Column: Rejecting this federal judge nominee should be easy. Don’t hold your breath

It’s one thing for Senate Republicans to acquiesce in confirming President Trump’s Cabinet of crackpots and agents of retribution, on the argument that a chief executive has the prerogative to pick his posse. It’s quite another matter for sycophantic senators to shirk their constitutional advice-and-consent power when the president’s nominee is up for a lifetime seat on the federal bench — a job that demands loyalty to the Constitution, not a president.

And yet, Republican senators appear primed for another surrender, this time in favor of one of the worst judicial nominations ever: Emil Bove, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer and for the past six months his enforcer in the Justice Department.

On Thursday, the Republican-controlled (rather, Trump-controlled) Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on whether it, and ultimately the full Senate, should confirm Bove to be a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Nearly 20 years ago, that court, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the Virgin Islands, was a springboard to the Supreme Court for another right-wing activist, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

It’s hardly far-fetched to imagine that Trump might similarly elevate a Judge Bove, should the president get a chance to pick a fourth Supreme Court justice, so fully has Bove established his fealty to Trump — the credential that may matter most to the president. And that was before a whistleblower alleged last month that Bove told Justice Department lawyers that they must be ready to say “f— you” to judges who stood in the way of Trump’s deportations.

As Trump posted on social media in announcing his pick, Bove would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

In pre-Trump times, Bove’s nomination would be an easy call: No. And if ever there was a time for the Senate to use its power to send a president that message, it’s now. Trump will be gone after four years (his teasing about a third term notwithstanding). The 44-year-old Bove would be on the bench for perhaps four decades.

Congress is supposed to be a coequal branch of government, and the Senate’s power to confirm presidential nominations every bit as weighty as a president’s power to make them. The Senate should consider Bove not merely unqualified to be a judge but disqualified.

Don’t just take it from me. “Mr. Bove’s egregious record of mistreating law enforcement officers, abusing power, and disregarding the law itself disqualifies him for this position,” wrote 80 former federal and state judges, appointees from both parties, in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Confirming him, they said, “would not only compromise the integrity of the courts, it would set a dangerous precedent that judicial power may be wielded in service of personal fealty rather than constitutional duty.”

As for that egregious record: Before Bove’s association with Trump, he was a Justice Department prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he was denied a promotion and later nearly demoted after an internal inquiry into his bullying behavior. Bove’s subsequent work in private practice defending Trump in federal and state cases vaulted him after the election to the top ranks of the Trump Justice Department.

Since then, Bove has executed a purge of lawyers and FBI agents who investigated and prosecuted the Jan. 6 pro-Trump insurrectionists. He engineered the dropping of federal bribery charges against New York City Mayor — and sometimes Trump ally — Eric Adams, which provoked a wave of resignations, and astonishingly damning parting shots, among prosecutors working on the Adams case. And on the eve of Bove’s confirmation hearing in June, a whistleblower dropped a 27-page memo (and later, corroborative texts and emails) alleging Bove’s lead role in the administration’s pattern of ignoring court orders and making false statements to judges to facilitate Trump’s deportations drive.

The whistleblower, Justice Department veteran Erez Reuveni, was no liberal Deep State mole; in Trump 1.0, he’d repeatedly defended the president’s anti-immigrant agenda in court. But, he told the New Yorker, “Trump 1.0, they didn’t say ‘F— you’ to the courts.”

Bove has denied suggesting that at a March meeting. “I am not anybody’s henchman,” he insisted, implausibly, to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who for decades has styled himself as a champion of whistleblowers, rejected Democrats’ demand for a hearing with Reuveni before the panel votes on Bove.

Of the committee’s majority Republicans, only North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis has been seen as a potential vote against Bove. After all, he opposed Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and, under fire from the president, announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, that he was looking forward to voting as he pleased from then on. Just last week he told CNN he wouldn’t support any nominees who condoned the Jan. 6 riots, which should rule out Bove. Yet that same day Tillis said he’d likely vote for the nominee. His office did not respond to questions seeking to reconcile the statements.

Should the committee approve Bove’s nomination, sending it to the full Senate for a vote, it’s difficult to identify four Republicans there who’d oppose him, the minimum number needed to doom confirmation assuming all Democrats vote no. Yet failure to reject him would be the Senate’s version of Bove’s profane message, delivered not only to the courts and the Constitution, but to Congress’ own integrity.

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