It's not as sexy as waterboarding, but the decrepit state of our courts is a lot more important to the average Kossack (especially, those of us with FBI files), as it is more likely to hit you where you live. Moreover, as John Dean observed in Broken Government, the judiciary has suffered the greatest and most lasting damage from the neo-conservatives' onslaught.
I have despaired as to what to do about it, because federal judges (a) have lifetime appointments, (b) never seem to resign, and (c) are getting a 29% pay raise over their already-bloated salaries. But in my research on an unrelated matter, I stumbled upon an innovative solution.
Technically, our judges don't have lifetime sinecures. What they have is a freehold in office conditioned upon "good Behaviour." U.S. Const. Art. III, § 1. We have a Republican-appointed judge in town who has engaged in some spectacularly bad behavior as of late, but judges are never held to account for it. There is a distinct possibility that that may be about to change.
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