The federal courts are broken--and a Trump victory will make it worse

It’s hard to overstate how broken the federal judiciary is. The hard-right Federalist Society types Trump stuffed the courts with are not there to be independent or to ensure justice. Rather, these jurists are there to ensure right-wing policy preferences get enacted while Democratic goals get thwarted. That’s leading to sweeping and sloppy rulings that take a sledgehammer to regulations issued by President Joe Biden’s administration. And Donald Trump's victory in 2024 would make this landscape even worse.

Let’s start with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which has been unbalanced for decades. Democratic appointees haven’t outnumbered Republican ones since 1985, and Trump got to fill four vacancies. Now, the Eighth Circuit has only one Democratic appointee, Jane Kelly, who was put on the bench by President Barack Obama in 2013.

While it would be improbable that Kelly would step down during a second Trump administration, a 2024 Trump victory would likely give Trump the chance to shore up his stranglehold on the courts by swapping out some older jurists. James B. Loken was put on the bench by George H. W. Bush in 1990, and is 84 years old. Loken could choose to take senior status. Senior status lets a judge have a reduced caseload and opens a vacancy on the court. Judges Duane Benton and Bobby Shepherd, both George W. Bush appointees, are both over 70 and could choose to do the same.

Of course, the current composition of the Eighth Circuit is bad enough, and it just gave us an incomprehensible ruling on the Biden administration’s latest student debt relief plan. Red states have continued to race to friendly courts to attack the administration’s efforts to provide student loan forgiveness after getting the Supreme Court to block a plan to discharge $10,000 of federal student loan debt for millions of borrowers last year.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/2/2266805/-The-federal-courts-are-broken-and-a-Trump-victory-will-make-it-worse