I wish the headline above were an exaggeration. It’s not. From TPM:
Senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway said in an interview Sunday morning that a federal judge's ruling "really doesn't affect" the President's executive order banning refugees and immigrants from certain countries from entering the United States.
"The judge in Brooklyn, the Obama appointee judge in Brooklyn's stay of order really doesn't affect the executive order at all, because the executive order is meant to be prospective," Conway said on "Fox News Sunday."
Publicly pointing out the appointment history of a Federal Judge when that Judge rules against a given Executive Branch policy is usually the province of pundits and news outlets. It’s never been the province of the Executive Branch, because the institutional damage caused by undermining the public’s faith in our Judiciary has always been considered too much of a risk.
What Conway does in this statement is begin the process of delegitimizing the Federal Judiciary in the public mind by setting up all future conflicts the Courts may have with Trump’s policies as rooted in political ideology. This is a deliberate choice of language by Conway, and we should expect more of it as Court challenges to Trump’s policies begin to mount. A Fascist state cannot and will not accept its actions being fettered by the Courts. There has to be an ulterior reason a Court rules against the Fascist, and that reason must be rooted in an opposing, biased political ideology.
The Courts, particularly the Federal Courts, are going to be our last line of defense against this regime, and in fact they are the last line of defense for the American Republic.
Trump’s people just demonstrated they are well aware of this.