Five years ago, I wrote about a federal judge who, in my view, had discarded any resemblance of judicial restraint and judgment in a public screed against Republicans, Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court. The Wisconsin judge represented the final death of irony: a jurist who failed to see the conflict in lashing out at what he called judicial bias in a political diatribe that would have made MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell blush.
His name is Lynn Adelman.
I was wrong in 2020. Irony is very much alive.
This week, a judge was randomly selected to preside at the trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan. A critic of Trump’s immigration policies, Dugan is accused of obstructing federal law enforcement and facilitating the escape of an unlawful immigrant.
The judge assigned to the Dugan case? You guessed it. Lynn Adelman, 85.
A judge is expected to come to a case like this one without the burden of his own baggage.
Judge Adelman is carrying more baggage than Amtrak in Wisconsin.
The selection of Adelman shows how political commentary by judges undermines the legitimacy of the court system. Now, in a case that has divided the nation, the public will have to rely on a judge who discarded his own obligations as a judge to lash out at conservatives, Trump, and conservative jurists.
Adelman was a long-standing Democratic politician who tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to run for Congress during his 20-year tenure in the Wisconsin Senate. For critics, Adelman never set aside his political agenda after President Bill Clinton nominated him for the federal bench.
Adelman was sharply rebuked for ignoring controlling Supreme Court precedent to rule in favor of a Democratic challenge over voting identification rules just before a critical election. Adelman blocked the law before the election despite a Supreme Court case issued years earlier in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), rejecting a similar challenge.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a stinging reversal, explaining to Adelman that in “our hierarchical judicial system, a district court cannot declare a statute unconstitutional just because he thinks (with or without the support of a political scientist) that the dissent was right and the majority wrong.”
Adelman, however, was apparently undeterred. In 2020, he wrote a law review article for Harvard Law & Policy Review, titled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.”
Adelman attacked what he described as a “hard-right majority” that is “actively participating in undermining American democracy.” He also struck out at Trump as “an autocrat… disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”
Hellbound and Down 