Expediting justice, like it or not

THE WHEELS of justice grind slow but grind fine,” Sun Tzu observed in The Art of War. That observation is a truism nowadays, and has been for a long time, but even that reality has exceptions. Sometimes, justice doesn’t just take its sweet time for its own sake; President* Donald Trump is learning that justice gets fast-tracked now and then — despite his best efforts and those of his proxies to keep that from happening.

House Trump is dealing with the inconvenience of that occasional judicial efficiency. Politico, for example, reported on May 23 that Trump’s fight to stop release of his financial records is being fast-tracked for a three-judge appellate panel to make a pivotal decision.

From Politico: “In a two-page order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ judges scheduled oral arguments for July 12 in the case that pits the president’s attorneys against House Democrats, who issued a subpoena to the accounting firm Mazars USA for eight years of Trump’s financial records.

“The court date will come several weeks after a lower court rejected the president’s attempts to block the subpoena, arguing that the request was politically motivated. Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed the ruling, and the president called the opinion ‘ridiculous’ and ‘totally wrong,’ and noted Judge Amit Mehta was an appointee of President Barack Obama.

“In the next round of legal sparring, Trump will go before a panel of judges that includes another Obama appointee, Patricia Millett, as well David Tatel, a Bill Clinton appointee, and Neomi Rao, who joined the D.C. Circuit in March as a Trump appointee.”

That case follows the one presided over by Mehta, who ruled on May 12 that he would decide the Mazars USA matter in expeditious fashion.

“The sole question before the court — is the House Oversight Committee’s issuance of a subpoena to Mazars USA LLP for financial records of President Trump and various associated entities a valid exercise of legislative power? — is fully briefed, and the court can discern no benefit from an additional round of legal arguments,” Mehta wrote. “Nor is there an obvious need to delay ruling on the merits to allow for development of the factual record.”

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THESE RULINGS suggest the existence of a judiciary, some of it vetted and approved by Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that might have some pesky, inconvenient ethical affinities for actually following the law. They suggest there are judges that don’t like being presumed to be partisan, regardless of the law they’re sworn to uphold.

Mehta and the three-judge panel, at least, and maybe more, are inclined to push back against the intrinsic cynicism of the Trump administration, and its various attempts to slow down the progress of Trump-related cases through the court system — trying to manipulate labyrinthine bureaucracy and an already-crowded court calendar for a nakedly political purpose.

Judges probably don’t like being worked that way. Who the hell would?

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The administration’s hopes of running out the clock on subpoenas and congressional inquiries into Trump’s actions will run headlong into a problem they can’t control: There’s too much clock. There’s way too much time between now and November of this year for House Trump to navigate, let alone the time until November 2020; there’s already too much of a contrary dynamic loose in the national air.

And there’s too much in the court system that can’t be controlled by House Trump. If the swift rulings by Mehta and the three-judge panel are any indicator of what’s coming, the slow meandering  through the district-court judiciary garden, the scenic-route journey the administration was counting on, may not come to pass. The reasons why have more to do with practicality than politics.

The judges about to be tasked with ruling on the Trump-related congressional inquiries that can’t get resolved in Congress will realize (if they don't already) that the gravity of these matters — what’s at stake in the rulings for each or all of them, from the standpoint of their centrality to the rule of law itself — makes slow-walking cases like these an impossibility. They’re too important for that. We can anticipate House Democrats asking for expedited status on that basis.

But ironically, these cases are also too insignificant. Various legal analysts on the cable channels and elsewhere have said that administration claims of executive privilege and other dodges to maintain Trump’s cherished business-records confidentiality are so procedurally improvisational, so obviously unlawful that they’d be effectively dismissed from the start. What better cases to make short work of than those that shouldn’t have come to court in the first place? We should expect the district courts, judges appointed by Trump or not, to expedite those cases — or reject them — for that reason.

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Image credits: Trump side-eye: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images. Mehta: public domain.