2006—Outgoing American Bar Association president Michael Greco, a zealous liberal who stacked an ABA task force on presidential signing statements with fervent opponents of the Bush administration and who did his utmost to load the ABA’s judicial-evaluations committee with hard-core partisans, delivers a ridiculously pompous farewell address. For example: “Our fellow Americans, as never before, are looking to our Association with hope, with trust, and with respect for our leadership.” And: “In our generation, it is the lawyers of America who by destiny and by choice are the guardians of the walls of freedom. It is the American Bar Association that is protecting the separation of powers and the balance of powers by checking the excesses of any branch of government that would overreach.”
2019—Sometimes the repeat offender is the judge, not the criminal defendant.
Federal district judge Sheryl Lipman evidently wasn’t happy when the Sixth Circuit reversed her for imposing a sentence of a mere 12 months of home confinement on Dane Schrank, who pled guilty to possession of child pornography for downloading “nearly 1,000 images of babies and toddlers being forcibly, violently, and sadistically penetrated.” So on remand (in U.S. v. Schrank) Lipman imposes the same soft sentence. Never mind that the Sentencing Guidelines advise a sentence of 97 to 120 months in prison.
A year later, the Sixth Circuit will again vacate Lipman’s sentence as “fundamentally unjust” and will remove her from the case.
2020—“Mr. Adams began a birth control regimen to end his menstrual cycle.” Such is the denial of biological reality that pervades the Eleventh Circuit panel majority’s ruling in Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County. On the premise that Drew Adams, a girl who identifies as male, is really a boy, Judge Beverly Martin rules that a school board violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX by barring Adams from using the boys’ restroom.
As Judge William Pryor explains in dissent, “there is nothing unlawful, under either the Constitution or federal law, about a policy that separates bathrooms for schoolchildren on the basis of sex.”