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NOTE: If nothing else positive occurred during the first part of the Trump Presidency, the almost daily revelations of corruption throughout the Washington D.C. political landscape have been positive for the American People. How so? Many have for years felt there is an “underground” government that has allowed and often facilitated power and unscrupulous and sometimes illegal financial activities among those who serve in every capacity in the federal government. What else could possibly explain how over and over again, elected politicians go to D.C. as average middle class Americans but years later leave office worth tens of millions of dollars?
With the public investigations of Hillary Clinton’s illegal private email server use during the 2016 campaign, other Clinton irregularities in operations of the Clinton Foundation, probable quid pro quo foreign contributions to it, the substance of all the elements of the Mueller investigation regarding Russian election collusion with the Trump campaign, evidence verifying these “irregularities” throughout Washington keep piling up while confirming suspicions of this “underground” or “parallel” system of government operations. Americans can only speculate as to who is running this system. But its existence is no longer in doubt. What remains to discover is exactly how powerful it is and how far into America it reaches. It’s called the “Deep State.”
Chief in this Deep State operations scenario is the morphing of the institution that for 200 years has set the U.S. apart from other countries: the Justice System. It has long been known that the system of Justice established at the Nation’s founding has enabled the country to remain the World leader because of its fairness, independence, and impartiality: “Freedom and Justice for all.” That fundamental of American democracy is now being challenged daily by those from the Deep State.
During the next few days we at dnewman.org will break-down the American Justice System and examine how each segment of the DOJ and Intelligence agencies has been and still is under attack. These attacks have led to corruption at the highest levels of government. This corruption machine has apparently been in operation for a decade or longer, but has remained purposely hidden by Deep State purveyors. Donald Trump who entered his presidency as the most independent elected official in recent memory has in his brash and no-nonsense manner shown us just the tip of the Deep State and its danger to our Democracy.
In this chapter we will discuss the federal Court System and how the Deep State has corrupted many of those in it to purposely impact political operations for the benefit of those in the Deep State. Next we we will look at the American Intelligence Community and later the federal political system and how their interactions with each other has already dramatically changed our nation.
Today, “The Federal Court System.”
I hate the term “weaponization.” Events of the past 6 months or so have illustrated that suspicions of the political use of the DOJ and Intelligence agencies are NOT suspicions. It has happened.
The Birth of Weaponization
Intelligence/DOJ weaponization did not begin at the FBI or CIA. It began when the former Constitutional Law Professor took his first oath of office. On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States of America. After nearly eight years as president, he has delivered on one front: he immediately began appointing liberal judges to federal courts to quickly and quietly begin reshaping the federal judiciary.
Weaponization of the Judiciary
The total number of Obama Article III judgeship nominees to be confirmed by the United States Senate is 329, including two justices to the Supreme Court of the United States, 55 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, 268 judges to the United States district courts, and four judges to the United States Court of International Trade. That 329 lifetime federal judge appointments represents 40% of the total number of judges serving.
In terms of Article I courts, Obama made 8 appointments to the United States Tax Court, 3 appointments to the United States Court of Federal Claims, 3 appointments to the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, 2 appointments to the United States Court of Military Commission Review, and 2 appointments to the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. He also elevated two chief judges of the Court of Federal Claims.
On the Article IV territorial courts, he made two appointments and elevated one judge to the position of chief judge.
- Article III courts (also called Article III tribunals) are the U.S. Supreme Court and the inferior courts of the United States established by the Congress, which currently are the 13 United States courts of appeals, the 91 United States district courts (including the districts of D.C. and Puerto Rico, but excluding three other territorial district courts), and the U.S. Court of International Trade.
- Article I tribunals include Article I courts (also called legislative courts) set up by Congress to review agency decisions, military courts-martial appeal courts, ancillary courts with judges appointed by Article III appeals court judges, or administrative agencies and administrative law judges (ALJs).
When Obama entered the Oval Office, liberal judges controlled just one of the 13 circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Fifty-five successful presidential nominations later, liberal majorities took control of nine of those appeals benches, or 70 percent. Outside of legal circles the transformation of the influential federal appeals courts went largely unnoticed, though.
“The Supreme Court grabs the spotlight, but it hears fewer than 100 cases a year,” Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett said, “while the 13 federal courts of appeals handle about 35,000.” More than one-third of the 179 judges on federal appeals courts owe their seat to Obama, Willett told The Daily Signal. “That’s a legacy with a capital L.”
Obama also left his mark on the U.S. District Courts, which are the lower federal courts, successfully appointing 268 judges—seven more than President George W. Bush.
Obama didn’t push federal courts to the left by himself, though, since the Senate must confirm a president’s judicial appointments. And some conservatives complained that Senate Republicans handed over the keys to the judiciary without a fight. “These nominees can’t be characterized as anything but radical liberals, and the senators knew that when they were voting,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former attorney general of Virginia who is now president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee. While there’s “no singular explanation” for how the majority of federal appeals judges flipped, Cuccinelli told The Daily Signal, Senate Republicans adopted a strategy of “knee-jerk surrender” on nominees.
Republican leadership balked at that characterization, arguing that they spent most of their time engaging in guerilla-style campaigns against an entrenched, determined Democrat majority. “A Democrat president was in office for eight years, most of that with a Democrat Senate, including several years of a filibuster-proof Democratic majority,” a spokesman for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told The Daily Signal.
But there is no doubt that President Trump inherited a decisively liberal federal judiciary. That fact was driven home with the court fights over the new President’s temporary bans on immigration from certain countries implemented by executive order. Appeals of those executive orders flooded appeals courts stacked with Obama appointed judges — primarily the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. Their actions exhibit exactly what a liberal weaponized judiciary can do — and DID do. Though numerous Constitutional scholars declare that Presidential executive orders regarding immigration are Constitutionally authorized for use by a President for the safety of the Country as these were, liberal judges circumvented their Constitutional authority in issuing stays. (Decisions made by the 9th Circuit that find their way to the U.S. Supreme Court are overturned almost all the time) The former President knew this would happen under any conservative President, thus he stacked federal courts as a liberal cause “safety stop.”
How can This Judiciary “Stacking” be Changed?
Quite honestly, there is no wholesale possible cure. 329 Obama appointed judges received lifetime appointments. Short of a Congressional impeachment process, their death or retirement, they are on the bench for quite a while. The only way to make significant change to move the federal courts back to the middle (where our forefathers felt they would consistently be) is for Presidential appointments as seats in various courts become available.
It is important to note that just because a judge holds liberal or conservative views does not necessarily make them a bad judge. The significant problem with any judge whether conservative or liberal is if/when they begin to from the bench become legislators instead of judges. “Activist judges” are those who feel their judicial obligation is to not necessarily devise laws as various legislation entities are charged to do, but in the frequent absence of clear explanations for specifics within those laws make legislative interpretations of laws themselves rather than interpreting federal laws as they pertain to the U.S. Constitution. That is what liberal judges who now sit in these courts around the nation when hearing cases are prone to do. Examples of this practice are very visible today as we have seen liberal judges usurp previous SCOTUS determinations of the power of a President through executive order determine policies that are not already in law.
Judge Neil Gorsuch in 2017 during his SCOTUS confirmation hearing when asked a specific question about a specific law by a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee chided that Senator by stating that legislators would better serve the voters in America by making laws that include specific terms, conditions, and policies that are clearly understandable. Doing so would stop much of the angst that results when cases from those vague laws end up in appeals courts.
Summary
It is doubtful that many felt like a Trump presidency was going to be easy going. And it has not been easy going so far. One thing regarding judicial appointments by this President is clear: he has so far and is expected to continue during his presidency to appoint justices to various courts based on a rigid interpretation of the Constitution WITHOUT referencing their own personal ideas or ideals in rendering decisions. “Originalists” is the term used to describe such judges. The federal judiciary has certainly begun a slow swing back to the Center politically, but it may be a generation before the Obama major shift to the Left can be righted.
Pundits will say that the U.S. is more liberal than conservative. There is NO absolute way to make such a determination. But what we saw in the 2016 should be a fair comparison in determining how Americans feel politically: both east and west coast are comprised primarily of liberals while the balance of the nation is decisively conservative.
Knowing that the nation is close to evenly split in political thinking, wouldn’t it make sense to work to keep federal courts headed by judges similarly split?
It is absolutely un-American for a President to try to use the courts to push a political agenda. That’s done in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and in other totalitarian nations — NOT in the United States.
NOTE: Our next chapter will analyze the current failures and corruption in the top Intelligence Agencies. You will not want to miss it. Again a reminder: if you’d like to receive email notification of the posting of any new article at dnewman.org, you can scroll to the bottom right of the site home page, enter your name and email address, and you will immediately begin receiving such notifications with a link to each story. We NEVER give anyone your email address. We NEVER run ads on our site. We NEVER sell anything on our site either. Your email and personal information always remains safe.
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