Our Pathetic Senate
About to rubberstamp the worst nominee ever?
CBS cancels satire; Trump sues Rupert, toys with firing the Fed chair, begins to realize that V. Putin is not his BFF, but gives him 50 more days to keep killing Ukrainians. And try as he might, he still can’t shake the ghost of his Epstein past.
Happy Saturday.
But let’s start today with our self-gelded-Senate, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body Collection of Doormats and Bootlickers.
The Senate was supposed to be the sensible House, famously described as a cooling saucer for the “hot tea” of the House. O, as James Madison envisioned it, a “necessary fence” against the fickleness and passion of the House.1 Here, wrote one historian, “the passions of human nature, which history watched manifest into noble appeals to virtue and liberty as often as into the deplorable institution of slavery or the savagery of the French Revolution, were to be calmed and sober reason allowed to prevail…”
Well, no. As senators reminded us this week.
It’s not easy these days to single out the worst of the worst appointments, but certainly the elevation of the thuggish Emil Bove to the federal appellate bench has to rank right up there. Other churls and chodes will come and go, but federal judges are forever.
Without discernible exaggeration Barbara McQuade, calls Bove the “Worst Conceivable Nominee Ever.”
Emil Bove, nominated by President Donald Trump for a judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, has earned that distinction. In a letter sent Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, former assistant U.S. attorneys in Washington wrote that Bove’s selection “has eclipsed the Martin nomination as far worse and far more dangerous.”…
From time to time, Trump has expressed frustration with his appointees to the courts, disappointed when they have failed to back his agenda. In particular, Trump and his allies have targeted Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has privately referred to as “weak,” and whom his supporter Mike Davis has called “a rattled law professor with her head up her a--.” Trump has also complained about the advice he received regarding judicial appointments from Federalist Society president Leonard Leo, whom Trump has called a “sleazebag.” Apparently, Trump wants judges not just with conservative credentials, but with his own transactional worldview.
He may have found one in Bove, who appears willing to corrupt his own office to advance Trump’s agenda. If so, he could indeed be the worst conceivable nominee ever.
Indeed, as David French noted last week, Bove’s nomination “Puts the Senate to the Test.”
Our nation does not need vengeful political operatives on the federal bench. Bove is a far worse nominee than [Harriet] Miers. Critics questioned her experience and her qualifications. They did not question her integrity. But with Emil Bove, integrity is precisely what is in doubt…2
In an extraordinary display of alarm, the legal community has been trying to warn senators that this would be a good moment to exercise a modicum of due diligence.
More than 900 former U.S. Department of Justice employees on Wednesday warned the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee against confirming President Donald Trump's nominee Emil Bove to serve as an appellate court judge, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
"We are all alarmed by DOJ leadership's recent deviations from constitutional principles and institutional guardrails," the former department employees wrote, adding that he had "disgraced" the department.
"Emil Bove has been a leader in this assault."
**
Despite all of this, when Bove’s nomination came up, every GOP senator on the Judiciary Committee — including the deeply pathetic Thom Tillis — fell into line behind him. (Putting the cherry on this feculent cake of absurdity, senators also approved the nomination of Jeanine Pirro to be a US Attorney. FFS). Bove now goes to the full senate, which seems likely to once again disappoint the fondest hopes of James Madison.
Yet another deplorable week in review
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Anniversary weekend
Sorry, no dogs today. The Sykes-Riordan clan is celebrating our 25th anniversary this weekend. There will be champagne, a piano player, and of course, very large dogs.
In Federalist 63 Madison wrote “As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought in all governments … ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind?”
In other words, Madison never imagined a body stocked with Marsha Blackburns, Tommy Tubervilles, Markwayne Mullins; and Ron Johnsons.
Via French:
Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who was then the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District, resigned, declaring that she did not see “any good faith basis” for Bove’s legal position. Another attorney with impeccable conservative credentials, Hagan Scotten, wrote perhaps the most scathing resignation letter I’ve ever read.
“No system of ordered liberty,” he wrote, “can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
And consider these words, which we should never have to hear about any prosecutor, much less a prosecutor who’s nominated to serve as a federal judge:
Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Judge Dale Ho, a federal district judge in the Southern District of New York, wrote that Bove’s decision to dismiss the charges against Adams “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
On Tuesday, a former Justice Department lawyer named Erez Reuveni filed a whistle-blower complaint that included claims that Bove said in a March meeting that the Justice Department should consider saying “fuck you” to courts that enjoined efforts to deport immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act. Bove denies Reuveni’s account.
If the MAGA pilled Senate is willing to confirm a corrupt worm like Bove, there is ZERO reason for them to exist.
Happy Silver Anniversary and congratulations to you both! Enjoy your celebration!
I was hoping Tillis would stand up for something now that he's on the way out, but alas....he still can't find enough spine to hold himself up in a gentle breeze.