Outgoing President Biden has made more appointments to the federal judiciary than incoming President Trump did in Trump's first term. Specifically, Biden has put 184 district court judges where they are today as of this writing. Trump appointed 174. This is important, because most cases do NOT go up the appellate ladder at all. The Supreme Court (where of course Trump got a pivotal three appointments) ends up taking a very small percentage of the petitions for review it receives. A little under 1 percent, so less than 80 out of about 8000. That is a matter of necessity. This is a big country, there is a heck of a lot of litigation. There is only one Supreme Court. The upshot, then, is that although he only got to make one SCOTUS pick, Biden's other judicial appointments are an important legacy. There are 673 active federal court judges across the country. So (my quick arithmetic at work) Biden has appointed somewhat more than one quarter of them....
Posts
Yesterday in this place, I discussed how Lawrence VanDyke made a splash while studying law at Harvard. To catch up: he posted a book note in the law review there making clearly out-of-his-depth arguments about evolution, natural selection, and the establishment clause of the first amendment. Let me note parenthetically that I haven't been mistyping his name. In contrast to one-time chimney sweep Dick Van Dyke, Lawrence spells his surname without a break. The only interesting thing about the typographical oddity is that it gives me a chance to use the illustration I have chosen. Anyway: about Lawrence... he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and entered the practice of law with the New York firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Starting in 2012, though, he began working for the office of solicitor general. In three different states. This as a career path is a new one on me He worked as Assistant Solicitor General of Texas (2012), then Solicitor General of Montana (20...
From the presumption that Trump must be wrong, fallacious inferences follow. Yes, Trump is a horrible President on too many levels to enumerate. But remember what they say about a stopped clock? The US has no business having troops in Syria. If Trump is in fact intent on withdrawing them: good for him. [ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT NARRATIVE VOICE -- he is not in fact intent on withdrawing them.] If Mattis resigned over that: Mattis was in the wrong, and this is so EVEN IF it is true, as some reporting has it, that Mattis has been a check on some of Trump's worst impulses on other occasions. This is John Glaser, of CATO, on the subject: https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-right-withdraw-syria ------------- The latest news on this front, of course, is that the Trump administration wasn't serious. The troops are staying in Syria after all. It was all a diversion, presumably a way of drawing attention away at least for a brief spell from the new House of Representatives, the Mu...
Somebody very clever fed 1,000 hours of Trump rallies into a computer and had it algorithmically generate an artificial Trump rally. This is part of the result. PRESIDENT: Foreign powers cheat us! Canada steals our milk! China steals our milk! We only had one glass of milk left: Obama drank it. Not fair. Crowd boos. They wanted that milk. PRESIDENT: But like President Ronald Rogaine: I will bring back the milk! Crowd roars. They still want that milk. PRESIDENT: A wall of milk. No criminals get through. Democrats want criminals to have the milk. No way. Milk comes from coal. We'll dig it up.