Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 3:43 am
Judge Cannon is a good example of what you get when you prioritize ideology over competence in judicial nominations. Generally, an appointee for a Federal District Judge position has either a long track record of litigation experience or experience as a trial judge in a state trial level court. Experience in trying or litigating criminal cases is very helpful. Judge Cannon is simply out of her depth in this case. I’m not referring to the substance of her opinion in the dismissal order. I’m referring to the difficulty she has shown with basic parts of case management.
She inexplicably has problems making a decision on fairly routine motions but weirdly orders briefing on jury instructions when no instructions have been proposed. She makes abrupt rulings which she has to modify, yet holds extensive hearings on motions that would be decided on the briefs by an experienced judge. Her inability to manage pre trial motions led her to strike — not continue — the trial date. Although I don’t try cases, I have to monitor trial and pre-trial proceedings. Without a trial date and a set deadlines for pre trial activities, cases flounder and fail to move toward resolution. In contrast to the election conspiracy case, there was no appeal to wait for. I think she just lost control of managing the case to the point that she couldn’t set a schedule.
Don’t get me wrong — I doubt I could have done any better. I have a pretty good handle on my limitations, and you’d have to be crazy to nominate me for a federal judgeship.
Judge Cannon may have the chops to be a good judge someday, but that’s going to take some time.
I know that it’s popular to portray her as a shill for Trump, but it’s been my experience that people are far more complicated than those kinds of simplistic tropes.
She and Thomas haven’t done the judicial system any favors. Every court in the U.S. is not only required to be fair, but to avoid the appearance of unfairness. Justice Thomas flipped the bird at the appearance of fairness with his little stunt in the immunity decision.
One of the bedrock limits on the Supreme Court’s power is that it has no jurisdiction to issue advisory opinions. Its power is limited to resolving actual cases and controversies.
When the Court accepted review in the immunity case, it did not accept review of the issue of the Special Prosecutor’s authority to prosecute the case. No party briefed or argued that issue. Yet, Justice Thomas issued a concurring opinion that addressed the authority issue. He knows that the Court doesn’t have the authority to address an issue that is not before it on review. He knows that lower courts should not use his opinion (which no other Justice joined). So what was he doing?
Sometimes a Justice will flag an issue not being reviewed as a signal that there is an issue that the Justice thinks needs to be addressed. In a normal case, that’s basically a no harm-no foul situation.
But this wasn’t a normal case. The defendant in the case before the Court was also a defendant in a case before Judge Cannon in which the authority issue was at issue.
I don’t care what Justice Thomas intended, but his throwing a lifeline to a young judge who was appointed to her position by the defendant in both cases, shatters any appearance of fairness.
And young Judge Cannon grabbed the lifeline for all it was worth. Even worse, she cited Justice Thomas’s concurrence at least three times, even though she knows that, in terms of legal authority, it was worthless. And she absolutely knows, as her opinion contains a lengthy treatise on which statements of the Supreme Court are authoritative and which are not. If her reasoning is sound, she didn’t need to cite Justice Thomas at all. Why cite something that she knows is of zero precedential value when the citation adds nothing to her decision.
So, a Supreme Court Justice who has (secretly) accepted an unconscionable amount of gifts from billionaires who finance a litigation agenda that regularly comes before the Court and whose spouse lobbied for overturning the result of an election that the defendant in the case he was deciding lost, throws a lifeline to another judge in a case involving the same defendant, who also was nominated to the bench by that same defendant.
You can spin that 24/7 for years — you can never make it look fair.
Courts are how we resolve disputes without killing each other. They have no ability to enforce their decisions, but rely largely on their institutional legitimacy in having another branch enforce their decisions. So what do Justice Thomas and Judge Cannon think will happen when they flip the bird at the concept of fairness, including impartiality?
Justice Thomas does not belong on the Court. Nobody who makes a mockery of the concept of impartiality, in substance and appearance, deserves to be a member of the judiciary at any level.
But all that aside, the appellate courts (11th Cir. and Supreme) may affirm her ruling. Personally, I think her statutory interpretation is a mess. But the blame for that lies with the Supreme Court. The Conservative’s statutory interpretation is a mess. I feel sorry for Judges across the country, because the Court’s method of statutory interpretation is wildly inconsistent from case to case. For example, the Court issued two opinions on the same day with contradictory methods of statutory interpretation. How are the lower courts supposed to know which method to use in the cases before them?
But there is a consistency in result. The Conservative majority really, really, really, really objects to how Congress delegates discretion to the executive when it comes to implementing the law. The current court has arrogated to itself power over the details of how Congress delegates power. It would not surprise me at all to see this Supreme Court hold that Congress’s express delegation of power to the DOJ doesn’t meet the Court’s criteria.
I suppose we’ll see. At least if a President Trump doesn’t order the DOJ to dismiss the case.
