Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Running out of federal court vacancies to fill, Senate Republicans have been quietly making overtures to sitting Republican-nominated judges who are eligible to retire to urge them to step aside so they can be replaced while the party still holds the Senate and the White House. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who has used his position as majority leader to build a judicial confirmation juggernaut for President Trump over the past three years, has…

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Alexander Burns writes: The date of the general election is set by federal law and has been fixed since 1845. It would take a change in federal law to move that date. That would mean legislation enacted by Congress, signed by the president and subject to challenge in the courts. To call that unlikely would be an understatement. And even if all of that happened, there would not be much flexibility in choosing an alternate election date: The Constitution mandates…

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The Washington Post reports: Lynn S. Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, has riled conservatives by publishing a blistering critique of the Supreme Court’s record under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., focusing on a string of decisions that he argues have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans. Adelman also criticized President Trump, who he wrote ran as a populist but failed to deliver…

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David Frum writes: Sometime before June 29, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court will either plunge the United States into the severest constitutional crisis of the Trump years—or save Americans from that crisis. Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic. Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned…

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George T. Conway III writes: President Trump is treating the judiciary the way he treats the media. But the harm created by these attacks could be far greater. In 2016, CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Trump off camera why he persisted in going after journalists. In one of those sporadic moments in which he reveals the raw truth, Trump replied, according to Stahl, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write…

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The New York Times reports: A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Congress could not sue to enforce its subpoenas of executive branch officials, handing a major victory to President Trump and dealing a severe blow to the power of Congress to conduct oversight. In a ruling that could have far-reaching consequences for executive branch secrecy powers long after Mr. Trump leaves office, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit…

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Corey Brettschneider writes: Speculation that President Donald Trump might pardon Roger Stone has reached a fever pitch after Stone’s sentencing by a federal judge and the president’s repeated hints that he thinks the verdict unfair. But fortunately, the Constitution’s framers imagined this nightmare scenario—a suspected criminal president pardoning a co-conspirator—and they put in the Constitution language to legally prohibit the pardon power in exactly this kind of case. Both the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text and the historical evidence…

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Vox reports: The Supreme Court voted along ideological lines Friday evening to allow a Trump administration rule restricting low-income immigrants’ ability to enter the US to take full effect. All four of the Court’s Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing a sharply worded dissenting opinion accusing her Court of “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration. “It is hard to say what is more troubling,” Sotomayor wrote. “That the government would seek this…

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Barbara McQuade writes: Truth still matters in some places. A courtroom is one of them. In imposing a 40-month sentence on Roger Stone, Judge Amy Berman Jackson did something that the executive and legislative branches have been unwilling to do lately — defend truth. Stone appeared before Jackson in her courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Thursday following his conviction at trial of seven counts of lying to Congress, obstructing justice and tampering with a witness. The crimes occurred in the…

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The Washington Post reports: During his Senate impeachment trial, Democrats repeatedly asserted that President Trump is “not above the law.” But since his acquittal two weeks ago, analysts say, the president has taken a series of steps aimed at showing that, essentially, he is the law. On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to a clutch of political allies, circumventing the usual Justice Department process. The pardons and commutations followed Trump’s moves to punish witnesses in his impeachment trial, publicly intervene in…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to file retaliatory lawsuits “all over the place” for damages he claims to have incurred as a result of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In a multi-post morning Twitter screed, the president fiercely condemned the 22-month-long probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also appeared to weigh in once again on the federal criminal case against his longtime political adviser Roger Stone. “These were Mueller prosecutors, and the whole…

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James Comey writes: Recent events have prompted a lot of talk about the Justice Department and threats to its credibility. Many alumni of the department believe the president and attorney general are doing grievous damage to an essential American institution. Other people might not understand what we are so worried about. They might not know this institution and appreciate the gravity of the threat. What is the Justice Department? Most people — even those who work there — don’t fully…

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The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to 11 people, including several convicted felons who are either Fox News regulars or have been championed by the president’s favorite cable-news network. Among those granted pardons or sentence commutations were former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was sentenced to four years in…

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Donald Ayer writes: When Donald Trump chose Bill Barr to serve as attorney general in December 2018, even some moderates and liberals greeted the choice with optimism. One exuberant Democrat described him as “an excellent choice,” who could be counted on to “stand up for the department’s institutional prerogatives and … push back on any improper attempt to inject politics into its work.” At the end of his first year of service, Barr’s conduct has shown that such expectations were…

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