Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Hundreds and thousands of actions go through the federal courts promptly—Judge Messitte and Judge Sullivan are dedicated judges who do not regularly let motions grow stale beyond the standard 6-month target deadline. So why cannot the President get his motions decided in a timely way just like any other litigant in the federal courts? It is all so difficult to understand.**
Seth helps us to understand.
(Parts I and II of this series of posts are here.)
…In other words, in the District of Columbia action, Judge Sullivan’s standing-only ruling did not dispose of the DOJ’s motion to dismiss. The customary or target deadline for resolving such a motion is 6 months—i.e., the 6-month target to resolve the motion was December 7, 2018. December 7 has come and gone. We are now 3 months post-deadline. There has been no call by the court for further clarification, renewed briefing, or renewed oral argument. Yet the DOJ’s motion to dismiss remains unresolved.
Why?
Why the delay?
Where is the decision?
What is going on?
Read Seth’s entire post.
UPDATE: Part II: The Mystery of Senator Richard Blumenthal v. President Donald J Trump
Important points:
In his 60 Minutes interview, former acting FBI director McCabe said:
There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts, to open the investigation. The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt… publicly undermining the effort of the investigation.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/thoughts-andrew-mccabes-60-minutes-interview (emphasis added).
Is not this statement troubling, if not Orwellian? Think or speak the wrong thing—and the government investigates you? In a 2017 blog post on New Reform Club, I wrote about this issue as follows:
https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2018/09/peak-conlawprof-i-and-ii.html
Too short to quote; worth clicking.
It strikes me that the complaint against judicial elections (as voiced on this listserv) is rooted in the absence of life tenure — not elections per se. You could have elections filling judicial vacancies — but with the candidates’ receiving life tenure. And you could have appointments by political authorities to fixed and limited judicial terms — with the possibility of reappointment. The threat to the rule of law (such as it is), lies with the prospective candidate for reelection/reappointment to judicial office biasing his/her decision for self-interested reasons. But that conflict of interest will appear whenever you have terms of limited duration with the possibility of reelection/reappointment. It is not elections per se that create the conflict.
This is an excellent point.