The current crop of Biden judicial nominees makes for entertaining viewing when Sen. Ted Cruz or Sen. John Kennedy asks them a basic question about the law, and they look like drunk drivers asked to recite the alphabet backward in Greek. Still there are some old school Dem nominees who are not just horrendously leftist, but also horrendously stupid.

One of them has been mostly obscure, but he figured out how to get some attention.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said Montana’s TikTok ban “oversteps state power” and “likely violates the First Amendment.”

There’s no First Amendment right for a Chinese company to operate in the United States. If shutting down a company violates the First Amendment, then virtually every state and federal action is unconstitutional. I know some libertarians would like that, not sure Democrats or Molloy have thought that through.

But Judge Donald Molloy is probably one of the dumbest Clinton appointees on the bench.

Molloy wrote that though officials in Montana have defended the law as an attempt to protect consumers in the state, there is “little doubt that Montana’s legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers,” the judge wrote.

Considering that China’s role in TikTok hurts Montana consumers, there’s no contradiction here. And calling China’s role in Tiktok “ostensible” shows that Molloy either doesn’t know what the word means or is unfamiliar with the company.

Montana, as a state, does not have authority over foreign affairs, Molloy said, but even still, he found the national security case presented against TikTok unconvincing, writing that if anything the Montana law had a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.”

Montana doesn’t need authority over foreign affairs to regulate a company operating in the state. If regulating a foreign company means that a state is interfering in foreign affairs, states will have no authority over foreign companies.

Again, has Molloy considered the precedent that his idiotic ruling is setting?

Calling this a ruling is flattering, this is a USA Today op-ed.

He said state officials justified the Montana ban under a “paternalistic argument.”

And? Is there a ban on states regulating things based on “paternalistic arguments?” (maybe there should be, but there isn’t). These aren’t legal arguments, they’re Twitter arguments. Judicial review had better have a compelling reason to override laws put into place by legally elected officials.

Lately, judges have taken to overriding laws based on the flimsiest of reasons, and Molloy has taken flimsiness to a new level.  His legal reasoning amounts to “I don’t like it.” And claiming that Montana can’t ban a foreign company from operating in the state because that’s “anti-Chinese” is borderline treasonous.