While everyone was looking elsewhere, and wondering about their immigration status in the lands of their ancestors, the administration* and Mitch McConnell had their white-guys judicial assembly line humming. This time, it was two caucasian sensations named Peter Phipps, to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and Clifton Corker, to the district court in eastern Tennessee.

It should be noted that Phipps has an open seat only because Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey blue-slipped Barack Obama's nominee for it. McConnell, of course, essentially has done away with the blue-slip process because he is a power-mad little man bent on poisoning American politics for three decades after he's dead. So, despite the opposition of Pennsylvania's other senator, Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., Phipps will be the 14th Republican judge installed over the objection of at least one of the senators. Anyway, Phipps is awful on LGBTQ rights, as we see. Meanwhile, Corker is one of those judges who can't give a simple "Yes" or "No" answer as to whether Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided.

The conservative effort to salt the federal judiciary with larval Scalias is devastatingly close to completion. Make no mistake, This would have happened if any of the Republican candidates had been elected in 2016. It may be the only thing keeping a lot of Republicans on the Trump Train. You are going to be hearing from both these guys long after the president* is spinning on a spit in hell. Depend on that.

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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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