STRASBOURG — The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) wants to scrap the directly elected European Parliament, shrink the European Commission and let Berlin opt out of common EU policies. That’s according to the party’s policy program, which party leader Alice Weidel will present at the European Parliament on Wednesday.

The AfD’s push comes as far-right parties look to gain ground across Europe. The party’s recent victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have given it fresh momentum.

Last week, Marine Le Pen was in Brussels to outline her plan for the EU if she becomes French president. She vowed to halve Paris’ contributions to the budget if she gets to power, and to turn the European Commission into a “secretariat” in the service of its member countries.

“I’m not fooled by what the European Commission wants to do. The European Commission wants to turn itself into a state; we do not. And so we will stand in its way,” Le Pen said. 

The AfD policy paper, obtained by Brussels Playbook, says the AfD would not seek to leave the EU or eurozone at first. Instead, it wants to renegotiate the EU treaties and cut the bloc’s powers, institutions and budget. Weidel will present her strategy at an event on Wednesday afternoon entitled “Our new deal for Europe.”

The party wants to replace direct European Parliament elections with delegates appointed by national parliaments, reduce the Commission’s role to purely administrative and transfer decision-making to national capitals. It also wants to replace the EU’s top court with an arbitration tribunal.

The plan calls for slashing and capping the EU budget, freezing staffing numbers and abolishing agencies. The AfD would use its veto power to scrap revenue from VAT and plastics taxes, and threaten to halt Berlin’s contributions to the common budget to force through the reforms it demands.

“If Brussels refuses the path of reform, this veto will be used to block future EU financing legislation and drastically reduce Germany’s contributions,” the AfD plan says.

The AfD also wants to give larger eurozone economies more voting power at the European Central Bank — giving Germany a say in monetary policy — and reject the digital euro.

Berlin should seek exemptions from EU rules on migration, taxation, social policy, defense and common borrowing, the party argues. If the EU’s green policies are not scrapped, and no substantial changes take place to industrial, agriculture, and financial policies, an opt out in these areas would be sought too.

The paper identifies 2029 — when the next European Parliament and German federal elections will take place — as the moment to start implementing the reforms.

“In 2029, something we have scarcely dared to hope for may become reality: a patriotic, right-wing majority in the European Parliament is coming within reach.”

If its reforms fail, the AfD says it would put Germany’s EU membership to a referendum.

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.

Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts. 

In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942. 

More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country. 

Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate. 

Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.

Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance. 

NEWRY, Northern Ireland — The former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, Jeffrey Donaldson, received a 15-year prison sentence Thursday for sexually abusing two schoolgirls and continuing for decades into their adulthood.

Donaldson, 63, kept his hands clasped together but offered no visible reaction as Judge Paul Ramsey said the former Democratic Unionist Party leader must serve an 11-year sentence for raping one girl and a further 4-year term for sexually abusing another.

Donaldson has been behind bars since June, when a jury found him guilty of 18 counts of sexually abusing the two women — identified in court only as Victim A and Victim B — when they were children. The listed offenses ran from 1985 to 2008.

Ramsey, addressing a packed Newry Crown Court, read from the two victims’ statements, which described abuse that began when they were 7 or 8 years old. One of the victims described recurring nightmares: “I wonder what it is like not to be afraid at night.”

The judge noted how Donaldson, who is appealing the conviction, had “doubled down on his denials” over what he called the veteran politician’s “catastrophic descent into disgrace.”

Donaldson’s former party, which denounced him immediately after his 2024 arrest and scrubbed him from the DUP website, said in a statement Thursday that Donaldson “deserves every day of the lengthy prison sentence he has to serve” for what it described as “vile and disgusting crimes.”

“Our first thoughts are again with the innocent victims who, having suffered such evil, were retraumatized through giving evidence at the trial. They deserve our compassion, support and respect,” the DUP statement said.

Donaldson was an MP representing Lagan Valley from 1997 to 2024, first for the moderate Ulster Unionist Party and then — after belatedly breaking with the party over its support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 — as a member of the hard-line DUP.

Donaldson became DUP leader in 2021, when he oversaw the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government in a bitter dispute over the region’s peculiar post-Brexit trade rules. Just weeks before his arrest, he again played a key role in reviving the coalition, the cornerstone of the Good Friday peace deal he had once rejected.

In March 2024, Donaldson was arrested in his secluded County Down home and charged alongside his wife, Eleanor. She was subsequently deemed by the Newry judge not mentally fit to stand trial on charges of aiding and abetting his crimes.

The U.K. government in July removed Donaldson from membership in the Privy Council, a body of parliamentary advisers to King Charles III. The king also stripped him of his knighthood.

Donaldson has been placed in an isolated hospital wing at Northern Ireland’s Maghaberry Prison, alongside other convicted sex offenders, to protect him from potential assaults from other prisoners. He reportedly is spending much of his days behind bars doing puzzles and reading the Bible.

Federal authorities arrested a Saudi national employed at OpenAI and charged him with planting a recording device in a company’s executive conference room, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

On or around Sept. 30, OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device inserted into the back of a television in an executive conference room located in one of its San Francisco offices. The company determined that the device was installed approximately a couple days prior, concealed in toilet paper. The contents of the device were encrypted, according to the DOJ.

The Department of Justice said in a news release that the employee, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Friday and appeared in federal court Tuesday. OpenAI confirmed the incident on social media and said that it was supporting the FBI’s investigation.

“We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier,” OpenAI said in its statement. “At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.”

Alfozan used a “productivity tool” to inquire about the company’s meeting rooms, calendars, and “leadership and exec” locations, according to OpenAI’s complaint to the DOJ. A chatbot account associated with his spouse also indicated that the user submitted prompts in September relating to installing and remote accessing a recording device.

The DOJ said that CCTV footage showed Alfozan, who had been employed as an engineer by OpenAI since July 2025, near and inside the conference room on multiple occasions before the device was discovered. Meetings in the conference room “frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities,” according to the complaint.

The company also discovered another recording device in one of Alfozan’s bags left in the office.

“We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest,” OpenAI said. “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”

The Saudi national, who has since been fired by OpenAI, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release if convicted, according to the DOJ.

“For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California said in a statement. “This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint.”

EU lawmakers urged the bloc’s executive to robustly defend the International Criminal Court against U.S. sanctions in a letter sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday and obtained by POLITICO.

“We formally call for the urgent deployment of all instruments at our disposal to protect the International Criminal Court from the consequences of these sanctions,” reads the letter, signed by 58 MEPs, led by ECON chair and S&D lawmaker Aurore Lalucq and EPP Dutch lawmaker Dirk Gotink.

They ask the Commission boss “to draw a clear line towards the US administration.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to demolish the ICC “brick by brick.” Washington has already sanctioned several judges, including judges from France, Italy and Slovenia, after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

U.S. sanctions announced on Friday risk to cut off the whole ICC from the financial system, which runs on the dollar, and from the majority of tech service providers.

Lawmakers said the sanctions are “an attack by a foreign power on an entity on EU territory, using our own financial system.” They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as Blocking Statute, that would prevent EU firms from complying with the U.S. sanctions as soon as a 180-day grace period ends.

After a meeting in Luxembourg, foreign affairs ministers agreed to seek pragmatic solutions to make it possible for EU firms to continue to work with the Court, according to two diplomats. MEPs called for a fiercer reaction.

“The survival of the values the European Union upholds is at stake, as is Europe’s autonomy and credibility in protecting its citizens and entities against foreign sanctions,” their letter reads. “This is about the survival of the Union itself.”

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant rejected furious accusations from the U.K. region’s unionists Monday that he had “bent the knee” to Irish republicans blocking a long-disputed Protestant march.

Bryant told the House of Commons that his decision to ban what had been a legally authorized parade by the Orange Order — a pro-British Protestant brotherhood reviled by many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics — had been taken principally to avoid violence. Thousands led by Sinn Fein, the main Irish republican party, had spent nearly two weeks blocking the Orangemen’s intended path down the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the town of Portadown, but police kept the two sides apart.  

“The Orange Order obtained a legal right to parade, but … upholding the determination does not come at any cost. Upholding the law also means judiciously preventing serious disorder,” Bryant said in defense of his intervention Friday night.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.

Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.”

But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay.

“I utterly reject the charge that I have in any way succumbed to mob rule. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.”

He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s.

The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling. Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets.

A separate Belfast High Court hearing gave the go-ahead for Portadown’s Orange lodge to pursue a legal challenge against both Bryant and Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. That case will be heard starting next Monday.

Boutcher, rejecting unionist calls for him to resign, issued his own lengthy defense of his officers’ management of the Portadown standoff. He appealed to both sides to respect a legal process that could take months to conclude — including potential charges against senior Sinn Féin figures involved in the Garvaghy Road blockade.

The legal fight over whose rights should prevail is fracturing Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, a bitterness on full display Monday night at Stormont, the center of government on a hill overlooking Belfast.

After a three-hour debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly, unionist members voted unanimously to oust the four Sinn Féin ministers from their supposed unity government. Unionists accused all four, led by First Minister Michelle O’Neill, of breaking their ministerial pledge to uphold the law of the land by joining and encouraging the Garvaghy Road protests.

O’Neill accused her accusers on the other side of the chamber of being reactionary bigots.

“It’s no surprise to me that the three unionist parties have signed up to this motion. They have never accepted the reality that an Irish republican is now the first minister, and a woman at that. They have never accepted equality,” she said.

The unionists’ motion of no confidence bore no legal weight because of Stormont’s peculiar power-sharing rules. This would have required Sinn Féin members to join the unionists in voting to punish their own leaders.

In the end, four motions — seeking the expulsion from office for a year of O’Neill, Finance Minister John O’Dowd, Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald and Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins — all failed on virtually identical sectarian tests. While 33 to 34 unionists voted to kick out each one, 35 lawmakers from Sinn Féin and a smaller Irish nationalist party, the SDLP, voted to keep them in office.

O’Neill’s official co-leader of Northern Ireland’s four-party government, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists, said she understood the law as a barrister — and her government colleague had broken it by leading a “mob” that included well-known figures from multiple IRA factions “threatening violence and disorder.”

BRUSSELS — Ryanair has accused rivals Lufthansa and Air France-KLM of trying to ground the low-cost carrier by alleging that its ownership structure violates EU rules.

The two legacy airlines, which face growing competition from budget carriers, belong to the European Network Airlines Association, a lobby group that has filed a legal challenge over Ryanair’s share ownership.

“Now they’re in the Irish High Court seeking to have our license suspended and Ryanair grounded,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said Thursday in Brussels.

The association confirmed to POLITICO that it has spent months urging EU and Irish aviation authorities to investigate whether Ryanair complies with the bloc’s ownership and control rules.

Under those rules, airlines must be majority-owned and effectively controlled by EU nationals or entities to hold an EU operating license. ENAA argues that Ryanair no longer meets those requirements, pointing to the airline’s March announcement that only 30% of its shares are held by EU nationals. O’Leary, an Irish citizen, holds 4% of the stock.

When the Irish Aviation Authority seemed “reluctant to engage on the matter,” ENAA took the matter to court. If Ryanair loses the case, it could be forced to change its ownership structure. The carrier’s operating license would only be suspended if it does not comply with the verdict.

Ryanair has rejected the allegations, arguing that its non-EU shareholders do not have voting rights, which means the airline is under EU control.

In an emailed statement, Ryanair accused its rivals of attempting “to restrict competition and choice for EU air travel” by challenging its operating license.

Grounding risk seen as remote

Augusto Viansson Ponte, a London-based director at Alton Aviation Consultancy, doubted that the legal case would be easily dismissed, but also said it was unlikely that Ryanair would lose its operating license.

“ENAA’s request is sufficiently well-founded to justify examination, but it is way too early to say that Ryanair is violating the rules,” he said.

Regardless of the legal outcome, Viansson Ponte said that a “likely first step would be corrective measures, not immediate grounding.”

Even if the court rules against the budget airline, Ryanair would have several options to address any compliance problems, the analyst said. 

“Ryanair could restrict non-EU [share] purchases, facilitate transfers of shares to EU investors, implement targeted share buybacks or restructure its licensed subsidiaries for example,” he said, adding that the process “should be manageable” for the airline.

Enemies in court, friends in Brussels

Despite their spat, Ryanair, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM all belong to the Brussels-based Airlines for Europe (A4E) lobby, and all are pushing for a reform of the Air Services Regulation, which sets the rules for operating in the EU, including ownership and control.

The lobby’s members jointly support providing “more flexibility … and tackle the risks linked to this change,” they said in feedback to the Commission.

“The potential way forward is to allow institutional investors from selected third countries to hold a limited percentage of shares … which would count towards the EU share of ownership,” the joint position adds. 

If EU lawmakers adopt the proposal, “that would allow a greater access to liquidity in those markets for airlines,” said easyJet CEO Kenton Jarvis, whose company is set to be acquired by U.S. investment firm Apollo.

However, the legal battle between the Irish budget airline and legacy carriers may fracture A4E. O’Leary threatened on Thursday at an A4E press conference to leave the lobby group unless the legal case is dropped by the end of the year. 

A4E later acknowledged that its members “may have differing views on certain issues, [but] we share a common interest in advancing our collective work for the benefit of European passengers, particularly in an increasingly complex and costly regulatory environment.”

Neither Lufthansa nor Air France-KLM commented on O’Leary’s threat to leave A4E.

LUXEMBOURG — The European Parliament can’t review the secret ballot votes that blocked the far right from key positions, its lawyers told a court in Luxembourg today.

In court, the Parliament’s lawyer, Niklas Görlitz, said: “The results of the vote are definitive. There’s no mechanism in our rules to redo the vote.”

The EU’s General Court was hearing a case brought by the Patriots for Europe group, which is challenging the long-standing firewall set up by Europe’s centrist forces — the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, the liberals of Renew, and the Greens — to keep the far right away from decision-making. 

Specifically, the Patriots are contesting elections in which the chairs and vice-chairs of parliamentary committees were selected after the 2024 EU election. Those jobs were filled through voting in secret ballots. The group is also questioning the composition of the Parliament’s international delegations, saying its lawmakers were kept away from key roles.

Lawyers for the Patriots — home of France’s National Rally, Spain’s Vox and Hungary’s Fidesz, among others — said its MEPs being kept from top committee jobs was a “categorical exclusion” and it was “not acceptable” for the Parliament’s third-largest party to be locked out of these positions.

The Patriots have 85 lawmakers in the 720-strong chamber. Top jobs in Parliament come up for grabs again in January 2027, giving the Patriots another chance to try to get into powerful positions. 

Hungarian lawmaker Kinga Gál, the Patriots’ first vice-president, has previously called the mainstream parties’ actions “outrageous” and “against the rule of law.”

The Patriots’ lawyer, Azelio Fulmini, referred to the EU institution’s own description of representation.

“This proportional distribution of leadership positions within Parliament prevents the dominance of political life by just one or two large political groups, ensuring that smaller political groups also have a say in setting the political agenda,” he read.

“I don’t know if there’s a clearer declaration than that,” he said, adding that he was reading directly “from the European Parliament’s website.”

Görlitz told the court that all groups can nominate candidates for key jobs, adding: “Not getting the votes … doesn’t justify your tribunal getting involved in our affairs.”

The Patriots’ lawyer accused the Parliament of going beyond the neutral administration of committee elections, arguing that officials helped implement a political agreement designed to keep the group out of leadership posts.

EPP chief Manfred Weber told POLITICO in May 2025 that giving the far right access to executive posts was a red line. Over the past two years, his group has repeatedly passed legislation with the far right’s support.

The presiding judge, the court’s new president Savvas Papasavvas, did not give a date for the court’s decision.

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. This decision should surprise no one because, about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election.

That second decision, moreover, followed an even earlier one by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. In that matter, Kavanaugh acted alone under a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process that the justices rarely invoke unless they view a case as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally refer it to their colleagues.

So, for those keeping track at home, that’s three times that the Supreme Court needed to decide the same exact question in less than three weeks. 

This happened because of an extraordinary round of defiance by Republican judges in the lower courts. Just minutes after Kavanaugh determined (for the first time) that Missouri cannot use the Republican gerrymander, a Trump-appointed judge in Missouri tried to countermand Kavanaugh’s decision. Then, after the full Court reaffirmed Kavanaugh’s decision, a panel of three Republican appellate judges again tried to reinstate the new maps that the Supreme Court had already twice rejected.

These judges’ behavior is disturbing. But it is also potentially a window into the future of the Supreme Court — at least if Republicans keep winning elections that allow them to fill seats on the federal judiciary.

The lower federal courts are gravid with ambitious Republican judges who reach conclusions that are either too extreme or too partisan for the current Supreme Court — such as the ones they reached in this case. These courts are also full of plausible candidates for a Supreme Court nomination who have shown unwavering loyalty to Trump, the MAGA movement, or the Republican Party — regardless of whether there are legal arguments supporting the GOP’s preferred outcomes.

Indeed, one lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, now functions as a kind of think tank for MAGA legal theories that less partisan judges would scoff at in disgust. This is the same court, for example, that attempted to pull the abortion medication mifepristone from the market. It’s a court that declares entire federal agencies unconstitutional. Or that orders thousands of lawfully cast ballots thrown in the trash after the Republican Party asks them to do so. The Fifth Circuit is also frequently reversed from the left by the Supreme Court.

That means that, if Republicans hold onto the Senate after the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, Trump will be able to easily identify and confirm Supreme Court nominees who make Justice Samuel Alito, the most partisan member of the current Court, look like an icon of disinterested fairness. And many of these ultra-partisan judges are young enough that they will remain viable Supreme Court candidates in future Republican administrations.

Eliminating judicial filibusters transformed who gets nominated to federal judgeships

About 13 years ago, the Senate fundamentally changed how federal judges are confirmed. Prior to late 2013, senators in the minority party could use the filibuster to block any judicial nominee who couldn’t find 60 senators who would support their confirmation. But the Senate voted in November of 2013 to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

Both parties have their own narratives blaming the other for this development. Republicans often claim that Democrats’ decision to filibuster a handful of President George W. Bush’s lower court nominees — before the second Bush administration, judicial filibusters were rare — was a major escalation in the partisan war over judicial confirmations. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Republicans for a significant uptick in judicial filibusters under President Barack Obama.

In any event, Senate Democrats eventually decided to allow judges to be confirmed by a majority vote after Republicans filibustered all of Obama’s nominees to three vacant seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That broke a logjam that otherwise would have prevented Obama from filling any of these seats, but it also created a new world where lawyers who wished to become federal judges or justices no longer needed to worry about winning votes from senators in the other party.

This new world was apparent immediately after Trump took office the first time in 2017. There was a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, largely because Senate Republicans had held it open for a year until Trump could fill it. 

During his first term, Trump largely delegated the task of picking judges to the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. And the Federalist Society was obsessively focused on weakening the power of federal agencies to regulate private business. 

Trump’s eventual nominee for the open seat, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, secured his new job by advertising his eagerness to advance the conservative legal movement’s top priority. Shortly before his nomination, Gorsuch wrote a pair of opinions laying out his plan to make federal agencies subservient to the judges. And one of these opinions, according to the journalist David Kaplan, “proved decisive in clinching” the nomination for Gorsuch.

In the pre-2013 world, judges with Supreme Court ambitions often avoided making their most controversial views public out of fear that doing so would antagonize other-party senators who they might need to support their confirmation to a higher court. In 2011, for example, Kavanaugh, then a judge, was assigned to a panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare. But he dodged the key issue in the case, instead claiming that he lacked jurisdiction to rule on whether Obamacare is lawful.

After Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory opinions scored him a Supreme Court seat, however, lower court judges took notice. And the most ambitious Republican judges started looking for opportunities to prove their conservative bona fides to the Trump White House. Before 2017, for example, Kavanaugh had avoided taking a public position on abortion. Months after Gorsuch’s confirmation, however, Kavanaugh gave a speech to a conservative think tank signaling that he would be a vote to overrule Roe v. Wade if he were given a promotion.

The confirmation process, in other words, now favors candidates who audition for judicial jobs by demonstrating that they are dependable votes on issues that drive their political party. This is especially true for Republican judicial candidates, because the Trump White House has shown such favor toward candidates who are personally loyal to Trump. But Democrats who want a judicial appointment also have similar incentives. 

Gorsuch got his seat because Republicans, who controlled the Senate in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death opened a vacancy on the Supreme Court, refused to confirm anyone that Obama nominated to fill this seat. It now appears, in other words, that no Democrat can get confirmed to the Supreme Court unless their party controls the Senate. So Democrats with Supreme Court ambitions also have no incentive to make nice with Republicans.

The way to get a high-powered judgeship is to convince your own political party that you will use that judgeship to advance its goals.

Republican judges are openly auditioning for the Supreme Court

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are hardly the only judges who started advertising their ideological and partisan loyalty in an apparent effort to get ahead. The lower courts are now full of judges who write extreme and often needlessly provocative opinions that seem designed to catch the eye of someone in the White House.

The Ninth Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke, for example, is a particularly vulgar judge who was reportedly on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court during his first term. He’s best known for opinions mocking his colleagues and left-leaning litigants in a tone more often found on MAGA podcasts than in judicial opinions. VanDyke began an opinion about transgender women last March, for example, with the line “this is a case about swinging dicks.”

Or consider Andrew Oldham, a Fifth Circuit judge known for his opinions undercutting the First Amendment, attacking voting by mail, and standing up for vaping companies’ ability to sell bubblegum-flavored nicotine products — among other things. Oldham’s chambers is a factory pumping out decisions that even cause many of the Supreme Court’s Republicans to cringe — his vaping opinion was tossed out in a unanimous decision by Alito — but that also align perfectly with the Trump administration’s preferred policy outcomes.

The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

Or take Judge James Ho, Oldham’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit, who is also known for his trolly opinions attacking liberal shibboleths. Rather than attempt to summarize Ho’s jurisprudence, I will simply refer readers to my 2023 profile of him: “The edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

I could name more judges who behave similarly — I bring up these three largely because they’ve been discussed in the national media as potential Supreme Court candidates if Trump gets to appoint another justice. But there’s no need to belabor the point. The bottom line is that, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, Trump will have no shortage of judges who appear to have spent their judicial careers looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how eager they are to advance a MAGA agenda, even when that means moving several steps to the right of a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans.

Indeed, the Missouri incident reveals just how widespread these sorts of judicial partisans are within the lower courts. None of the Republican judges who tried to reinstate the Missouri gerrymander after it was rejected by the Supreme Court, for example, have received the same attention that VanDyke, Oldham, and Ho have received as possible Supreme Court candidates. One of them, Judge James Loken, is an 86-year-old George H.W. Bush nominee with no prospects whatsoever of getting promoted.

But the culture in the lower courts has grown so open to partisan decisionmaking that he, along with two younger colleagues, literally tried to give the Republican Party an extra US House seat after the Supreme Court had told them not to do it twice.

Which isn’t to say that every Republican federal judge, or even every Trump appointee, is a partisan hack. One of the most pointed opinions rejecting Trump’s attempt to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, for example, was authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee. But, while Bibas’s opinion in Donald J. Trump for President v. Secretary (2020) was excellent, it also almost certainly guaranteed that he will never become a justice. And it absolutely guaranteed that he will never be nominated by Trump.

There’s no good solution to this problem

The biggest reason why America is stuck in this mess is that its two major parties have polarized on the proper role of judges. Even setting aside the youngest generation of hyperpartisan judges, it’s long been the case that any Republican nominated to the Supreme Court will be a reliable vote against causes like abortion rights, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act, and an equally reliable vote in favor of the “unitary executive” and for religious conservatives who seek exemptions from state and federal laws. Any Democrat, meanwhile, will take the opposite position on these, and a whole array of other issues where the two parties have consistent positions.

This is why restoring the old filibuster rules that existed prior to 2013 will not succeed in moderating the judiciary. If anything, allowing the minority party to filibuster judges again would mean that no one would ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court, because any nominee who is acceptable to one party would be radioactive in the other party.

Ultimately, the only effective way to keep people like Oldham, Ho, or VanDyke off the Supreme Court is to elect senators and presidents who do not want them on the Supreme Court. The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.