There’s a great stirring in the legal—and legal journalism—circles these days over an article in an upcoming issue of the Harvard Law and Policy Review by Judge Lynn Adelman, a federal district court judge from Wisconsin. Adelman’s article takes a meat-ax to the current conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. It is titled, "The Roberts Court’s Assault On Democracy," which should give you some idea of where things are headed.

...the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.



Adelman goes on from there. There is nary a minced word nor a prisoner taken. It is a piece written in anguish and anger at what Adelman sees as the hijacking of the federal judiciary by conservative activists, and it is a piece unlike any I’ve ever read by a sitting federal judge. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern put it in Slate:

Under any set of ordinary circumstances, it is always better for life-tenured jurists to stay in their lane, avoid partisan political criticism, and work to preserve the vitally important norms of judicial independence and nonpartisan, oracular judicial temperament. But there remains the question—possibly the abiding question of our time—about whether only one side can remain beholden to norms when the other has eviscerated them.

Judge Lynn Adelman minced no words about Chief Justice Roberts or his colleagues. Brooks Kraft Getty Images

A startling number of Trump judges appear to believe that, like Ho, their job is mainly to own the libs in print. Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics.



These are the symptoms that linger.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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