“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with here.”

Roxxsmom said:

Well, creating a non-independent judiciary is necessary for a dictator.

The good news it was one dissenting judge. I'm even more worried about what's going to start happening when his legal shills start providing the swing votes in highly polarized decisions that influence the basic rights of Americans from different walks of life.

You should be worried and wish that more Americans were worried as well. There is no good news about this "one dissenting judge." Her name is Neomi Rao, and despite never having been a judge before, she sits on the federal judiciary and should Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Beyer go gently into that good night before Trump is forcibly evicted from the White House, Rao is on his short list of future Supreme Court justices.

Rao's a real winner.

Neomi Rao has been confirmed as a new judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. President Donald Trump nominated her to fill the seat left vacant by now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The Senate confirmed Rao in a 53-46 vote on March 13, 2019.

Rao has never served as a judge before. Her previous position was Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. She also teaches law at George Mason University in Washington, D.C.


Her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit Court bench faced challenges due to articles she wrote while a college student at Yale University. Rao wrote that women could be held partially responsible for rape if they were drunk at the time of the incident. Other articles included referring to people on welfare as “lazy” and that affirmative action gave minority students advantages that were unfair to white students.


Politico reported that Rao is also on the president’s list of potential nominees if another Supreme Court seat became available.

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The best thing about Judge Rao. She's bad, but she's not even among the worst of the worst.

Steven Menashin who seriously hates the gays and the women.

Thomas Farr, who is such a racist Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator couldn't put this guy on the court and his opposition killed the nomination.

Brett Talley and Jeff Mateer, two losers who were so dogshit awful, Sen. Chuck Grassley told Trump to stop dumping his garage in the Senate Judiciary Committee's chambers.

Then there was this Matthew Petersen dickhead who totally did a face-plant after crapping his Fruit of the Looms after a Republican senator asked him basic legal questions and he couldn't even guess the answers.

This is your federal judiciary under Donald Trump and these yahoos have lifetime positions.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a brief but pointed dissent Wednesday evening from a Supreme Court order that effectively locked nearly all Central American migrants out of the asylum process. Asylum allows foreign nationals who face certain forms of persecution to seek refuge in the United States.

The Court’s order is temporary, and it only allows the asylum ban to remain in effect while the case is working its way through the courts. It stays a lower court decision that blocked the ban. Though this litigation will continue to percolate in lower courts, other judges are likely to read the Supreme Court’s order as a sign that a majority of the justices will ultimately uphold the ban.

As is often the case with such temporary orders, there was no majority opinion — and thus no explanation of why the Court ruled the way it did or even how each member of the Court voted. We only know that Sotomayor voted against the stay, and that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Sotomayor’s dissent.

The sharpest part of Sotomayor’s opinion may be its final paragraph, which accuses a majority of her colleagues of bypassing the Court’s ordinary procedures in order to bail out the Trump administration.

[G]ranting a stay pending appeal should be an “extraordinary” act. Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal. Historically, the Government has made this kind of request rarely; now it does so reflexively. See, e.g., Vladeck, The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket, 133 Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming Nov. 2019). Not long ago, the Court resisted the shortcut the Government now invites. I regret that my colleagues have not exercised the same restraint here. I respectfully dissent.

To translate this paragraph a bit, a “stay pending appeal” is an order that suspends a lower court’s decision while the case is working its way through an appeals court. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court granted such a stay of a lower court order that blocked a Trump administration policy preventing most Central American migrants from seeking asylum.

As Sotomayor notes, the Supreme Court rarely granted such stays in the past, and for good reason. Because the Supreme Court is the final word on any legal dispute, it typically likes to hang back for a while as lower court judges wrestle with new legal questions. If a lower court hands down an erroneous order, and the Supreme Court does not take immediate action, then the erroneous order may remain in place for months. But a lower court decision will eventually work its way through the appeals process and can be reversed by the Supreme Court if it is wrong about the law.

If the Supreme Court acts prematurely, however, its erroneous decision could last forever because no higher court can overrule the justices.

Thus, out of a healthy fear that its mistakes could linger, the Court historically has preferred to give lower court judges time to consider novel legal questions so that the justices can be informed by those judges’ opinions before the Supreme Court hands down a final word. Sotomayor’s warning is that her Court may no longer be exercising such caution — at least when the Trump administration comes knocking (though it is worth noting that Sotomayor’s dissent also notes a recent case where the Court behaved more cautiously).

A majority of the Supreme Court, in other words, appears to be sacrificing caution and care in favor of a process that makes it easier for the Trump administration to implement its policies....

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