2020—“I think it needed to be said,” asserts octogenarian federal district judge Lynn S. Adelman in defense of his 35-page political screed titled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.”
In fact, Adelman says nothing that hasn’t already been said, over and over, in the fever swamps of the Left. He condemns Chief Justice Roberts’s metaphor of a judge as umpire as a “masterpiece of disingenuousness,” charges that “the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy,” alleges that the Court’s rulings “constitute a direct assault on the right of poor people and minorities to vote,” and complains that the “Republican Party has been particularly afflicted by the concentration of wealth at the top,” “has also become more partisan, more ideological and more uncompromising,” and has displayed a “zealous partisanship” on judicial appointments that “reminds one of nothing so much as … those fervent defenders of slavery who pushed the South into the Civil War.” (And that’s all just in his screed’s first eight pages. How could anyone read further?)
Adelman, a longtime liberal state senator who was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1997, might be said to epitomize the judge as politician in a robe—except that he is known to appear frequently in his courtroom without even bothering with the pretense of a robe.