The Division of Justice is a joke. And why wouldn’t it’s? Beneath Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi, the DOJ now not does the work of justice. As an alternative, it does the work of grievance, staffed by unqualified true believers.
To be honest, it’s not simply that the attorneys in President Donald Trump and Bondi’s orbit are unqualified. They’re additionally fully unhinged, pushed by a poisonous brew of bigotry and resentment. How else would we get the spectacle of the pinnacle of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, explaining to the Wall Road Journal that her methodology for locating civil rights complaints is to get up at 6 AM to troll X for discrimination claims—lots of them about universities?
Does it even must be stated that this isn’t how the Civil Rights Division sometimes handles complaints?
Complaints about colleges had been traditionally dealt with by the Division of Schooling’s Workplace of Civil Rights, however because the Trump administration chips away at that division, it appears to have shifted complaints—at the very least these involving faculties and universities—to Dhillon.
If you happen to’d prefer to see what a standard authorities report about civil rights complaints appears like, right here’s the Schooling Division’s report from the Biden period. It covers the variety of complaints obtained and resolved, compliance evaluations undertaken by the division, varieties of complaints mostly obtained, insurance policies and truth sheets for every main class of discrimination complaints, illustrative circumstances, authorities staffing ranges, and extra.
However, hey, Dhillon has X. So what does she do after her early morning scan of a social media web site overrun by bots and white supremacists? After compiling “a list of new horrors,” she “text[s] her deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.”
So the work of the Civil Rights Division is now ruled by randos on X, and Dhillon picks and chooses which 280-character screed warrants the total would possibly of a DOJ investigation, after which orders her deputies to … what? DM the X account to get extra data? Deal with the submit itself as a grievance and open an investigation into a university proper then and there?
A minimum of Dhillon has a variety of free time for this, on condition that the DOJ has killed police reform consent agreements, eradicated the fitting to convey disparate influence complaints—that are the majority of civil rights complaints—and is usually not pursuing voting rights circumstances until the top consequence can be fewer folks voting.
The true function of Dhillon’s job, in her personal phrases, is that “we don’t just slow down the woke. We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch’s goals.”
However the Trump administration isn’t content material with stopping on the DOJ; it’s additionally going to stuff the judiciary with the hackiest of hacks, and it doesn’t need the pesky American Bar Affiliation to level out their lack of {qualifications}, per Bondi’s letter to the ABA, which was offered in an unique preview to Fox Information.
Let’s cease there for a minute. This isn’t how the federal government works. Bondi’s letter to the ABA is an official piece of presidency communication, not one thing to be dangled in entrance of servile media retailers as an “exclusive.”
As of Thursday afternoon, a number of hours after the breathless Fox Information piece, there’s nonetheless no announcement on the DOJ web site, nor an official copy of the letter. However you can discover the letter in full over on X, posted by former Trump felony protection legal professional/present unqualified high-level DOJ appointee Todd Blanche.
So the one method to study massive adjustments on the DOJ is to attend for an announcement to pop up on absolutely the worst social media platform. A completely regular method to run the federal government.
Trump isn’t the primary president to be sad in regards to the ABA rating a judicial nominee as unqualified. President George W. Bush iced out the ABA, barring the group from receiving future names of nominees earlier than they had been submitted to the Senate.
And Trump’s anger on the ABA goes again to his first time period, when the group deemed 10 of his nominees unqualified. This made Trump so unhappy that he posted a Nationwide Overview op-ed on an official authorities web site about how his nominees had been too certified, so there.
Now in his second time period, Trump is gearing up to decide on essentially the most unqualified partisans as judges, so he can’t have the ABA hanging about saying unhealthy issues like “they have no trial experience” or “they said queer people should be driven out of public life.”
Trump merely isn’t occupied with listening to why his felony protection legal professional and DOJ bully Emil Bove isn’t certified to be a decide.
This time round, the Trump administration additionally received’t be directing judicial nominees to supply waivers that might permit the ABA to entry details about them. Terrific. The one factor Trump’s nomination course of wants is much less transparency. Wouldn’t need the general public to know that Trump is remodeling the judiciary right into a handmaiden to energy, solely present to assist him obtain his horrible objectives. Finest to maintain that each one beneath his hat.
