How to Break a Judiciary, Part 2: Difficult Working Conditions
Guest Essay by Alyssa King In yesterday’s first installment in this series, I located the Trump administration’s assault on the courts and the bar in the tradition of authoritarian consolidation of control of legal institutions. I then described methods by which authoritarians ensure that legal challenges to their actions go before friendly judges: hiring friends, firing enemies, and altering jurisdiction. Today I focus on how working conditions shape judges’ ability to discover, and effectively respond to, illegal government action. These issues range from the deceptively benign—all the good faith and experience in the world is sometimes little match for a computer that will not turn on—to the overt threats. Difficult Working Conditions The judiciary is a bureaucracy and as a bureaucracy is vulnerable to the same techniques—hiring and funding freezes, cancelled contracts, and lockouts—that are currently causing harm to so much of the non-partisan executive branch. Judges a...