Originally published at: Trump's bid to end the Mar a Lago FBI investigation ends in humiliation for his pet judge | Boing Boing
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And here you have people on the right continually hand wringing about “activist judges” when the whole time it was their judges.
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Americans have rested too long in the comforting assumption that an independent judiciary is a natural and permanent state of affairs. It is neither, and as a society we have dropped the ball on doing the hard work required to insist upon and maintain this essential pillar of liberal democracy.
This being a legal topic, I’m sure someone (perhaps a non-lawyer using a lawyerly voice) will show up to tell us this is just the system functioning properly and routinely, and that there’s nothing to see here. The remedy only takes one so far, especially if the cancer is deeply entrenched. There is no reason for us to accept that Judge Cannon’s conduct on the bench is any more normal or acceptable than that of Clarence Thomas’ or Samuel Alito’s.
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“I like beer”
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It’s almost like when they whine about activist judges.
Or social media bias.
Or cancel culture
It’s almost like it’s a pattern.
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Between Kavanaugh’s appreciation of a fine lager, Thomas’ love of pornography, and Alito’s spiteful “jokes” it must be quite a time on the right wing of the SCOTUS.
A projector run by gaslight.
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Well, at least the part where the judge was shut down is functioning properly. Good that the justice system has layers and fallbacks, though their increasing necessity (and broken-ness at the top) is depressing. 
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Part of the problem is that the judicial system allows (and, with the advent of the Federalist Society, encourages) political lapdogs like Cannon to get on the bench in the first place. Too much of that and we can no longer count on the appeals system to save us.
We allow ourselves to be distracted from the deeper problem by protestations that the system is working routinely to address them at our peril.
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I hope that filling open judge seats at the federal level is in the top three priority items that Biden and the majority Democratic Senate have on their to-do list for the next couple years. It’s not about packing the court, it’s about reestablishing balance.
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I do that sort of thing sometimes, but this really doesn’t seem like the time.
It is far more like the system detected an internal fault, and is managing to work, but shouldn’t be left this way. Like an airplane that lost an engine and still manages a landing with no deaths. Even if it landed at the correct airport you still need to fix the engine, and consider is you can avoid future engine failures.
So cool that it managed not to go totally off the rails. Not so cool if we leave it alone and see if it keeps on working.
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Sounds like an impeachable offense.
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She’s still on the runway.
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Yep, with one engine on fire.
Which would be not the time I choose to say “its all ok and here is why”, or even “it isn’t as bad as you think and here is why”. Today’s message from me is “nobody died this time and we should fix it…but it doesn’t look like we are…”
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Nothing to see here…
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“Congratulations, Judge Cannon, your reputation as a judge is in tatters.”
“Yes, but my reputation is stellar where it actually matters – with the kind of people who believe Donald Trump is being persecuted by the Deep State. I figure this has to be good for a speaking tour and maybe even a book, with a place on the best-seller list guaranteed by the GOP’s book-buying program.”
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When somebody with that much authority tries to abuse it as much as she did, the “proper” result in my book would be removal from the bench, followed by a significant amount of jail time.
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That would/should be the next step.
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One would hope so. We have to recognise that routine, functional systems that might have saved us now and then can be twisted into instruments of oppression by a politicised judiciary. Some would prefer we don’t focus on the fact that too many Judge Cannons now can lead to future Roland Freislers.
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Of course these days every time a check on partisan overreach works as intended it puts a spotlight on the next institution for right-wingers to undermine before the next election cycle.
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