Would-Be Dictator

Ever since his administration*’s child-kidnapping ring was exposed, the president* has told this story about how “they” came into his office and “they” said we need 5,000 judges to handle cases on the border.

[...]

This is all a lie. There is no “they.” This meeting never happened. Nobody ever told him that we needed 5,000 judges. As it happens, there have not been 5,000 judges in the entire history of the federal court system. There are only a little less than 900 judges working in the federal system now, so we do not have “thousands of judges already.” And the phantom “they” are wrong about how many judges we have handling these cases now. Congress has authorized 484 of these judges, and less than 400 are presently working. This whole passage is one bald-faced non-fact after another.

(I would have added, “…and the president* knows it," but the president* doesn’t know anything about anything.)

He doesn’t care. The goobers don’t care. And, apparently, the elite political media is so banjaxed on the subject of civility and what they consider to be fairness that the president* could have said we have three million judges and half of them are Martians, and he would be said to be only “obfuscating” or “exaggerating,” especially about the number of Martians.

[...]

There is a distinct purpose behind [this lie], and that is to delegitimize all legal restraints on the president*. The lie is in keeping with his attack on due process a week ago. He wants to gin up weaponized ignorance against the federal courts—possibly because he sees himself facing the business end of one somewhere down the line—and beginning by creating a phantom bureaucracy to rail against while creating a very real problem. This is straight out of the Republican playbook as rewritten in the days of Ronald Reagan: starve an agency until it’s overwhelmed, and then make it (and “government” generally) an object of scorn and ridicule because it can’t do its job.

  Charles P Pierce

This is true if you take the underlying assumption as fact: that he wants to delegitimize the federal courts because he'll soon be in their hands. I'm sure that's part of it, but the other, major, part is exactly what he said: "I don’t want judges. I want ICE and Border Patrol agents." He doesn't want this country to be run by the rule of law. He wants to be at the top with an army of enforcers to do his bidding.  The more this demagogue gets away with, the less concerned he is about being brought up in court.  And, the scary thing is, he may be right.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.