2024 U.S. election: Democrats didn't run on the courts. That was a mistake.

As the clock ticks down on the lame-duck session, Senate Democrats struck a deal on confirming judges last week that left many of us scratching our heads. As long as the phony-baloney litigating front groups can get their phony-baloney fake plaintiff of convenience into the courtroom of a phony-baloney MAGA judge, and then run it up through an appropriate circuit to the captured Supreme Court, the rest of the system just doesn’t matter. So yes, it’s really important that we confirm these judges, but we also have to keep an absolute laser focus on this phony-baloney railway that gets the issues that the right wing wants to litigate into the right court so that they can move up to the Supreme Court. If in fact we are in this era where you just need one Aileen Cannon, you just need one Matthew Kacsmaryk, you just need one James Ho—all of whom are going to spend the next four years tripping over themselves to audition for Clarence Thomas’ seat on the Supreme Court—then what can possibly happen in the next two months to create some kind of bulwark against that in the Senate judicial process? Two years ago, hardly anybody knew who Leonard Leo was, and now people are beginning to understand that he ran a very crooked operation, funded by a couple of creepy billionaires, to set up a system where basically the Koch brothers picked Trump’s judges and then they all went through a conformity bath to make sure that they would do what was expected of them.