Even Trump-appointed judges are resisting authoritarian ploys

Judges have refused to buckle under or bow down

Donald Trump certainly nominated some of the most unfit partisan judges ever to make it to the federal bench. U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sitting in Amarillo, Texas has become the poster boy for outrageous, ideologically-extreme pronouncements on abortion. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon for the Southern District of Florida issued a series of indefensible, unhinged rulings in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for taking top-secret documents to the bathrooms of Mar-a-Lago. (Even the notoriously right-wing 11^th Circuit slapped her down at one point.)

However, as we are witnessing, not all Trump appointees are cut from the same cloth. When it comes to basic democratic principles, even his appointees—like judges appointed by other presidents—have proven their mettle by harshly rebuking MAGA attacks on the rule of law.

On Monday, a Trump appointee, U. S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers, II from the Eastern District of North Carolina, put the kibosh on a MAGA scheme to steal the November 2024 election of a progressive judge to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Judge Myers explained, “Six months ago, millions of North Carolinians exercised their right to vote.” In a race for the Supreme Court of North Carolina, the results showed:

“Justice Allison Riggs led Judge Jefferson Griffin (a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals) by 734 votes: 2,770,412 (50.01%) to 2,769,678 (49.99%). In the aftermath of the election, Judge Griffin filed hundreds of election protests across North Carolina’s 100 counties.”

Myers had harsh words for the refusal to accept the results of a duly held election. “[The] case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals.” He continued, “This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible.”

He sternly said no to both questions.

Citing Bush v. Gore, Myers said Griffin could not cherry-pick the electorate seeking to exclude certain voters in select districts to rig the election in his favor. “Judge Griffin challenged the absentee ballots cast by overseas military and civilian voters in no more than 6 of those 100 counties,” Myers explained. Imposing stricter requirements on certain voters is patently unconstitutional.

Likewise, Myers found that Griffin’s effort to overturn the results ran afoul of due process. “The court observes a unifying principle: retroactive changes to election procedures raise serious due process concerns, particularly where those changes result in invalidating the votes of individuals who cast ballots in reliance on previously established rules.”

Griffin’s attempt to disqualify people who (he alleged) had never resided in the state failed because a substantial number of them had been misclassified. Imposing a new burden—i.e., forcing them to “cure” their misclassification in a very brief time, violated due process principles as well, Myers noted.

This reasoned opinion concluded: “The court concludes that the retroactive invalidation of absentee ballots cast by overseas military and civilian voters violates their substantive due process rights, and that the cure process violates their equal protection rights. The court further concludes that the lack of any cure process for individuals erroneously designated as Never Residents violates their procedural due process rights and represents an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.”

Put more succinctly:

“That principle will be familiar to anyone who has played a sport or board game. You establish the rules before the game. You don't change them after the game is done.”

Two things are striking about the opinion. First, the specious, absurd lengths to which Griffin went to contravene the will of the voters serves as a reminder that election denial is alive and well. If shameless Republicans and their hired gun counsel are willing to argue anything to secure victory, then democracy is on tenuous ground. Americans have only one party that abides by the core democratic principle that the voters hold the power.

And second, Griffin was aided and abetted by several preposterous state court rulings from hyper-partisan judges. If not for a federal court judge loyal to his oath, Griffin might have pulled this off, opening up the floodgates to a slew of MAGA suits aiming to ensure Republicans never lose an election.

Myers is not the only Trump-appointed judge to honor his judicial oath. Recently, U. S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., was the first Judge to strike down Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelans. He minced no words in holding that “the historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”

Make no mistake: these judges are not squishy progressives. Their rulings on everything from discrimination to guns to reproductive rights to tort liability may have been averse to the interests of progressives. But on matters of fundamental democratic governance, the sanctity of elections, and due process, they have not shied away from upholding their constitutional oaths. (Recall the more than 60 cases in which judges rebuffed Trump’s 2020 election challenges.)

No wonder Trump is lashing out at judges and threatening to impeach them. No wonder his lackeys have arrested Judge Hannah C. Dugan in Wisconsin state court on frivolous grounds.

Of greater relevance is what we are seeing from Chief Justice John Roberts, who rejected calls for impeaching federal judges; and from more than 150 former judges across the ideological spectrum, who wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, condemning Dugan’s arrest. The judiciary is rebuffing Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, for now. They must remain vigilant and uncowed if democracy is to survive.