If there’s anything that the last six months have taught us, it’s that appointing the right judges is critical, especially since the current version of Our Democracy we’re being sold holds that, “Yeah, it’s OK to elect a president and a Congress, but to actually do anything you need the approval of a herd of unelected swells in robes.” This is a sad state of affairs; when I was in the Persian Gulf, I don’t remember any of my troops telling me that they were very proud to be fighting to defend the ability of a bunch of Ivy Leaguers who largely couldn’t cut it actually litigating to rule over them based not on the law but on what was going to get them the happiest happy ending from the regime media and their cronies at the country club.
Donald Trump made his first round of judicial picks, and he’s hitting it out of the park with exactly the kind of nominees we need to help fix the broken bench. Let’s take Emil J. Bove, the president’s nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The federal Courts of Appeals are very crucial. They handle appeals from the district courts, which are the federal trial courts. The Courts of Appeals are the final stop for the vast majority of cases since the Supreme Court only picks about 50 or so cases a year out of the thousands of Courts of Appeals rulings. It’s a big deal, and because it involves lifetime tenure, you need to make sure you’ve got the right guy or gal.
You want somebody who has been there and done that. Look at Bove’s résumé. He clerked for two highly respected judges – that’s where a young lawyer helps a judge write his opinions, giving him an insight into how it’s done that you just don’t get anywhere else. Next, he spent about 10 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, which was then legendary for rooting out political corruption and mob influence in the Big Apple. He was a partner in a prominent law firm in private practice, but he gave up the big bucks to go back to the Department of Justice as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Trump and sort out that mess. His credentials are impeccable. Prosecutor. Defense attorney. Department of Justice official.
But, of course, the left hates him. It hates him in general because Trump picked him. It hates him in particular because he helped Donald Trump successfully beat the false lawfare charges against him. This is a guy with the character to put everything on the line to do his job as a lawyer. Conservative lawyers have been blackballed in the top tier legal industry over the last decade as part of a concerted effort to prevent Republicans from being able to obtain legal representation. Think of the character it took for Bove to be at the top of his game yet to put that all at risk because he was committed to doing his job of representing a client who was being railroaded while most of the legal industry cheered on that injustice.
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Emil Bove could have cashed in on the non-controversial clients beating down his door, gotten very rich, and never had to worry about SSRI goblins screaming in his face about “You’re literally defending literally Hitler!” while he tries to eat his dry-aged porterhouse at Peter Luger’s, but he chose to do his duty as an attorney instead.
Every Republican senator should eagerly confirm him. Every Democrat senator should confirm him. The fact that you take on clients who are unpopular in your city is a qualifier, not a disqualifier. Remember, John Adams defended – successfully – the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. And then he went on to be one of the Founding Fathers. Emil Bove is firmly within that tradition; this is a solid gold, No. 1 home run judicial pick who, in a reasonable political climate, would sail through confirmation 100 to nothing.
Republicans, you need to make this happen because picking good judges is huge.
I’m picky about judges for a couple of reasons. For one, my Mom was a judge, and she set the standard. She treated everybody the same – not badly, but with high expectations. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be rude. Be on time. Wear pants. On the rare occasion someone was dumb enough to appeal her ruling, it ended poorly for them. On the rare occasion someone was rude to her when she was on the bench, that also ended poorly for them. However, you could go before Judge Mom, and you could expect her to try to be fair and to figure out what the law says, then apply it. She was a former prosecutor but demanded that the district attorney’s office do its job properly – to the point that the office got so mad at her that it started using peremptory challenges to keep her off cases. She was for law and order, which meant law and order applied to the government accuser as well as the accused. Mom had her point of view, but she put it aside when she put on the robe.
That’s the standard. By the way, she was a font of wisdom for aspiring lawyers, telling me to remember 1) to treat the court staff with respect and that 2) everybody lies.
And I spent 30 years in front of judges, including federal district and appellate court judges. Some were very, very smart. Some were the opposite of very, very smart. Most tried to take the law and apply it to the facts fairly. I wasn’t always happy with their final rulings – remember that in every case, 50 percent of the parties are going to be unhappy about the verdict – but I usually got a fair hearing.
Not always. I appeared in front of some famous judges, including one allegedly conservative Court of Appeals judge who got driven off the bench in disgrace, who were just terrible. Sometimes, judges are unfair, results-driven, and/or annoying, but that’s kind of the way it is in every aspect of life. A significant percentage of people are terrible, and this is true in any endeavor.
But, for the most part, I was not litigating political cases. I sometimes did, but most of my work was regular business litigation, whether on the plaintiff’s or the defense side. Here’s something you need to understand about what’s happening with all these temporary restraining orders and injunctions and ex parte motions to stay the stay and all that. It’s completely crazy. It is totally unrelated to the law as practiced for hundreds of years and as is currently practiced in 99.99 percent of cases. You look at this stuff and think it can’t be right, and you are absolutely correct. It is not right. The idea of some federal judge issuing a class certification and temporary restraining order without allowing opposition based on unsupported allegations in a motion at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning is so utterly alien to how law is generally practiced that it might as well be bursting out of John Hurt’s chest.
The judiciary is broken, and it will be broken until Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court stop letting their subordinates saw off the judicial branch while they’re sitting on the end of it. But, in the meantime, Donald Trump must appoint, and Republican senators must confirm, judges like Emil Bove. We need judges like Bove who will follow the law instead of treating it like a legal Mad Libs. We do not need judges who get their opinions by consulting such renowned legal authorities as the uniformly dumb resistance bar on Twitter, MSNBC panels full of attorneys with weird hair and weak minds, and their own feelz.
You want someone with experience and someone with common sense. You don’t want anyone approved by the American Bar Association – a group that has no legal authority and is just a club for law nerds who are the legal industry’s equivalent of incels. You also want to be careful about nominees who are too wrapped up with the Federalist Society. There are a lot of good potential judges there, but also some who think the highest and best purpose of a judge is to find a case where he/she can show off his/her commitment to the law by ruling in favor of some kind of leftist nonsense.
You want people with street smarts. You want people with experience. You want judges like Emil Bove. If Judge Mom was still here, she’d approve.
Republicans, make it happen.
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