Paul Callan is a CNN legal analyst, a former New York homicide prosecutor and currently is counsel at the New York law firm of Edelman & Edelman PC, focusing on wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Follow him on Twitter @paulcallan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) President Donald Trump's nomination of Matthew Spencer Petersen to a lifetime appointment as a federal district court judge demonstrates the President's utter contempt for the judiciary.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday for several of President Trump's nominees for coveted federal district court judicial positions, Petersen got to see a scathing and highly effective cross-examination by Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana. Unfortunately for Petersen, he was the subject of the cross-examination, which has likely extinguished any possibility of him being confirmed, even by the Trump-friendly Republican senatorial majority that has been relentlessly approving conservative nominees to the federal courts.

The televised hearing showed Kennedy using an experienced trial lawyer's cross-examination technique of baby-stepping a witness into a corner and then hitting him over the head with a baseball bat -- symbolically, of course.

Since the primary job of a federal district court judge is to try cases, Kennedy began his examination with a very unusual question to the entire panel of aspiring federal judges: "Have any of you not tried a case to verdict in a courtroom?" The question seemed somewhat ridiculous because the primary job of a federal judge is the supervision of complex federal trials.

Who would nominate a lawyer with no trial experience to supervise federal trials?

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