The new judiciary, circa 2022

I could be wrong (I hope I am) but in my opinion, it's a waste of good breath for the so-called “legal experts” on liberal TV to tell us how bad Judge Aileen Cannon is and how her rulings in a recent case are unsupported by established law.

Judge Cannon is the Florida District Court judge who is presiding over the stolen documents case involving former president Donald Trump. She recently granted Trump’s request for a special master to review documents seized in an FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club, and has repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor on virtually every aspect of the case, much to the chagrin of legal scholars who call her decisions wrong-headed and dangerous for the country.

Judge Cannon is a Trump appointee who appears to be giving the former president every advantage as he fights against the U.S. Department of Justice over possession of classified materials. But Judge Cannon is just a symptom of a much larger malady that is affecting justice in America.

The fact is, while many of us were distracted by Trump's rallies and word salad bluster and the way he ran roughshod over the four years of his presidency, he and Senate President Mitch McConnell -- with help from their White House counsel -- were busy reshaping the country's judiciary and filling the bench with far-right appointments suggested by the conservative Federalist Society.

In all, the Senate confirmed 234 Trump judges during his single term, including three associate justices of the Supreme Court (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrett), 54 judges for the United States courts of appeals, 174 judges for United States district courts and three judges for the Court of International Trade.

By comparison, over two full terms, President Barack Obama nominated more than 400 individuals for federal judgeships but only 329 were confirmed by the Senate, most during his first term. After Republicans got control of Congress two years into Obama’s presidency, many of his nominations were blocked by the opposition party. Majority Leader McConnell instituted a virtual blockade of judicial appointments, such that very few nominations were successful during the later Obama years.

When Obama left office, he left behind 128 judicial vacancies, prompting Trump to famously say, “I’ll have so many judges because President Obama left me 128 judges to fill. You just don’t do that.”

(For the record, President Joe Biden has thus far appointed 82 judges including Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, 23 judges for courts of appeals and 58 judges for district courts, but there are 56 nominations still awaiting action in a divided 50-50 Senate.)

So what it all means is this: Now that hundreds of these Trumpian judges have been set in place across the country, the former president can go shopping for a judge who will do his bidding any time he needs a friendly decision. He appears to have found one in Aileen Cannon. In other words, until someone stops him, the law in 2022 is whatever Trump and his judges say it is … and precedent be damned. Going on MSNBC and arguing about how it used to be when civility, decorum and rules of law were in order is an absolute waste of time.

In my opinion, as I said elsewhere, this is the way the court system works these days, and we might as well get used to it, because there's more of it to come. This is not your grandfather's judicial system, and it's only going to get worse.

I'll say it again, I could be wrong ... but I don't believe that I am.