubt they’re alone.

If this is so in this era of artificial intelligence, why do we need judges? I always thought that law was policy by another name or a close cousin. Freedom of the press and freedom of religion are fundamental rights. They are also policies. If a justice wants to ignore the gravity of amicus briefs, that’s just weird. So, we have a supermajority that includes precedent and policy ignorers. Now that the Court has abolished constitutional protections for abortion, eviscerated a significant provision of the Voting Rights Act and has its eyes set on another, expanded executive power to kingly proportions, and greenlit big money in politics, it’s hard to imagine what they won’t do to precedents Thomas has hinted strongly that he wants to overrule such as New York Times v. Sullivan, which affords the press protection from libel actions filed by public figures. If all they are doing is calling balls and strikes (and I mightily dispute this), we might as well abolish the judiciary and replace it with an AI ball-strike challenge, which might be preferable to what we have under Chief Justice Roberts.

The post The Roberts Court at 20 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The former FBI director James Comey has been indicted for making false statements and obstructing Congress. The gossamer-thin charges, issued by a federal grand jury, came after President Donald Trump pressured the attorney general to indict Comey for perjury before the statute of limitations expires next week. At issue: whether Comey lied during a Senate hearing in September 2020 about the FBI’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, and whether his deputy, Andrew McCabe, authorized a leak to a reporter. An inspector general’s report, probably not shown to the grand jury, casts doubt that anything was untoward on Comey’s part. The president’s norm-shattering crusade against Comey included pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi, bouncing his own respected pick for U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and replacing him with an insurance attorney who worked on Trump’s personal defense team and has no prosecutorial experience. The former is reported to have balked at making the indictments Trump wanted. The latter seemed to have no such hesitation. That Comey may well have elected Trump in 2016 by violating Department of Justice policy and giving long, rambling remarks about Hillary Clinton’s emails—a case he closed that summer and then, with great fanfare and little evidence, reopened days before the presidential election—is one of the ironies of our era when justice can best be seen through a fun house mirror. It’s a shocking development and proof that Trump’s presidency is a revenge-driven one and is in full throttle. Will this be the last indictment of a Trump critic? I suspect not.

I came of age in the law when presidents and prosecutors were made of sterner stuff. In 1967, when I joined the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, I became steeped in the Justice Department’s tradition of non-partisan independence. Comey would head the office after 9/11, but when I was there, the head was the legendary prosecutor Bob Morgenthau, who would later become the longtime Manhattan District Attorney. Public service was in his DNA. His grandfather was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, nominated by Woodrow Wilson. His father was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary. He was a friend and appointee of John F. Kennedy.

No one asked me about my politics when I interviewed for the job. In fact, I was a registered Republican. The “Boss,” as we affectionately called Morgenthau, expected that we, as federal prosecutors, be guided only by the facts and the law in each case. Politics was foreign to our culture. We were lawmen, not political apparatchiks. We investigated Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor, sharing and sharing alike.

Today, under Donald Trump, tradition is seriously compromised. The Communist Manifesto predicted the “withering away of the state,” and under Trump, we are witnessing it shrivel or loom all-powerful, depending on how you look at it.

Forget that Trump has diminished if not extinguished the government’s commitment to foreign aid, medical research, Medicaid, sensible economic regulation, the environment, and the arts.

Forget the First Amendment infraction that two late-night television political satirists have been forced off the air, with two others said to be “next” as part of the crackdown on media using libel actions and threats to block legitimate mergers and acquisitions. Trivial is the footnote that in the face of public outcry, The Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, has announced Jimmy Kimmel’s show is back on the air. The abridgement of free speech continues. Under pressure from the government, right-wing media company Sinclair, which operates nearly 40 ABC stations across the country, says it will not restore Kimmel’s show to the airwaves it licenses. It announced it will preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! with news programming. Nexstar, which owns roughly 30 ABC affiliates and is seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its merger with Tegna, says it will follow suit.

Forget that the executive claims it has the authority to impose harsh tariffs when that power is explicitly granted to Congress by the Constitution. 

Forget that Trump threatens to send the military or ICE agents to blue cities across the country to carry out law enforcement activities, even though it is illegal under the Posse Comitatus statute.

Forget that Trump has attempted to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence by trying to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointed member of the Fed’s board of governors, over a minor issue related to a mortgage application filed before she took office or that virtually all living Fed chairs and former Treasury secretaries have filed an amicus brief spelling out the grave threat posed by this president to Fed independence.

Forget that releasing all the Justice Department files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would be a simple matter and could erase lingering suspicion about lurid details of his 15-year relationship with Trump, but most of the documents remain secret.

Forget that three Trump supporters—Trevor Milton, Carlos Watson, and Devon Archer—each convicted of securities fraud, were pardoned, potentially undoing civil penalties that could total hundreds of millions of dollars. Also, forget that the Justice Department is ignoring the investigation of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. Homan allegedly took a paper bag of cash, worth $50,000, to help FBI agents posing as businessmen secure government contracts related to the border. 

From all this, we might swallow hard and move on.

But the final straw is that Erik Siebert, U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia, was forced out of office for refusing to indict Trump’s personal enemies after reviewing the facts and the law. Siebert resigned, though Trump claims he had fired him. Siebert, a seasoned lawman appointed by Trump himself, believed there was no crime to prosecute. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office: “I want him out.” The issue? Siebert refused to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully went after the Trump Organization for fraud and is a key figure in much of the litigation state attorneys general are bringing against Trump. Siebert’s office was looking into Jim Comey and declined to pursue charges against him.

Siebert was a seasoned and respected career prosecutor. He began his career in 2010 as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. He spent nearly 15 years prosecuting a wide range of cases, including violent crime, international and domestic drug trafficking, illegal firearms, fraud, child sexual exploitation, illegal immigration, and public corruption. Trump appointed him interim U.S. Attorney the day after his inauguration on January 21, 2025. He received awards and accolades for his prosecutions. He was a Metropolitan Police Department officer in Washington, D.C., from 2002 to 2006. His father-in-law is a former Virginia Attorney General and a counselor to Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

Siebert had support from Virginia Republicans and the commonwealth’s Democratic U.S. Senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. They knew he was a dedicated career prosecutor. He had the respect of the judges in his district. When his 120-day interim term ended in May, the court unanimously reappointed him to continue in office.

Trump, the self-styled chief law enforcement officer of the country, has flagrantly abused his power. His conduct in seeking direct control over the hot-button cases in Pam Bondi’s Justice Department makes any parade of other horrors pale in comparison. We are living through a period of maximum danger for the nation.

Even before Siebert resigned, ABC News predicted that the administration would appoint a U.S. attorney to investigate James more aggressively. “It looks to me like [James] is very guilty of something,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, “but I really don’t know.” 

So, who would that person be, ready to do the master’s bidding? The Washington Post reported it would be Mary “Maggie” Cleary. Cleary, who has limited federal experience and has spent much of her career in the Virginia state system, joined the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in September 2025. Her LinkedIn bio states she “served in the Culpeper County Republican Committee.” She undoubtedly recognizes the immense power of the prosecutor, claiming in an essay published this year that she had been “framed” as participating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—an incident she says ended with her being cleared by investigators and inspiring her to pursue a U.S. attorney position.

After the Post reports on Siebert’s successor, Trump abruptly shifted his stance on Truth Social, claiming that he judged that his enemies were “all guilty as hell.” Guilty of what? If he had read the United States Code, it would probably have been the sections related to conspiracy to defraud the United States or mishandling classified documents, for which he was indicted.

Then, he proposed a different nominee, Lindsay Halligan, a “Special Assistant to the President” who has worked on the information purge at the Smithsonian. Before this, she practiced insurance law in Florida, joined his legal team, and handled her first federal case in 2022 when Mar-a-Lago was searched. She has never been involved in any prosecution. Unlike Cleary, who was somewhat qualified for an Assistant U.S. Attorney’s position, Halligan lacks the remotest experience to qualify her for this important role.

Halligan brought an indictment against Comey, and a grand jury has agreed. What now? A federal district judge might dismiss the case for lack of evidence or because this is a selective and vindictive prosecution; Trump himself has given Comey’s attorneys ammunition with his public statements. If and when the Comey case ever reaches trial, prosecutors will have the Herculean task of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to twelve jurors when there’s a mountain of evidence that the prosecution was selective. And then there is always an appeal. What a waste of judicial resources!

And beyond the prosecutions of Comey and perhaps James, Trump’s push for indictments of his two enemies could undermine public confidence that other cases are being pursued for valid reasons.

Here’s the full text of what our president said:

And the follow-on to the purge of Siebert is the pressure on Maryland U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes, another veteran career prosecutor. Hayes has the purported mortgage fraud case against Senator Adam Schiff, another of Trump’s enemies, and the one against his former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, for mishandling classified documents. Hayes reportedly told associates that she well understood the grave consequences if she declined to bring a case against a Trump enemy because the evidence of criminality was insufficient.

If history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s said to rhyme. In 2006, President George W. Bush fired nine U.S. attorneys for what seemed like political reasons. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appropriately resigned over the scandal. As Watergate sadly proved, politics has no place in public prosecutions.

If left unchecked, Trump could transform us into a nation where criminal law enforcement becomes a political tool for the president. We tend to mock Latin American countries as “banana republics,” implying they are places where the government suppresses opposition. However, there is much to learn from Latinos about respecting the rule of law. Argentina prosecuted its former president, Jorge Rafael Videla, for crimes committed during his regime, and Brazil did the same with its leader, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Yet, we seem unable to do even that.

The post Trump’s Threat to Justice: Comey and the Politics of Prosecution appeared first on Washington Monthly.