Let the record show I covered scores of courtroom cases over the years, and can’t recall a single judge handing down a decision based on the kind of raw, muscular, naked politics now attempted by President Donald Trump.
So, tough luck for the lame duck.
I’ve seen smart judges and dim ones. I’ve seen sober judges and funny ones. One day, I saw Baltimore District Court Judge Robert Gerstung sentence a tough fellow to six months in jail. When the guy muttered, “Sheet, I can do six months standing on my head,” Gerstung replied, “I’m gonna give you six more months, to get you back on your feet again.”
I’ve been in federal courts and municipal courts, stately high courts and chaotic district courts where unruly neighborhoods coughed up their troubles of the day, and the wisest judges made decisions based on both the law and common sense.
But not on politics.
I saw a judge named Ralph Powers Jr., who presided over the trial of Arthur Bremer, the strange, lonely young man who tried to assassinate a presidential candidate named George Wallace, who was governor of Alabama.
As an entire nation watched that packed Upper Marlboro courtroom, and a parade of shrinks and social workers outlined the subtleties of Bremer’s troubled mind, Powers kept testimony going until nearly midnight for a full, utterly exhausting week.
Why such long hours? Because the judge had scheduled his summer vacation for the following week, and nothing was going to stand in his way.
Not even politics, not even in a case involving a presidential candidate.
I give judges more credit than that. They may tick us off in a lot of other ways, but they tend to pay attention to the law – and the laws of arithmetic, especially as applied to vote totals.
So it was unsettling, in the weeks since our 2020 presidential election, to see two things happen.
We’ve seen President Trump’s unwillingness to accept his loss to Joe Biden manifest itself in a torrent of lawsuits.
And we’ve had millions of Americans worried because Trump stocked the courts with conservative Republicans over the last four years, imagining that these judges, beholden to Trump for their jobs, would turn away from the U.S. Constitution and from previous election history, and from basic jurisprudence and from logic itself – and validate Trump’s delusional bid to overturn his loss at the polls.
Instead, we’ve now had about three dozen judges, many of them Trump appointees, stand up for the simple rules of law, of decency and fact.
The latest was last Friday, Nov. 27, in Philadelphia, when U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, rejected the Trump campaign’s courtroom histrionics.
Bibas, writing for a three-judge panel – all three judges appointed by Republican presidents, by the way – said, “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.
“Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Bibas was echoing judges across the country who have rejected similar Trump legal challenges. A week before Bibas, Pennsylvania U.S. District Court Judge Mathew Brann, who’s another Republican, said the Trump campaign’s error-filled complaint, “like Frankenstein’s monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.”
What’s troubling is not just Trump’s attempted perversion of the sacred American election process, but the number of people who worried that these judges were in Trump’s back pocket and that they’d sold their souls when they took Trump’s appointments.
We’ve never had such a loss of faith in the American judicial system. It doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from four years of Trump shredding our faith in a slew of government institutions. It comes from four years of such Trumpian lying, and such skirting along the edges of law and custom, that we’ve lost our sense of what we still believe in.
In the current presidential madness, it’s reassuring to see that politics has its place, and the law has its own place, and in American courtrooms it’s the law (and the laws of arithmetic) still prevailing.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
What does it mean to be fully present with each other and the sacred, asks Maryland-born cultural anthropologist Alanna E. Cooper.
As millions mourn the passing of Stephen Colbert from the airwaves, Michael Olesker looks back on the "institution" of late-night TV.
As he gets ready to leave for California, Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg looks back on his time in Baltimore and his 10 years writing for Jmore.
