Courting Disaster

Courting Disaster
Senate Republicans spent the end of Barack Obama's term running out the clock on his picks for federal judges, and refusing to even hold hearings for Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. So when Donald Trump took office, he aced a nearly unprecedented number of vacant judgeships and an opportunity to rollback gains in diversity and remake the federal courts for decades.

Judicial vacancies at start of first year         Federal judges serve for life. 16 of Trump's
Reagan              - 35                                   nominee's are 45 or younger.
G.H.W. Bush    - 39                                    42% of Obama's appointees were women.
Clinton             - 107                                  Trump's nominees are 23% women.
G.W.  Bush      - 80
Trump              - 104                                  61% of Trump appointees are affiliated with
                                                                   the conservative Federalist Society.
Judicial nominations in first year             
Reagan            - 43                                    (Source: Mother Jones, March/April 2018).
G.H.W. Bush  - 22
Clinton           - 48
G.W. Bush     - 64
Obama           - 34
Trump            - 69

Trump's judicial nominees
63% white men
19% white women 
13% other men 
4% other women
1% black men

All federal judges
49% white men
24% white women
9% other men
5% other women
8% black men 

Deportation Nation
"ICE arrests are also up under Trump. Between his inauguration and September 30, ICE arrested 42 percent more people for immigration violations than it did over the same period in the previous year.

"ICE is now willing to arrest people with no criminal record; people who are guilty only of immigration violations."

"In the spring of 2017, [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions also issued guidelines to all federal prosecutors, directing them to bring felony criminal charges whenever possible in immigration cases."

"Trump has also invited the public to get involved in the process of nabbing immigrants. This year, the administration set up a hotline called VOICE (Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement), supposedly to provide services to the victims of crimes perpetrated by 'removable aliens,' but an investigative report by 'Splinter' found that the hotline was being used by people to settle family scores -- one caller reported his stepson, another his mother- and sister-in-law, a third his ex-wife, and a fourth her granddaughter's boyfriend -- as well as to report suspected undocumented workers at various businesses and, in one case, people using EBT cards." (Source: "Deportation Nation," The Nation, January 15/22, 2018).

ADDENDUM:
*President Trump's call for  a 25 cent gas tax is said to be delighting transportation groups and infuriating conservatives; however, much of the reaction is that Trump will soon drop the subject and will put no weight behind it. Trump had preciously mused about a 50 cent tax.