Bill Essayli might just rein in the madness of California electeds, prosecuting political corruption and enforcing presidential orders.
Bill Essayli might just rein in the madness of California electeds, prosecuting political corruption and enforcing presidential orders.
A ttorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that California state lawmaker Bill Essayli, a Republican from Riverside, will run the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. Covering 20 million people, including everybody in Los Angeles, it is by far the largest district in the nation, larger in population than every other state but Texas and Florida.
The announcement sent in-state reporters to area hospitals with a severe case of the fantods. “Trump picks lightning-rod California legislator to be US attorney in Los Angeles,” trumpeted Politico. In a follow-up, Politico upgraded the modifier to “bomb-hurling,” while the Sacramento Bee preferred to describe the 39-year-old former U.S. prosecutor as “outspoken.”
Among Essayli’s perceived threats to the republic, the Los Angeles Times noted that he has “criticized COVID-19 restrictions, critical race theory and California policies aimed at protecting LGBTQ+ students. He has pushed especially hard for ‘parental rights’ measures that would mandate parents be informed whenever a child identifies as transgender or asks to change their name or pronouns at school.”
“Essayli has been a strong supporter of Trump over the years,” the Times further noted. Following Trump’s conviction on charges “tied to a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election, Essayli posted on Facebook that he looked forward to electing Trump as president ‘to restore the rule of law and our constitutional principles.’”
Imagine what a guy like that might do to rein in the madness of California electeds, prosecuting political corruption and enforcing presidential orders.
Sworn in on Wednesday by Judge Dolly M. Gee, Essayli “said he will prioritize the enforcement of federal immigration laws against sanctuary jurisdictions,” said attorney Julie Hamill, whose own January 31 complaint triggered a federal investigation of California schools. She emphasized “his authority to prosecute public corruption. He knows where all the bodies are buried. This is a great day for Californians.” (Disclosure: Hamill is a colleague at the California Policy Center, where I am president.)
Essayli doesn’t neatly fit what many may think is the classic profile of a Trump nominee. He’s a Muslim, for one thing, the son of parents who fled their native Lebanon during that country’s cataclysmic civil war in the 1980s. They settled in California’s Inland Empire, two sprawling Southern California desert counties east of Los Angeles in which the most notable city is Palm Springs. A graduate of nearby Cal Poly Pomona and Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, he interned briefly in the George W. Bush White House Counsel’s Office. He went to work as a prosecutor in the Riverside County District Attorney’s office and then, while serving as an attorney in the Central District, was part of the team that prosecuted the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino.
But a former California U.S. attorney (who requested anonymity) says Essayli is unlikely to receive Senate confirmation because of the “blue slip” that applies to presidential nominations of federal judges, U.S. marshals, and U.S. attorneys. That process allows a nominee’s home-state senators to document their objections to a nominee on a literal slip of blue paper and submit it to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Until 1955, that was merely a part of the Senate’s constitutional advice-and-consent role in presidential nominations. “That year,” as Jonathan Tobin wrote on NRO in 2017, “new Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson turned the practice into an absolute veto, allowing senators to deny a home-state nominee a hearing either by submitting a negative blue slip or declining to submit any blue slip at all.” No longer a veto, a negative blue slip won’t prevent a nominee from being considered, “provided the administration consults with both home-state senators before announcing his nomination, but considerable deference is still paid to it.”
Senate protocol would still allow California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, to blue-slip Essayli. If Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) followed the old Johnsonian blue slip model and blocked a vote of the full Senate, Essayli’s tenure at the Central District would expire at 120 days, on July 30. Then, the chief judge of the Central District — the very Judge Gee who swore Essayli into office — would appoint his replacement. The chief judge’s appointment requires no Senate confirmation.
Gee’s own nomination to the federal bench by Bill Clinton was killed by Senate Republicans; it was left to Barack Obama to resuscitate her judicial career. With that experience behind her, you might predict what would happen next.
Or perhaps you can’t.
“This is really going to be up to Senator Grassley,” said California political consultant Jon Fleischman. “The blue slips stop nominations — until the judiciary committee votes to say that they don’t.”
That’s what happened during then-President Joe Biden’s nomination of Andrew Mathis to the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Confronted with blue-slip objections from Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, both Republicans, the Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), moved forward with the nomination anyway. Mathis ultimately prevailed.
Blackburn “said the White House failed to ‘meaningfully consult’ with her or fellow Senator Bill Hagerty and went with an ‘unqualified’ nominee over their alternative recommendation, a Tennessee state court appellate judge,” Reuters reported.
Durbin countered that “meaningful consultation” ended during the first Trump administration.
After Mathis’s win, CNN reported that Trump and the Republicans “broke with previous Senate tradition to confirm 17 federal appeals court nominees over the objection of Democratic senators representing the states tied to their seats on the bench.” When it came time for Joe Biden and Senate Democrats to fill red-state vacancies, they used that precedent “to continue their record-breaking pace of judicial confirmations.”
Essayli might escape controversy in the smoke generated by two other Trump picks, the former California U.S. attorney said. He noted that Democratic senators have already threatened to blue-slip Alina Habba, the president’s former defense attorney, chosen for U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and criminal defense attorney Sigal Chattah, chosen for that role in Nevada.
But in California, Padilla and Schiff have been remarkably quiet — maybe too quiet. One possible explanation is that Trump’s actions, not just his nomination of a conservative to run the largest judicial district in America in the nation’s bluest state, have left California Democrats overwhelmed. Just 75 days into Trump Two, the president has all but pushed Governor Gavin Newsom out of the driver’s seat. The president has made headlines related to federal wildfire relief and the use of federal reservoirs; he also has said he’ll investigate the state’s flailing, costly high-speed rail project. He has threatened to break through state and local policies on illegal immigration, energy, and vehicle emissions. And of course, he unleashed federal attorneys to investigate attorney Julie Hamill’s complaint that almost all of California’s nearly 1,000 school districts are playing politics with children’s sexuality.
With Essayli ensconced at the Central District, Hamill says, “the hammer of justice is finally falling on California. Girls, women, and all sane Californians: Rejoice!”