Plus, Obama warns Democrats about the 2020 election.
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Trump Installs 200th Lifetime Federal Judge, And They've Got Something In Common |
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Senate Republicans on Wednesday confirmed President Donald Trump’s 200th lifetime federal judge, a number higher than any president has confirmed in a first term in decades.
Zero of his judges at the highest levels ― on the nation’s appeals courts and the Supreme Court ― have been Black. And it’s the first time in four decades that there isn’t a single appeals court vacancy left nationwide.
Trump will almost definitely brag about this number ― he should! It’s a big part of his legacy. Broken down, he has confirmed two Supreme Court justices, 53 appeals court judges, 143 district court judges and two judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade. These are all Article III judges; they serve for life and can only be removed by impeachment.
There’s more to this than sheer numbers, though.
The White House has worked closely with The Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to funnel members of the organization into appeals court seats. They’ve focused on appeals courts because, while most people pay attention to the Supreme Court, it generally refuses to hear appeals. That means that appeals courts have the final say in more than 99 percent of the cases they decide. So you can think of appeals courts as mini-Supreme Courts.
So, what do Trump’s appeals court judges have in common? They are overwhelmingly young, conservative, white men with records of being hostile toward voting rights, women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. |
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| | Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned Democrats against thinking they’ve already won the 2020 election. “We can’t be complacent or smug or sense that somehow it’s so obvious that this president hasn’t done a good job because, look, he won once,” Obama said of Trump during a virtual fundraiser for and with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough,” he continued. “And I hold myself and Michelle and our kids to that same standard.” |
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A federal appeals court, in a 2-1 decision, moved to force a federal judge to dismiss a criminal case against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has twice admitted his guilt. Judge Neomi Rao of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a Trump appointee who formerly served in the Trump administration, wrote the majority opinion, saying that allowing U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan to examine the Justice Department’s reasons for moving to drop the charge “will result in specific harms to the exercise of the Executive Branch’s exclusive prosecutorial power.” She was joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, a George W. Bush appointee. |
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A GOP-backed police reform bill stalled in the Senate Wednesday amid historic protests against police brutality across the country, leaving the issue in limbo just one month after George Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. Democrats filibustered the modest Republican bill that they viewed as insufficient to bring real accountability and change to police departments and police practices nationwide. |
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