Random thoughts while fending off a cold…
To paraphrase a beloved but pretty lousy musical, the hills are alive with the sound of impeachment. The Republicans are threatening to impeach the heads of Homeland Security and the FBI. And that’s just for starters. I guess they figure that their constituency put them back in charge of the House (albeit by the width of a razor blade) in order to exact Trumpian style revenge on his Democratic oppressors and to do nothing else.
Well, good luck with that. In the event that they can get Articles of Impeachment out of their Chamber (which is by no means clear despite their majority status) the damn things will be DOA when they hit the Senate. It will sound and fury signifying nothing as Shakespeare might (and did) put it. Or a colossal waste of time and money as I would.
Such foolishness is not confined to the Red side of the bench. There is a move afoot amongst earnest and weak-minded liberal types to impeach US District Judge Aileen Cannon who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump. You may recall that Her Honor was the one who granted a Motion (Petition? Complaint? I was never real clear on what they called the damn thing she decided she had jurisdiction over) to basically stay the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified and unclassified documents he took with him into private life. She also appointed a Special Master to go through the docs before allowing the FBI to get its mitts on them.
Long story short. Thursday the 11th Circuit reversed her outright and dismissed the case brought by Trump to try to queer the investigation into his retention of theses docs. Words and phrases such as “eviscerated” and “slam dunk” have been bandied about in the press to describe DOJ’s victory therein.
Not content with the Rule of Law being followed at last in this whole transaction, as was alluded to earlier, certain groups are calling for the Impeachment of Judge Cannon.
This is stupid. Even stupider than what the Republicans are fixing to turn loose come January. Look. If committing error is a “high crime and misdemeanor” than we’re going to have a bunch of judges back in private practice. No doubt that Aileen Cannon was wrong on the law. She was so wrong on the law even I knew she was heading for reversal at warp speed. But being wrong is not an impeachable offense. And thank God for that.
US District Judges toil, for the most part, pretty much in obscurity. One has to screw up pretty bad to get into the zeitgeist. And as some of my colleagues have suggested, perhaps this is Aileen Cannon’s legacy. She will be forever remembered as the Trump appointed judge, sitting in the District where he resides (and whose forum was pretty clearly placed in a grocery cart) who issued one of the most idiotic decisions in the history of the United States Criminal Code and Code of Civil Procedure, two tomes which are seldom mentioned in the same sentence.
Sure it looked bad. Really bad. But the Nation got bailed out by the Rule of Law, which has been popping up more frequently lately. And thank God for that.
Life tenure is a pretty sweet deal. Unless the legacy of being thought of as a partisan hack or an incompetent follows one along in the discharge of that tenure.
Now guys like me know her name. That’s punishment enough.
