Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) whined today that judicial nominees being sent to the Senate by President Joe Biden for confirmation are too left wing and liberal to gain his vote, but his complaints were quickly fact-checked by a reporter who reminded him that many of the judges nominated by former president Donald Trump were so inferior that their own peers considered them to be unqualified for service on the bench.
According to Jen Bendery of Huffington Post, Cruz began by saying Biden’s nominees were “extreme!”
Ted Cruz to reporters: Biden's judges are "extreme!"
Me: Lots of Trump's judges were unqualified.
Cruz: "Ackchyually, the caliber of judges that Trump nominated was exceptional."
Me: Ten were rated "not qualified" to be judges by ABA. Zero of Biden's.
She then used facts to swat down the Texas Republican.
Let's look at some of those unqualified judges that Ted Cruz supported.
There was Steven Grasz, who earned an embarrassing and unanimous “not qualified” rating for being “unable to separate his role as an advocate from that of a judge." https://t.co/D5qDcLQDe3
There was also Jonathan Kobes, 44, who earned a “not qualified” rating because he didn't have the experience and “was unable to provide sufficient writing samples of the caliber required” of a U.S. circuit judge. He could not write, folks. https://t.co/hm2oMi0tZf
Ted Cruz also voted to confirm Lawrence VanDyke to be a federal judge, a guy whose *own colleagues* described him as “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-today practice including procedural rules.” https://t.co/iJseTKPUw0
Those are just some of Trump's TEN unqualified judges who the GOP confirmed anyway.
An unqualified rating is otherwise rare.
And Cruz's claim that ABA is simply partisan goes out the window every time GOP senators celebrate one of their nominees getting a positive ABA rating.
Those are specifically Trump's court picks who actually got confirmed.
Here's a sampling of some who were even too crazy for Republicans to support. In the world of judicial nominations, it was a RIDE during the Trump years. pic.twitter.com/UsLJEt06Xd
He is referring to Judge Dale Ho, a longtime voting rights lawyer, who said in his confirmation hearing that a comment he made about being a “wild-eyed sort of leftist” of how others may have described him, but not how he sees himself.
Ted Cruz loves to try and present himself as some sort of great legal mind because he earned his law degree at Harvard. But he’s really not all that bright. He’s also a habitual liar and so blatantly partisan that he can’t admit when he’s wrong.
But today, Teddy got hit with a giant dose of facts and karma. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving douchebag.
You probably recall that when he ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump promised that he would surround himself with “only the best people,” and therefore guarantee that his administration went down in history as one of the best.
But as we’ve learned over the years, Trump is a terrible judge of talent, and most of the people he appointed or nominated to high positions turned out to be complete idiots who weren’t bright enough to pour piss out of a boot with the directions printed on the botton.
One of those nominees, Aileen Cannon, is now judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and is clearly in way over her head.
According to Jose Pagliery of The Daily Beast, a recent mistake by Cannon could have led to an innocent man going to prison for a crime he claims he didn’t commit.
The man, Christopher Wilkins, was tried in Cannon’s court, and when it came time for the judge to give the jury a verdict form, the one she provided only featured one option: Guilty. Not guilty wasn’t listed as an alternative.
Jeffrey Garland, an attorney for Wilkins, notes, “How far does somebody have to go to school to say that a verdict form is supposed to say guilty and not guilty? That would be one of the more egregious versions of jury instruction error… it’s such a rare error.”
Garland is now appealing his client’s conviction, and there’s an excellent chance he’ll win that appeal because Judge Cannon doesn’t know what in the hell she’s doing.
“This is the judge’s deal,” Garland added. “This is nobody else’s deal. I’m gonna tell ya, I’ve done a lot of appeals, and I’ve got a pretty good winning record. This is a great issue.”
University of Georgia law professor Elizabeth Taxel said she was absolutely stunned by Cannon’s blatant mistake:
“I’ve never seen anything like it. I am a law professor, and I found it cumbersome to read and follow. It’s unclear to me why the court didn’t, out of an abundance of caution, include ‘guilty or not guilty.’”
Judge Cannon is now overseeing the trial of failed ex-president Trump on felony counts of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice by attempting to hide those documents from investigators, including the FBI and Department of Justice.
Attorney Garland made it clear that he has absolutely no faith in Cannon’s ability to serve as a judge:
“That’s her verdict form. There’s no ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty.’ The traditional format is ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty,’ as it was on the proposed form the government and I had created. We agreed on that. And she comes up with this. This is her creation. This is her baby. It’s kind of funny. It’s ridiculous.”
During a confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), thought he’d try and prove his misogynist credentials by essentially blaming a female nominee to the federal bench for all of the crime committed in the United States.
As Kylie Cheung of Jezebel notes, Cruz worked himself into a frothy frenzy as he attacked Nina Morrison, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to be U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of New York:
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a confirmation hearing for three Biden judicial nominees, although Republican Senators were pretty singularly obsessed with Morrison, a senior litigation counsel at the Innocence Project whom Biden has nominated for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Morrison point-blank that she and the policies for which she’s advocated — “letting violent criminals go,” as he described it —are directly responsible for “skyrocketing crime rates, homicide rates, burglary rates” and “carjacking rates” in America.
Hard to believe one lawyer could be responsible for so much crime, isn’t it, especially since she was merely doing her job when she represented people at the Innocence Project who have been sentenced to death for crimes they didn’t even commit.
When Cruz finally got to a question, the one he asked was so patently asinine and arrogant that he probably thought he was scoring big points with the extreme right-wingers who have taken control of the Republican Party and are a growing threat to liberty and justice in the United States:
“Why do you keep advising radical district attorneys to let violent criminals go that send homicide rates skyrocketing? Do you care about the innocent people being killed because of the policies you’re implementing?”
But Ms. Morrison was more than equal to the challenge of the man who was turned into a slavish political eunuch by failed former President Donald Trump on multiple occasions:
“Absolutely, Senator, and to clarify my role in those transition committees were only issue of what is called conviction integrity, not the front end prosecution policies, but on the review of old cases. That is the limited capacity on which I worked. I played no role in formulating front-end policies, but it is because when the wrong person is convicted of murder, the person who actually committed the crime isn’t brought to justice.”
Sen. Ted Cruz attacks judicial nominee Nina Morrison for advising "radical district attorneys who let violent criminals go and result in homicide rates skyrocketing."
Morrison, a 20-year attorney for Innocence Project, rebuffs Cruz with a perfect rejoinder about real justice. pic.twitter.com/CeqDR6qwfQ
During his four years in office, failed one-term former President Donald Trump made a lot of appointments to the federal bench, including two right-wing Supreme Court justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
But that was only part of the impact Trump left on the federal bench, Washington Monthly notes:
“With Sen. Mitch McConnell’s help, the Senate became a judicial confirmation factory. Not counting the Supreme Court, Trump got 231 judges with lifetime appointments confirmed. No president got more lower court judges confirmed in a single term since Jimmy Carter.
“After flipping three Circuit Courts from majority-Democratic to majority-Republican, Trump left office with 7 of the 13 appellate-level courts staffed by a majority of Republican appointments. And when counting up all of the appellate-level and district-level judges at the end of Trump’s presidency, Republicans had more: 17 more to be exact.”
Yet despite all of the judicial appointments McConnell managed to get confirmed, President Joe Biden is on the verge of reversing nearly all of the gains Trump made during his term in office:
“Biden’s first set of judicial nominations this week is the beginning of something big: almost certainly by the end of this Congress, the majority of lower court seats will be filled by Democratic appointees.”
Yes, you read that correctly: By the time the current Congress is finished in 2022, the majority of lower court seats in the federal system will be held Democratic appointees.
But that’s not all the good news.
There are also rumblings that some of the current Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices could also be ready to retire. The name most often mentioned is Clarence Thomas, who is 73 and reportedly tired of being on the bench.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, may also be close to retiring, since he’s been on the bench for almost 30 years and is 83 years old.
Even if Thomas and Breyer stay on the high court, many of the lower courts are about to be populated by Democratic appointees, and that means decisions will be favorable to the Biden administration as its moves forward with its legislative agenda.
In other words, Donald and Mitch may have thought they had hijacked the courts, but it turns out their efforts are about to come to naught.
