Trump's Card

[caja-dglh]

The best wacko battles around my way are for Zoning. It is elite level NIMBY.

[WOM]

I also have no idea how I'm meant to know about 17 different judges and have opinions on whether they deserve the job.

And you have the nerve to bitch about Trump voters...

[ursus arctos]

SB, California has contested judicial primaries.

I’m beginning to think that it is a good thing that you can’t vote.

[San Bernardhinault]

I still don't understand how that works, though, Ursus. You have a contested primary, and then have to vote "Yay or Nay" on the judges? I am actually confused about the process now.

[Nefertiti2]

Trump's rallies

Among the things I heard the President of the United States do: make fun of a female candidate in Iowa by giving her a derogatory nickname. Accuse a U.S. senator of being a “drunk.” Claim that Hillary Clinton engaged in a conspiracy with Russia to rig the election (which she lost). He called the European Union a “brutal” alliance “formed to take advantage of us.” He attacked American libel laws and the World Trade Organization.

. Political leaders are called onstage to praise the President in terms that would make a feudal courtier blush, and they’re not empty words. These are the kinds of tributes I have heard in places like Uzbekistan, but never before in America. “Is he not the best President we have ever had?” the Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith enthused. (Trump then praised her for voting “with me one hundred per cent of the time.”) In Erie on Wednesday, a Republican congressman, Michael Kelly, gave the most sycophantic speech of the ones I listened to this month. Trump, he yelled to the crowd, is “the strongest President we have seen in our lifetime.” Addressing Trump, he said, “You are the best! You are the best!” Trump did not need to leave his “luxurious” life behind for the indignities of political combat, but he did. “I am so grateful,” Kelly concluded, “that an American citizen came out of nowhere to take the reins and reform and retake this nation.”

Much of the coverage of these events tends to be theatre criticism, or news stories about a single inflammatory line or two, rating Trump’s performance or puzzling over the appeal to his followers. But what the President of the United States is actually saying is extraordinary, regardless of whether the television cameras are carrying it live. It’s not just the whoppers or the particular outrage riffs that do get covered, either. It’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters. Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster.

I listen because I think we are making a mistake by dismissing him, by pretending the words of the most powerful man in the world are meaningless. They do have consequences. They are many, and they are worrisome. In what he says to the world, the President is, as Ed Luce wrote in the Financial Times this week, “creating the space to do things which were recently unthinkable.” It’s not a reality show; it’s real.

[Eggchaser]

He can say whatever he likes. He's winning, frankly. Got the tax cuts, destroying environmental protection, ripping up trade deals, getting tough with China, Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court, brutalising refugees, immigrants and the poor. Destroying the reputation of journalism.

He's done what he promised.

And he'll probably get a second term.

[anton pulisov]

Economy not far off a crash though

[Eggchaser]

Him and his handlers will do fine come what may.

Anyway, his base will believe it is all the Democrats' fault.

[Gerontophile]

His base cannot spell 'democrat'.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/PhilipRucker/status/1050819996631425026

[ursus arctos]

SB, I wasn't being entirely fair.

There are three principal statewide courts in California, each of which has a separate procedure.

Superior Court - The trial court/court of first instance for both civil and criminal matters. There are 58 (one per county), with the number of judges on any one court being set by the Legislature and roughly reflecting the county's population. Judges are initially appointed by the Governor but must be re-elected at the end of their six year terms if they wish to continue to serve. This is the level at which the contested primaries exist. Any candidate winning a majority of the primary vote for a given seat automatically wins the general election. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two vote getters in the primary proceed to the general election. In my experience, however, many Superior Court judges are unopposed and thus never appear on the general election ballot.

Court of Appeals - The six regional courts that deal with appeals from Superior Courts. Originally appointed by the Governor with the consent of the Commission on Judicial Appointments, Court of Appeals Judges must be confirmed by the voters of their jurisdiction at the next general election and then re-elected at the end of their twelve-year terms if they wish to continue to serve. These are the up/down elections you described.

Supreme Court - The state's highest court, same process as for Courts of Appeal, but in statewide elections. As there are only nine justices, there won't necessarily be one on the ballot in any given year (as is the case in 2018).

Considered bonkers by the rest of the world, California's judicial selection process is actually one of the more rational of those current in the US. We have states with partisan elections for their highest court and ones in which lawyers for various special interests are by far the largest contributors to the campaigns of judges before whom they regularly appear.

[Gerontophile]

Sometimes, California makes Nevada seem ordinary.

[San Bernardhinault]

Ah-ha! That makes sense. It's just re-appointment of justices who were already appointed by Gov Brown, so we can get rid of them if they're notably terrible but on the whole would always vote Yes.

[ursus arctos]

Yes, and being California, there is also the possibility of a recall election during the course of a judge's term.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Economy not far off a crash though

I don't get you on this stuff.

When the Democrats were criticizing Trump for the expanded deficit, you said they were wrong. Now you're saying that there's an imminent crash on top of these deficits?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Ursus, what I was getting at with judge elections before was whether there was anything coming from federal law/the supreme court that would make it impossible to abolish judge elections.

[ursus arctos]

I don't understand the question. They are a matter of state law.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Abolishing state-level judicial elections wouldn't violate something in the US constitution? Or even something Judge Kavanaugh and co might infer from the constitution?

[ursus arctos]

There is no federal Constitutional guarantee of judicial elections, which I thought would be obvious from the fact that they don't exist for federal judges.

More practically, there is no movement to abolish them anywhere.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Thanks.

I hadn't thought of federal judges, so it wasn't obvious.

[ursus arctos]

Sorry. I'm sure that you weren't alone in that.

Having thought about what kind of state judicial election case could come before the current Court, my best bet would be legislation attempting to eliminate the type of donations I mentioned above, which could definitely be frowned upon by the Citizens United branch of the Court (at least from a jurisprudential point of view, from a purely political point of view that same branch could strain to uphold a law that penalised the "trial lawyers" so often demonised by Republican paymasters).

One observation that occurs to me is that England seems to have some absolutely appalling High Court Judges emerge from an inherently more reasonable process of selection.

[Tubby Isaacs]

No need to apologize, I should have thought of federal judges.

I know nothing about the US Constitution, beyond having a vague sense that it's a mine for "federalists" to stop anything good happening anywhere.

Appreciate the answers you give to all my questions. Citizens United has the cogs in my brain whirring.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I don't really know much about British judges. Plenty of us are idiot incompetents generally.

[San Bernardhinault]

Ursus's primer turns out to have been particularly timely, as we had a Democratic canvasser around today who gave us a list of which judges to vote yes on, and which to vote no on. It seems that there's one actually contested Superior Court judgeship on the ballot, with the incumbent a complete nutter, for whom birtherism is a tiny part of why he's appalling.

But looking down the list of supreme and appeal court justices, the Democrats want a decent handful of No votes. It appears that's because the 12 year term means that there are some Schwarzenegger appointments still there, and particularly the CA Supreme Court has only just started shifting marginally leftwards after being very conservative for a long time. So we might want to kick off Carol Corrigan, who doesn't appear to be a particularly bad justice but doesn't necessarily align with California.

[ursus arctos]

Interesting.

That’s much more aggressive than the party was when I was living there, but then again that was before one party rule (and during campaigns to recall progressive judges).