One of Trump’s anti-LGBTQ judges issues a dissent best described as ‘whackdoodle’


Neomi Rao Photo: Official government portrait

Neomi Rao is one of the viciously anti-LGBTQ judges chosen by President Trump to pack the federal courts. Rao is also the author of a dissent last week that was, in the words of former U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, “nutso,” “whackdoodle” and “profoundly antidemocratic.”

If you think that first sentence above has nothing to do with the second, you’re wrong.

Related: LGBTQ people have a lot at stake in Donald Trump’s impeachment

The dissent was Rao’s attempt to protect Trump from a congressional investigation into his finances. Last spring, a Congressional committee subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm for his financial records. Trump has been furiously fighting the subpoena, not exactly the act of a man who has nothing to hide.

In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. District Court of Appeals — the same one that Brett Kavanaugh served on before his ascension to the Supreme Court — ruled that there was two centuries of legal precedent allowing Congress to seek financial records for an investigation.

Then there’s Rao’s dissent.

Rao doesn’t care about precedent. Instead, she comes up with a novel (see adjectives above) argument that the president can only be investigated if he’s been impeached. No one in their right mind has ever before interpreted the law to say that you have to impeach the president in order to investigate him.

To justify this claim, Rao resorted to communing with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers to determine “text, structure, and original meaning.” Like most mediums, she told her client (in this case Trump) exactly what he wanted to hear.

Rao went even one step further, suggesting that the courts would be able “to determine the scope of impeachable offenses.” In other words, Trump appointees would be able to override Congress’s constitutional right to decide what constitutes a high crime or misdemeanor.

As a reminder, Rao is the Trump appointee who said that gay people “defile” society. During her confirmation hearing, she refused to say whether the Supreme Court ruling that…

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