and by and large, it's looking really good.
Americans, save for lawyers, really know very little about their legal system. This is no surprise, most people most places don't know that much about a good functioning legal system. Average people are in fact a lot more likely to know a lot about their society's legal system if its corrupt and broken. The American one isn't.
Indeed, its enduring this stress test remarkably well, although that's not a surprise. The post election Trump lawsuits have never had any chance of success and if they were meeting with success, that would be the really distressing thing.
None the less, what Americans are seeing is that it really doesn't make much of a difference if a judge is a Republican or Democratic appointee in regard to a flatly meritless suit, by and large. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, but they are rare exceptions. Indeed, if the Trump administration was depending upon "Republican judges" to rule in their favor as they are Republicans, they were massively misinformed.
So the judiciary is really looking good.
What Americans are also seemingly learning, if they care to learn it, is that simply getting in the door of the courthouse doesn't mean anything. Early on there were some really naïve commentators that assumed filing a lawsuit meant it has merits. It means nothing of the sort.
Indeed over the weekend Chris Christie called the Trump legal effort a "national embarrassment", which it isn't. . . its an international embarrassment. Apparently it was such an embarrassment that even that team disavowed a lawyer over the weekend who had theories about dead Venezuelan dictators and the like, who claimed that new suits to be filed today would be "Biblical".
What not all people have picked up, however, is the mechanics of these dismissals. The one that came on Saturday by a Pennsylvania Federal Judge was "with prejudice" and indicated that the complaint had lacked evidence or merits.
What this means is that it can't be refiled and that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that they had any facts or supporting law. I note that as there are some commenters out there in the Trump camp who keep claiming that "the judges haven't seen the evidence yet". If they haven't, that's because the Trump legal assemblage hasn't submitted any, and that would be because there isn't any. You don't get to hold back your prima facie case for another day.
Indeed, on Meet The Press the South Dakota GOP Senator who was trying to downplay things as routine, more or less, and merely procedural noted that the judges hadn't been presented with evidence yet. Well, Senator, they're never going to. That ship didn't dock in the harbor and sank in the bay. If you follow the Dilbert author Scott Adams, who I have been as I like Dilbert but whom I'm going to cease doing as its all political, you'll see a statement that all of this is probably procedural while Trump's lawyers dig for the real dirt, which in terms of an analogy is a little like saying the Germans had retreated into the Berlin city boundaries in April 1945 while they looked for a real winning strategy. No, they shot their bolt.
So, the public is getting a series of lessons. One is that the thing lawyers claim the most about the judicial system, that its a great one that really works and is free of improper influence, is being proven true. A thing they already suspected, that being a lawyer doesn't make you noble or doesn't mean that you won't advance baloney arguments right up to the point of sanction is also being proven true. At the same time, however, it's being shown that lawyers are a lot more careful about advancing baloney theories in court than they are in the press.
The question remaining, I suppose, is the degree to which innocents who were fooled by the claims of legal merit on these claims will be willing to accept that they never did have merit. That's an important question. If they don't, the legal community will bear some guilt for that.
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