Dems can reward Gen Z: Fix the judiciary | Will Bunch Newsletter

”It’s all cold down on the beach. The wind’s whipping down the boardwalk. Hey Band! You guys know what time of year it is?” Even Bruce Springsteen, a Phillies fan, probably knows that the out-of-nowhere, bitterly cold days after the last pitch of baseball season can be a depressing time. Next year feels an eternity away, especially when your team just fell two games short in the World Series.

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American voters, mad about losing abortion rights at the U.S. Supreme Court, delivered a loud message by elevating Democrats in last Tuesday’s midterm election. But the one man they’d probably want most to hear their rage was busy turning on the political equivalent of a white noise machine.

There was nothing but uproarious applause and a 2,000-person standing ovation on Thursday night when Justice Samuel Alito — the key architect of the court’s 5-4 June decision that undid the Roe vs. Wade precedent that had guaranteed reproductive rights — strolled onto a D.C. stage. The New Jersey-born jurist and three of his GOP-appointed colleagues were there to congratulate the right-wing Federalist Society for helping them, and hundreds of other judges like them, ascend to power.

The conservative cacophony seemed badly out of tune with the rest of the nation, where young voters on college campuses lined up for hours to vote as a protest of Alito’s anti-abortion ruling — and for a future of student-debt cancellation, gun safety, and environmental protection. The farce at the Federalist Society smacked of the only good line in those final three Star Wars prequels, in the face of the evil Empire’s rising dictatorship — “So this is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause.”

But last week exposed a glaring contradiction in U.S. politics. The voters who proved decisive in keeping the Senate in Democratic hands and killed off the mythical “red wave” in the House were furious at the Supreme Court. But they couldn’t vote for the High Court, only for lawmakers who may instead spend the next two years mired in gridlock. Meanwhile, the folks making the key decisions on the things young voters care about — college loans, abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun safety, climate change — are untouchable federal judges, many of them Federalist Society-created Alito clones backed by the likes of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

They are appointed for life, and seemingly accountable to no one.

The stark contrast between what America’s electoral majority wants and the reality of this entrenched GOP judicial regime was underscored this past week in Texas, where Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman — a founding member of the Tarrant County Federalist Society, who recently threw out a Texas law aimed at preventing 18- to 20-year-olds from carrying handguns — struck down President Biden’s $400-billion-plus student-debt cancellation.

Pittman’s ruling — which legal experts said hinged on an absurd interpretation about whether the plaintiffs suing the Biden administration have standing to bring the case — was nonetheless upheld Monday by the ultra-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling by judges named by Trump or fellow Republican George W. Bush. The decisions mean that the fate of Biden’s signature program to help 45 million Americans mired in debt for the kind of higher education that was cheap and accessible for baby boomers rests with the same 6-3 right-wing SCOTUS, with three Trump justices, that just deep-sixed abortion rights.

It remains to be seen whether a Supreme Court shutdown of the college-loan plan would make young voters even more angry for the 2024 election, or alienated and apathetic instead. But it’s increasingly clear that a conservative-leaning federal judiciary — in which the twice-impeached Trump picked 30% of the country’s active appeals court judges, and more than 25% of active district judges — looms large over their daily lives.

Also on Monday, students at the University of Virginia were sheltering in their dorm rooms or hiding in basement libraries during the hunt for a student gunman who murdered three varsity football players — a loud echo from the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller ruling that enshrined the individual right of gun ownership. Young voters who’ve also seen the black-robed American mullahs kill rules that would have reduced greenhouse-gas pollution just days after the Roe reversal have good reason to fear what’s next on issues like contraception or same-sex marriage.

Here’s the deal: Gen Z and Millennials voters saved the day for Democrats this election by voting for the party by a whopping 28% margin, and with a higher-than-average turnout. Now it’s time for the Democrats to pay them back, by ensuring that a lifetime federal judiciary can be reformed to represent their values ... during their lifetime.

The first step is the easiest, given that Democrats will hold the Senate with 50 or maybe 51 votes. Biden and the Senate Democrats must make filling every federal judicial vacancy a top priority. To put this in perspective, Biden has successfully confirmed 84 district and appeals court judges since taking office, yet some 85 vacancies still exist. Now, the momentum and motivation is there to pick up the pace.

But they should try to accomplish even more. As I noted here a couple of years ago, just before Biden was elected, there is a powerful argument that the current federal bench is overworked and undermanned. In 2020, the progressive group Demand Justice called for 70 new district judges, based on population growth — a concept that has drawn support from the Bush-appointed chief justice, John Roberts. Even if the incoming Congress is too divided to pass this, Democrats should get this on the agenda, in their pitch to win more seats in 2024.

The same is true of the Big Kahuna of judicial reform: updating and possibly expanding the Supreme Court, to as many as 13 seats. As many who’ve followed this issue know, the number of justices isn’t fixed by the Constitution, and has risen and fallen over time. Today, people on the left say a larger court would reflect its bigger workload, allow for a High Court that looks more like America, and undo the dirty tricks of the McConnell years, who broke all democratic norms to deny a SCOTUS pick to the first Black president.

Biden’s first pass on this issue was ridiculously timid, punting matters to a commission that proposed no significant reforms. But we live in a different moment now — the post-Roe era — and it’s a good time for the president to change his mind, as he’s done on other issues from same-sex marriage to abortion rights to college debt. The will of the American people seems pretty clear after the 2022 elections, but a calcified, reactionary judiciary is standing in the way. If Democrats can find a way to fix this, they will be the ones worthy of thunderous applause.

Question: If the GOP only wins the house by a few people … what month in 2023 do you expect it to flip to the Democrats? — Via Beth Loves To Travel (@skywalkerbeth) on Twitter

Answer: Beth, most of this week’s questions seemed to be a variation on this theme: How will Capitol Hill actually function in 2023 and 2024 if the GOP emerges from these midterms with a thin majority of maybe one to three seats, as looks likely from the current vote counting. I’d look for two possible, underrated developments. The first is the chance that Democrats — now lacking the majority to keep Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker — seek a deal with the tiny sliver of a half-dozen or so remaining “moderate Republicans” to put one of them in charge of the divided chamber instead of a right-winger like Kevin McCarthy, the present GOP leader, or some more extremist rival. Interestingly, centrist Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska on Monday told NBC News he’s amenable to exactly such a deal with the Dems, so stay tuned. The other reality is that any 218-217 or 219-216 majority will likely only stay that way for a matter of weeks, because in every term representatives die, get sick, retire, get in criminal jeopardy, or take a better job. There’s always one or two vacancies, and often as many as five. Fasten your seat belts, America.

Unlike most folks who write about politics for a living, I don’t have any predictions for you about the future of Donald Trump, who is poised to announce his third bid for the presidency Tuesday in Mar-a-Lago, despite a weak showing for the candidates he endorsed in the midterms. I’m still focused on his multitude of sins from the past, including his four incredibly corrupt years in the White House.

The latest? A congressional investigation revealed Monday that a slew of nations with sordid histories of graft and human-rights violations — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Turkey, Qatar and Malaysia — paid exorbitant fees to stay in the president-owned Trump International Hotel in D.C. at the same time these nations were lobbying the Trump White House on sensitive issues. For example, records provided a House committee by Trump’s former accountants showed the Saudi Defense Ministry booked $10,500-a-night suites at the Washington hotel while they were in town lobbying Team Trump to back its moves against Qatar, which POTUS 45 himself then did in a tweet. The total hotel haul was at least $750,000 to prop up Trump’s shaky enterprise, but probably more when U.S.-based lobbyists for these nations are added in.

The disclosures seemed to prove what many of us maintained throughout Trump’s term — that he governed in blatant violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, meant to prevent our leaders from getting paid by foreign powers. And yet this disclosure was met with collective yawns from the U.S. body politic — as did a bombshell report by the Washington Post this weekend that U.S. intelligence has chronicled how one of Trump’s hotel patrons, the UAE, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts, both legal and illegal, to alter American foreign policy, often successfully. Since 2016, the intelligence probe found, the oil-rich Gulf state spent at least $154 million hiring lobbyists here — just one piece of its vast influence campaign.

This all should remind us that as we worry about new threats to our democracy, we’ve done next to nothing about the one we’ve known about since Watergate-era reforms collapsed in the 1990s: the corrupting influence of big money. This virus, of course, transcends Trump and afflicts both parties — as we’ll be reminded in coming days as investigations look at the millions that disgraced FTX leader Sam Bankman-Fried donated to Democratic causes, including President Biden’s 2020 election before his cryptocurrency empire imploded. If the looming battle for the soul of America does nothing to end the ease with which plutocrats from Dubai to Palo Alto can buy off our leaders, then we haven’t really saved democracy.