Federal Judges Warn Of The Dire Threat To Democracy [View all]

[HUAJIAO]

Federal Judges Warn Of The Dire Threat To Democracy

Talking Points Memo

Opinion by David Kurtz
1d

In the early days of the Trump presidency, efforts to obtain his tax returns or enforce the Emoluments Clause were slow, clumsy, and sometimes reluctantly undertaken by Democrats in Congress. I was inclined to excuse that slowness. But as the threat mounted and become more obvious and the reaction to it failed to rise to the challenge, my own sense of urgency began to change.

SNIP

Six months ago, it looked like the first weeks of the new year would be dominated not by the GOP primary but by pretrial preparations for a whopping four criminal trials of Trump. The race was finally on to hold Trump to account for his cheating in the last two elections before he cheated in a third one. As we sit here at the end of January, the landscape is not what we anticipated.

The Mar-a-Lago case is almost guaranteed to happen after the election. So is the Georgia RICO case. The Jan. 6 case is stuck on pretrial appeals, with the DC Circuit and Supreme Court failing to push things along. The lesser of the four cases – the hush money case in New York – may be the only one tried before the election. Meanwhile, there’s a chance Trump will be brought down by the Disqualification Clause but no one is confident the courts will enforce that against him either.

I’ve gone from annoyed about the repeated complaints about the slowness of the system to sharing those sentiments myself to having my hair on fire that the gravity of the moment calls for so much more than the legal system is prepared to offer. In a way this a mea culpa for urging my staff over the last few years to chill out. Things have not been this urgent since the 1860s. And we’re failing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/federal-judges-warn-of-the-dire-threat-to-democracy/ar-BB1hjiz4?ocid=socialshare&pc=ENTPSP&cvid=998c414f421f4c0dba972f7fa7fbda24&ei=54