In Trump election fraud cases, federal judges upheld the rule of law '“ but that's not enough to fix US politics

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Charles Gardner Geyh, Indiana University (THE CONVERSATION) A healthy constitutional culture, in which the people and their leaders respect the authority of their Constitution, requires a baseline of trust in the government ‘” a baseline that, in the United States, has eroded from 77% in the early 1960s to 17% today. This collapse of public confidence paved the way for a populist form of leadership that redirected public faith away from the institutions of government toward a more autocratic leader ‘” Donald Trump ‘” whom voters trusted to consolidate power, neutralize opposition and ‘œdrain the swamp’� of the experts and bureaucrats he deemed responsible for the government’s malaise. In the past four years, President Trump has consolidated power to such an extent that the Republican Party has literally declined to adopt a party platform and effectively embraced the president as its alter ego. After losing the 2020 election by a comfortable margin, Trump counted on the populist power he had accumulated to force the hands of Republican officials across the country to invalidate the election, despite no creditable evidence of widespread fraud. The gambit almost worked. Trump’s influence ‘” made muscular by an energetic base poised to punish disobedient elected officials ‘” quieted intraparty criticism, moved a legal team to launch a battery of meritless lawsuits and inspired 18 state attorneys general to request that the Supreme Court overturn a presidential election. But that strategy ultimately failed, because Trump’s populist control did not extend to the federal courts. Cases need facts The legal assault on the election was spearheaded by attorneys who were willing to file suits based on unsupported suspicions and beliefs to perpetuate the president’s populist regime by any means necessary. These groundless suspicions and beliefs ‘” bellowed loudly and often by the president and his entourage ‘” may have gotten traction in politics, but they got none in courts of law. The judiciary’s firewall withstood the populist bomb that President Trump detonated. Apart from the fact that neither the president nor his enthusiasts could threaten the tenure of unelected federal judges who are appointed for life, judges are a different kind of public official, and the lies, bullying and bombast that work well in populist politics fall flat in courts of law. When judges hear cases, they follow a uniform system of procedural rules that enable them to evaluate the claims that the parties make and amass a body of information on which they rely to determine facts and ascertain truth. It’s a system that has served the judiciary well for generations, and served it well in the postelection cases that the courts decided in recent weeks. Judges are lawyers who have been steeped in the rule of law for decades. It begins with three years of law school, where they ‘œlearn to think like lawyers’� and are graded on their command of substantive and procedural law. Upon graduation, they must demonstrate their proficiency in law by passing a bar exam, and then practice law for years and typically decades before ascending the bench. ‘˜Trump judges’ aren’t Trump judges Trump has been criticized for appointing an unprecedented 10 judges whose credentials and experience the American Bar Association deemed so deficient as to warrant an ‘œunqualified’� rating. But the vast majority of his 227 appointees possess the traditional qualifications needed to perpetuate the federal judiciary’s entrenched commitment to the rule of law.