photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

Evidence was offered in recent Senate hearings that judicial nominee Emil Bove told subordinates the federal courts might need to be told “fk you” if they opposed the administration. Nevertheless, in a display of their complete, utter and abject submission to President Donald Trump, Republican senators voted on July 29 to confirm the former Justice Department official as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

This result ought not be viewed as a surprise but as proof of the Senate’s surrender to the power of Trump. He’s already shown he could bully the Senate into passing a bill to cut Medicare payments by close to a trillion dollars, into acquitting him of leading an insurrection and into confirming a vaccine-denier to head federal health programs. Now, in their latest profile in cowardice, 50 Republican senators showed beyond any doubt that loyalty and obedience to Trump counts for more than the loyalty and obedience to the Constitution.

In addition to this column, I write novels. I would be hard-pressed to make up a believable character less suited for a federal judgeship than Emil Bove.

Senators heard testimony in confirmation hearings that Bove, a senior official in the Department of Justice, accentuated with an obscenity that the DOJ might have to ignore court rulings if they blocked Trump’s deportation program. Bose claimed he had “no recollection” of such a statement despite corroborating evidence from other whistleblowers. In a July 21 article, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration stood accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in over one-third of the cases where the courts had ruled against them.

Only 11 days after Trump’s inauguration last January, Bove had overseen the dismissal of more than a dozen federal prosecutors who’d worked on cases arising from the Jan. 6 insurrection. He explained he would not “tolerate subversive personnel actions.”

In February, Bove ordered that corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams be dropped in an apparent quid pro quo for his support of Trump administration immigration roundups. Hagan Scotten, a highly regarded federal prosecutor in New York and a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts, refused to be the one who dropped charges against Adams. He wrote to Bove, “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives…. I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion.” The charges were eventually dropped by another official per Bove’s orders.

Over 900 former Justice Department lawyers signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Bove’s confirmation as a federal appellate judge. “It is intolerable to us,” they wrote, “that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land, as it should be intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice.”

Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Charles Grassley abandoned decades of support for whistleblowers by supporting the Bove nomination. He offered this excuse: “My Democratic colleagues made no effort to support whistleblowers who raised alarms about the Biden family.”

Bove’s nomination was in the end confirmed by a 50-49 majority of the Republican-majority Senate.

Trump has demonstrated his untrammeled power over the Senate and the federal judiciary. He nominated a manifestly unfit candidate to an appellate court to show he could force what was once known as “the world’s greatest deliberate body” to kiss his ring. His Justice Department defies court rulings to show judicial power relies on nothing more than nonexistent good faith. If a seat opens on the Supreme Court while Trump is in office and the Republicans still have a Senate majority, I’d bet on Bove as his nominee.

On Dec. 23, 1776, the patriot Thomas Paine wrote, “THESE are the times that try men’s souls…. He that stands by (his country) now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

We Americans need to heed Paine by waking up and standing up — for our country, for our Constitution and for the institutions meant to protect them.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.