Politico reports:

When Donald Trump moved on his first day back in office to strip birthright citizenship from children born in the U.S. to some immigrant parents, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour called the newly inaugurated president a threat to the rule of law.

Days after Trump mass-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth warned that for the first time in his career, “meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.”

And in September, U.S. District Judge William Young warned that Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian immigrants studying at U.S. universities “poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.”

In a year full of judicial rebukes for the president — often followed by vindication for Trump at the Supreme Court — these judges’ fierce and direct assessments of the president have stood out. But there’s more than lofty rhetoric that binds them. All were appointed to the bench decades ago by the same president: Ronald Reagan.

Now a fourth member of the Reagan-era fraternity has joined them: U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf, who took the bench in Massachusetts 40 years ago on the same day as Young. Wolf resigned his senior judgeship last week with the sole purpose of speaking out against what he sees as Trump’s incursion on the rule of law and the high court’s acquiescence to it.

It’s not an accident. Not only do these Reagan-appointed judges wield their seniority as a weapon, but their legal and judicial careers were all forged in the embers of Watergate, when a president’s assertion of vast, unprecedented power threatened to topple the justice system. They all worked and clerked for attorneys and judges tasked with rebuilding confidence in the federal government after Richard Nixon’s resignation and saw in it a vindication of principled appeals to impartial justice.

In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, Wolf said his own upbringing as a public corruption prosecutor during that moment of rebuilding is what has contributed to his alarm today. He sees echoes of that era in Trump’s second term but is worried that Americans — who would not have tolerated such behavior in the Watergate era, he says — may be too conditioned to view the world through partisan lenses to respond similarly today.

“I don’t know where the American people are today,” Wolf lamented. “When they’re repeatedly told that judges who rule against a president — they are corrupt and they should be impeached. I’m afraid if the courts do not have the support they need … our rule of law and our democracy will be doomed.” [Continue reading…]