Latest news with #Scheindlin
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
What Israelis actually think about starvation in Gaza
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Israeli protesters take part in a demonstration calling for the release of hostages and an end to the war in Gaza, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Saturday, August 9, 2025. Bloomberg via Getty Images How do Israelis feel about the increasingly horrifying crimes its government is committing in Gaza? This is one of the key questions going forward. Israel is a (teetering) democracy with elections scheduled for next year. The public's attitudes could — by putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition — play a major role in determining if, and when, we get a durable ceasefire. And yet, polling presents a somewhat confusing picture of their view on the war. To make sense of this, I called up Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel's leading pollsters and author of an excellent recent book on Israeli democracy. Scheindlin told me that Israeli opposition to the war is rooted in self-interest: a belief that continued fighting in Gaza is unnecessarily risking the lives of hostages (about 20 of whom are believed to be alive) and Israeli soldiers. Thus, opposition to the war is deepening while Israelis remain — on the whole — indifferent to the suffering of Gazans. Beyond describing those beliefs, Scheindlin explained where they come from in Israeli society. She got into the deep roots of dehumanization on both sides of the conflict, the conspiracy theory shaping ordinary Israelis' views of starvation in Gaza, and why her time working in post-war Serbia made her more somewhat more optimistic about the chances that there could one day be real peace. A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity. I want to start with a poll result that I found horrifying: 79% of Israeli Jews did not feel personally troubled by reports of starvation in Gaza. Do those results seem right to you, based on your broader read of the data? And what does this kind of poll say about the Israeli mindset? Yeah, it absolutely strikes me as correct. There's a general trend [in polls] of a very strong majority of Israeli Jews expressing not only lack of empathy but belligerence and hostility towards Gazans, including civilians. I do think we need to put it in the context of everybody else here. There are parallel trends of deep, deep hostility that we had seen already in joint Israeli-Palestinian survey research done before the war. Very hostile attitudes between the two populations definitely predate October 7. The reason I asked specifically about Israeli Jews — though parallel trends of hostility is obviously hugely important in understanding the situation — is that their views are especially urgent amid the overwhelming evidence that the Israeli government's policy has created a starvation crisis. It is, I think, very difficult for people outside Israel to understand why that doesn't break through in its politics. How is it that, when it seems like your government is committing such a crime, people aren't horrified? Is just dehumanization all the way down — that they think Palestinians deserve it? Or is there denial of what's clearly happening? Is there lack of coverage or censorship in the Israeli media? It's all of those things. Israeli media, as you pointed out, is barely covering civilian suffering in Gaza — which is not much of an excuse to be honest, because all of the information is available. Polls have tested whether Israelis believe the starvation was happening. A recent survey found that 47 percent of all Israelis felt that it was probably lies and made up. Now, if it's 47 percent of the average, it's in the mid-to-upper 50 percent range among Jews — as presumably very few Palestinian citizens of Israel feel that way. So 47 percent said it's not true; it's Hamas' lies. And another 18 percent said, 'Even if it's true, I'm not bothered by it.' Israelis are completely consumed with the hostages. It is front and center; it's everywhere. The country is flooded with hostage symbols: signs, slogans, pins. Everyone wears a pin, including the prime minister. The second thing they're consumed with is the fate of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers who are serving in Gaza. Basically, the Israeli Jewish public thinks the war needs to stop — but because it's hurting them and not because it's hurting Palestinians. Yes, that is correct. There is a small portion of people who are increasingly troubled by the situation in Gaza — primarily the left, which represents about 20 percent of Israelis. Among the Jewish population, it's about 12 percent to 14 percent. So, it's a minority, but those people are troubled enough that some of them have begun making that a much more central part of their public activity. I'm a little bit skeptical of making it seem like there's sweeping growing trends [towards public outcry about Gazan suffering]. There are demonstrations of people holding posters of children who've been killed in Gaza and also of people going to Air Force bases in Israel to hold those posters and say, 'Don't go.' There were two people who burst into a reality TV show — you know, primetime television — a couple days ago and screamed, 'Stop the war.' Is it growing? I don't know. But it's certainly becoming more urgent, and they're making the claim more publicly, and I think they feel that there's some space to make that claim more publicly. I think what you hear among a lot of mainstream Israelis — which includes people from the center and even the moderate right — is that, of course, the war is bad for everybody — get our hostages back, our sons back — and it's also bad for Gazans. But [the Gazans] certainly are not a priority. Many Israelis simply say, 'I cannot be sad for the civilians of Gaza,' after what they saw on October 7 and during hostage releases. They were often released with these really grotesque ceremonies and forced to cheer and [surrounded by] mobs. On one of those days when a hostage was released, I had a friend write to me saying, 'You still think there are innocent people in Gaza?' because of the mob. Now, even if there are thousands of people [jeering at hostages], that's out of 2 million. And, of course, we had thousands of people on the Israeli side who support, you know, terrible things. But [the imagery] is part of what explains the very dehumanizing attitudes that don't allow for compassion. Is this psychology part of what allows many Israelis to dismiss the seriousness or significance of the international outrage about Gaza? They would say that the Europeans or whoever simply don't get it; they haven't been through what we've been through, and they don't understand what it's like here. Or, even more aggressively, that they're either being taken in by Hamas propaganda or are themselves antisemitic. What [Israelis] are saying now is 'Everybody forgot about October 7.' They forgot who really started it — because, for a lot of Israelis, everything was sort of manageable before that. I think that the world hasn't forgotten October 7. They just don't think it's an excuse for what Israel is doing anymore. Right. It's [also] an extremely widespread view here that the entire global media is against Israel because the world — [including] the UN and the international system — is always critical of Israel. And the government is compulsively pushing the line that the rest of the world is just being spoon-fed lies directly by Hamas. In their defense, there's a grain of truth to that, right? Hamas will lie about things all the time; they're a horrifying organization. I know, but the assumption is that there's nobody else getting information out — that there's no Palestinian journalists who are doing their work, that there's no social media, that the international organizations who are there are never getting new information — it's only Hamas, and that international media isn't making any effort to get information from any source other than Hamas, which is just fundamentally factually not true. International media is getting its information from their own stringers and reporters inside Gaza, from credible vetted social media, or international organizations. If you think that the whole thing is made up, you're looking at a vast conspiracy of collusion between Hamas, observers on the ground, average Palestinians — a huge conspiracy of all of them. It seems to me that there's a real opportunity here for a politician or political faction in Israel to turn the things that Israelis are mad about — the hostages, soldier casualties — into an indictment of the broader right-wing worldview that is inflicting harm on Palestinians and taking their land is good for Israeli security — to argue that the government's whole theory of the case is a failure, and that a new approach is needed. And yet, I just have not seen a very successful articulation of an alternative philosophy — one that has caught fire and become really powerful in Israeli politics — since October 7. The public opinion groundwork is there, but politicians aren't taking advantage of it. You're absolutely right; politicians aren't taking advantage of it. Nobody's really making a case for an alternative. The opposition [parties are] maddeningly focused on criticizing; all of the critical points that you and I have just raised are out there. But nobody connects the dots and says, 'Here is an alternative. Here's what we would do differently.' Everybody limits themselves saying, for example, what we would do differently on a hostage deal. It's never about the bigger vision: How do you envision Israel ending this war and preventing the next war? I can tell you, from politicians' perspective, it's because they know that, on a deeper level, Israelis are right wing. [About] 60 percent of Jewish Israelis self-identify as right wing. They don't want a Palestinian state, and they don't want to hear about a negotiated solution, and they don't want to hear about concessions. So, that's why the opposition politicians don't want to get into it, because they have forgotten that leadership means courage — that leadership means leading, not following. They're basically just cowards running after a very simplistic reading of public opinion. Even scratching one level below the surface, they would know that you can change public opinion over time. We've seen repeatedly, over a decade, that the public changes its mind slowly and incrementally, but significantly, on issues related to conflict resolution or negotiations, concessions, final status — especially when they see it as a realistic possibility, and especially when their leadership is behind it and makes the case. I know from personal experience doing public opinion polling for Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David negotiations [the US-led peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians] in the year 2000. I was literally conducting the research, watching the focus groups, looking at the data through every night or almost every night of that negotiation, and people were changing their minds — slowly, but very steadily considering how compressed it was — over extremely controversial things. Did they love it? No, but they were moving. When we try to tell people in polls, 'Here are the advantages [of peace],' they can change their minds a little bit — but it's so remote from their experience, so hypothetical. There's no anchor in reality. If politicians were getting behind this, they would be able to create that kind of momentum. That's a bit grim, right? I thought my previous analysis was extremely optimistic. What I'm saying is that public opinion can change. The conditions are that there are some realistic policy grounds for a change in the situation and legitimate leaders who are advocating for it. And those two things are not impossible. Well, they're just not there now, though. That's why I said it's grim. Right now, sure. However, we have elections coming up; we're heading into an election year in 2026. [It's] very unlikely before then, but possibly. And all polls are showing opportunity is there, and the Netanyahu government has not been able to win a majority in any credible survey. It could still happen that Netanyahu wins again, but it's also possible that a different government might have a little bit less acumen at spinning the world around their finger — and even start feeling some pressure from the world to move towards two states. So, then, let me ask one long-term question. There's a line from the writer Omar El Akkad that I can't really get out of my head. I'm sure you've heard it. 'One day, everyone will have always been against this.' Exactly. Do you think that's true when it comes to Israel? That one day, Israelis who supported the war will say, 'I never could have supported that'? I think that this collective sense of regret — the rewriting of history whereby everybody was against it — is probably the exception more than the rule. I worked in various countries in the Balkans from roughly 2006 to 2010. What I saw there is that every side thought that they got the short end of the deal. Every side thought that the world was against them. Every side was embittered. But particularly the Serbian side, which I know better and was also viewed as the aggressor. I pretty much never encountered anybody who thought that they did the wrong thing other than losing. I'll never forget the taxi driver who said, 'You know, we lost Bosnia, we lost Kosovo, we lost everything.' And that — [not the genocide] — was his major regret. Yet, peace between Serbia and both Bosnia and Kosovo seems to be holding. That's part of another developing hypothesis I have — which I haven't proved — but maybe somebody's investigated. I think there is a habitation factor to both violence and non-violence. The longer you experience non-violence, the harder it becomes to break it — even if you kind of still hate each other. So, no, I'm not waiting for Israelis and Palestinians to love each other. We don't have the luxury of waiting for that.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
If Trump Defies the Courts, Here's What a Judge Can Do
Amid the growing battle between President Donald Trump and the courts, a once-unthinkable question is harder to shrug off: Will the administration deliberately defy federal judges if it doesn't get what it wants? The issue has come into sharp relief in the challenge to the administration's deportation of Venezuelan nationals under the purported authority of the Alien Enemies Act. The presiding judge — James Boasberg, chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — directed the government from the bench to turn the planes around carrying the deportees. That did not happen, though the administration claims it did not deliberately defy the judge. Boasberg has since pressed the government for more information, and on Friday, he will hold a hearing to consider the matter further. To consider Boasberg's options and the implications, I spoke with Shira Scheindlin, a former federal judge in Manhattan who served on the bench for 22 years. She is no stranger to complex, high-profile disputes involving the government, and as I can attest from brief personal experience — I once litigated before Judge Scheindlin while I worked in the private sector — she had a well-earned reputation for exercising firm control over her courtroom and the lawyers who appeared before her. Scheindlin said that in the debate over whether the United States is already in a constitutional crisis, the real red line is if the executive branch defies the judiciary, a move that Trump says he wouldn't take. But if it were to happen? 'That's when authoritarians become dictators and really tear down the temple by just ignoring the Constitution, ignoring the judiciary,' she said. 'That would be the shocking end to our 250-year experiment.' This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Did you ever confront a situation where there was a credible suggestion that the government had deliberately violated one of your orders? No. I don't remember any such event happening. In the case over deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, the government has argued that there is a difference between an oral order and a written order from a judge — that oral orders are somehow meaningless if they aren't immediately embodied in a written order. What do you make of that argument? That it's creative? That's all I can make of it, because I've never heard it before. When a judge makes an order from the bench, they sometimes say at the end, 'that's my order' or 'so ordered.' It's tough to appeal an oral order unless there's a certified transcript. Given that this is a high profile case, I bet he had a court reporter in the courtroom. I bet there is a transcript, and I bet they could have appealed it based on the transcript. I have had that happen — where it was so urgent that [a litigant] took the transcript, got up to the Second Circuit and said, 'you know, she's wrong.' Judge Boasberg has scheduled a hearing for Friday to determine next steps. The government has been making submissions in response to his orders, but they've been somewhat tentative and somewhat defiant. If you were Judge Boasberg, how would you approach this hearing? I think he's posed very specific questions to the government as to when certain flights took off. When did certain flights land? Who gave the [order]? Who was in touch with [the administration] after he issued his oral order? I'm sure he has a lot of questions that he thinks the government has to answer, and I think the government so far has been evasive in answering such simple questions. It is not hard to answer the questions I just gave as examples. What was the flight? Name and number. What airport did it leave? What time did it land? Who did you speak to after I gave my oral order? What time? He knows the time of [his order]. That's probably on the transcript. Those are the kinds of questions I think I would be asking on Friday. Assuming that the judge — Judge Boasberg or any other judge for that matter — eventually concludes that the government deliberately violated a court order, what are the judge's options? I can tell you that every former judge I know has been asked this question by somebody in the media, including me. I think the only real option is civil contempt. The reason why it cannot be criminal contempt is generally that would be referred to the Justice Department to prosecute. So you might have a lawyer, a witness that you direct to answer [a question], they refuse, and/or they lie. If you want to charge them with criminal contempt, you have to get the U.S. Attorney's office or Main Justice to prosecute, and clearly the Trump Justice Department, or the Bondi Justice Department, is not going to prosecute. Then you get that question, which was raised in the Eric Adams case, could you appoint a special prosecutor? That's tricky because of separation of powers, so I think criminal contempt is off the table. I think civil contempt, however, is something that could be done if the facts are fairly straightforward. The remedy in civil contempt, believe it or not, can include incarceration. Usually it's fines. If it was a lawyer, you might file a grievance against the lawyer. That could be done if these lawyers either lie to the court or personally violate the order — you might want to bring a grievance before the grievance committee of the local bar where they're admitted, something like that. So it could be fines, could be a grievance, but in theory, it could also be jailing somebody. I did that only once in my time on the bench. In a civil contempt case, I actually put somebody in jail because he was so defiant, and then … he did what he was told to do. You could also sanction the person, and that's always interesting, because you could have fines that double every day, so it can get serious fast. I don't know how good at math you are, but a $1,000 fine doubling every day can quickly add up to real money — not for the United States government, but for an individual. If somebody was individually sanctioned, that adds up. How would incarceration work in civil contempt? Wouldn't you still need the involvement of the executive branch? Well, you need the person taken away by the U.S. Marshal. That's the problem, right? When I held someone in civil contempt, I had to say, 'Marshal, take this person across the street to the jail.' That is part of the executive branch — just the U.S. Marshal escorting the person over to the federal facility. So it still has that problem, but you don't need a prosecutor. There have been reasons to doubt the veracity of the DOJ's arguments in court since the start of the Trump administration — to take just a couple examples, the arguments about why the prosecution against Eric Adams is being dismissed, and the arguments about why some civil servants have been fired. How do you approach a situation where you might not fully trust the representations that the government is making in court? That's a very good question. You have to try to develop evidence extrinsically to prove the falsehood. We talked about being evasive — in other words, just refusing to answer or ducking the question — but actually making a false statement to the court? You would have to have extrinsic evidence that it's false. If [opposing counsel] was able to find out what flight, what plane, when it left, when it landed, and it turns out that the government lied and said, 'Well, the plane took off before your order.' Let's say it turned out it took off an hour after the order. That's bad. That's a grievance to be filed against the individual attorney, who is an officer of the court, but you'd have to develop extrinsic evidence. You can't just say, 'I don't trust you.' I don't think that would work. You could say, 'I'm very doubtful that you have been candid with the court. I'm concerned about the veracity of what you've told me,' but I'm not going to take action without facts to prove that you have been dishonest with the court. Judges do have a sixth sense for that. They've been around. [Judge Boasberg] also has been around a long time. He's very experienced. I think you kind of know it when you see it. The lawyer has an ethical obligation to be candid to the tribunal. Are you worried that we'll see a situation where the government explicitly and outright defies a court order? I am concerned about that. We've been talking — we being civil society, everybody — about whether we're in a constitutional crisis. Everybody keeps writing an op-ed saying, 'Not yet, but almost.' The constitutional crisis will occur when the executive branch says to the judicial branch, 'Too bad, I don't have to listen to you.' That's a constitutional crisis, and we haven't quite gotten there. It seems to me that this executive branch is getting as close to that line as they possibly can without crossing it yet. But if they really just say, 'We don't have to listen to you,' that's very bad. There have to be three co-equal branches of government, and each branch has to respect the other. What do you think happens in a situation like that — particularly if it's a Supreme Court ruling — in terms of the public's confidence in the judicial system and the effects on American politics? If we really had the constitutional crisis that I just described — where the executive branch says to the judicial branch, 'I don't have to listen to you' — that's a very, very, very serious threat to our democracy. We are built on the separation powers. We're built on three co-equal branches of government. That's the authoritarian dictator saying, 'I'm tearing down the whole wall.' That's when authoritarians become dictators and really tear down the temple by just ignoring the Constitution, ignoring the judiciary. We won't have an independent judiciary any longer. That would be the shocking end to our 250-year experiment. It would be bad. And as far as public trust, I think more than 50 percent of the public would be very concerned and outraged. They didn't vote for this guy to tear down the house. Trump has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, but this week, we saw a rare statement from Chief Justice John Roberts pushing back on that idea. What do you make of Trump's comments — and also Roberts'? Trump knows better. His cronies have been talking impeachment for weeks now. They started with a judge from my court, Judge [Paul] Engelmayer, one of the early rulings they didn't like. They attacked him and said he had to be impeached, then they wanted to impeach a different judge. Now it's Boasberg. A lot of us have spoken out against the word 'impeachment,' pointing out very simply that a ruling you don't agree with is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and impeachment is limited to those [circumstances] and has never been used in any other way. So that's outrageous. It's a terrible thought. You disagree with the ruling, as Roberts said, you appeal it and you appeal it again, and that's our system. But you can't get rid of the judge. The Constitution gives us life tenure. That's the Constitution, and so impeachment is just not on the table. There's no basis. It's not a high crime or misdemeanor. There's been rising criticism, not just from Trump, but as you mentioned, congressional Republicans and also conservative activists. Are you confident that the judges can tune out all of this criticism? Judges read the news too, and there have been reports of rising threats to judges. I've been in that position where I've been publicly attacked, publicly criticized. The question is, does that deter you? Does that scare you? Does that intimidate you? That's the threat. Do you become intimidated? You do have family, you have spouses and children and parents, and there has been violence against judges. You know the history as well as I do. One judge lost her son, and another judge lost a husband and a mother. Terrible things have happened, so you can't help but worry about your security in an age where we've seen on TV, in a loop that never stops, what the January 6 rioters did, how they acted, how they tore through that building. It only takes one nut, and you or your family could be in danger. They're doing it to cause a chilling effect, but I think most judges are not going to be deterred. They're going to continue to stand up. They're going to continue to do what they think is right, but it's unfortunate that they have to, even in the back of their mind, worry that a judicial ruling could mean that they're physically in danger — them and their family. That's sad, but I don't think they'll be deterred. They certainly haven't been. It seems to me [that Trump has] been losing most cases at the trial level, no matter who appointed the judge, whether it's a so-called Republican appointee or Democratic appointee, either way. He's been losing in the district courts, and he lost again in the Ninth Circuit. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to add? Roberts' decision to speak out was unusual, almost unprecedented. He gives a state of the judiciary speech once a year, but I think only once before, maybe twice in all the years he's been chief justice, has he just come out and decided to make a statement. I think the last time was when Trump was president at the beginning, and he kept criticizing judges for being an Obama judge or a Clinton judge. And Roberts said there is no Obama judge. There is no Clinton judge. There's no Reagan judge. They're all federal judges, and they all do what they think is right. It was very unusual that immediately after Trump himself called for impeaching judges, [Roberts] must have said to himself, 'Enough is enough. I'm going to speak out. I'm the chief justice. They can't touch me. I'm going to say what I think.'
Politico
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Politico
If Trump Defies the Courts, Here's What a Judge Can Do
Amid the growing battle between President Donald Trump and the courts, a once-unthinkable question is harder to shrug off: Will the administration deliberately defy federal judges if it doesn't get what it wants? The issue has come into sharp relief in the challenge to the administration's deportation of Venezuelan nationals under the purported authority of the Alien Enemies Act. The presiding judge — James Boasberg, chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — directed the government from the bench to turn the planes around carrying the deportees. That did not happen, though the administration claims it did not deliberately defy the judge. Boasberg has since pressed the government for more information, and on Friday, he will hold a hearing to consider the matter further. To consider Boasberg's options and the implications, I spoke with Shira Scheindlin, a former federal judge in Manhattan who served on the bench for 22 years. She is no stranger to complex, high-profile disputes involving the government, and as I can attest from brief personal experience — I once litigated before Judge Scheindlin while I worked in the private sector — she had a well-earned reputation for exercising firm control over her courtroom and the lawyers who appeared before her. Scheindlin said that in the debate over whether the United States is already in a constitutional crisis, the real red line is if the executive branch defies the judiciary, a move that Trump says he wouldn't take. But if it were to happen? 'That's when authoritarians become dictators and really tear down the temple by just ignoring the Constitution, ignoring the judiciary,' she said. 'That would be the shocking end to our 250-year experiment.' This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Did you ever confront a situation where there was a credible suggestion that the government had deliberately violated one of your orders? No. I don't remember any such event happening. In the case over deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, the government has argued that there is a difference between an oral order and a written order from a judge — that oral orders are somehow meaningless if they aren't immediately embodied in a written order. What do you make of that argument? That it's creative? That's all I can make of it, because I've never heard it before. When a judge makes an order from the bench, they sometimes say at the end, 'that's my order' or 'so ordered.' It's tough to appeal an oral order unless there's a certified transcript. Given that this is a high profile case, I bet he had a court reporter in the courtroom. I bet there is a transcript, and I bet they could have appealed it based on the transcript. I have had that happen — where it was so urgent that [a litigant] took the transcript, got up to the Second Circuit and said, 'you know, she's wrong.' Judge Boasberg has scheduled a hearing for Friday to determine next steps. The government has been making submissions in response to his orders, but they've been somewhat tentative and somewhat defiant. If you were Judge Boasberg, how would you approach this hearing? I think he's posed very specific questions to the government as to when certain flights took off. When did certain flights land? Who gave the [order]? Who was in touch with [the administration] after he issued his oral order? I'm sure he has a lot of questions that he thinks the government has to answer, and I think the government so far has been evasive in answering such simple questions. It is not hard to answer the questions I just gave as examples. What was the flight? Name and number. What airport did it leave? What time did it land? Who did you speak to after I gave my oral order? What time? He knows the time of [his order]. That's probably on the transcript. Those are the kinds of questions I think I would be asking on Friday. Assuming that the judge — Judge Boasberg or any other judge for that matter — eventually concludes that the government deliberately violated a court order, what are the judge's options? I can tell you that every former judge I know has been asked this question by somebody in the media, including me. I think the only real option is civil contempt. The reason why it cannot be criminal contempt is generally that would be referred to the Justice Department to prosecute. So you might have a lawyer, a witness that you direct to answer [a question], they refuse, and/or they lie. If you want to charge them with criminal contempt, you have to get the U.S. Attorney's office or Main Justice to prosecute, and clearly the Trump Justice Department, or the Bondi Justice Department, is not going to prosecute. Then you get that question, which was raised in the Eric Adams case, could you appoint a special prosecutor? That's tricky because of separation of powers, so I think criminal contempt is off the table. I think civil contempt, however, is something that could be done if the facts are fairly straightforward. The remedy in civil contempt, believe it or not, can include incarceration. Usually it's fines. If it was a lawyer, you might file a grievance against the lawyer. That could be done if these lawyers either lie to the court or personally violate the order — you might want to bring a grievance before the grievance committee of the local bar where they're admitted, something like that. So it could be fines, could be a grievance, but in theory, it could also be jailing somebody. I did that only once in my time on the bench. In a civil contempt case, I actually put somebody in jail because he was so defiant, and then … he did what he was told to do. You could also sanction the person, and that's always interesting, because you could have fines that double every day, so it can get serious fast. I don't know how good at math you are, but a $1,000 fine doubling every day can quickly add up to real money — not for the United States government, but for an individual. If somebody was individually sanctioned, that adds up. How would incarceration work in civil contempt? Wouldn't you still need the involvement of the executive branch? Well, you need the person taken away by the U.S. Marshal. That's the problem, right? When I held someone in civil contempt, I had to say, 'Marshal, take this person across the street to the jail.' That is part of the executive branch — just the U.S. Marshal escorting the person over to the federal facility. So it still has that problem, but you don't need a prosecutor. There have been reasons to doubt the veracity of the DOJ's arguments in court since the start of the Trump administration — to take just a couple examples, the arguments about why the prosecution against Eric Adams is being dismissed, and the arguments about why some civil servants have been fired. How do you approach a situation where you might not fully trust the representations that the government is making in court? That's a very good question. You have to try to develop evidence extrinsically to prove the falsehood. We talked about being evasive — in other words, just refusing to answer or ducking the question — but actually making a false statement to the court? You would have to have extrinsic evidence that it's false. If [opposing counsel] was able to find out what flight, what plane, when it left, when it landed, and it turns out that the government lied and said, 'Well, the plane took off before your order.' Let's say it turned out it took off an hour after the order. That's bad. That's a grievance to be filed against the individual attorney, who is an officer of the court, but you'd have to develop extrinsic evidence. You can't just say, 'I don't trust you.' I don't think that would work. You could say, 'I'm very doubtful that you have been candid with the court. I'm concerned about the veracity of what you've told me,' but I'm not going to take action without facts to prove that you have been dishonest with the court. Judges do have a sixth sense for that. They've been around. [Judge Boasberg] also has been around a long time. He's very experienced. I think you kind of know it when you see it. The lawyer has an ethical obligation to be candid to the tribunal. Are you worried that we'll see a situation where the government explicitly and outright defies a court order? I am concerned about that. We've been talking — we being civil society, everybody — about whether we're in a constitutional crisis. Everybody keeps writing an op-ed saying, 'Not yet, but almost.' The constitutional crisis will occur when the executive branch says to the judicial branch, 'Too bad, I don't have to listen to you.' That's a constitutional crisis, and we haven't quite gotten there. It seems to me that this executive branch is getting as close to that line as they possibly can without crossing it yet. But if they really just say, 'We don't have to listen to you,' that's very bad. There have to be three co-equal branches of government, and each branch has to respect the other. What do you think happens in a situation like that — particularly if it's a Supreme Court ruling — in terms of the public's confidence in the judicial system and the effects on American politics? If we really had the constitutional crisis that I just described — where the executive branch says to the judicial branch, 'I don't have to listen to you' — that's a very, very, very serious threat to our democracy. We are built on the separation powers. We're built on three co-equal branches of government. That's the authoritarian dictator saying, 'I'm tearing down the whole wall.' That's when authoritarians become dictators and really tear down the temple by just ignoring the Constitution, ignoring the judiciary. We won't have an independent judiciary any longer. That would be the shocking end to our 250-year experiment. It would be bad. And as far as public trust, I think more than 50 percent of the public would be very concerned and outraged. They didn't vote for this guy to tear down the house. Trump has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, but this week, we saw a rare statement from Chief Justice John Roberts pushing back on that idea. What do you make of Trump's comments — and also Roberts'? Trump knows better. His cronies have been talking impeachment for weeks now. They started with a judge from my court, Judge [Paul] Engelmayer, one of the early rulings they didn't like. They attacked him and said he had to be impeached, then they wanted to impeach a different judge. Now it's Boasberg. A lot of us have spoken out against the word 'impeachment,' pointing out very simply that a ruling you don't agree with is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and impeachment is limited to those [circumstances] and has never been used in any other way. So that's outrageous. It's a terrible thought. You disagree with the ruling, as Roberts said, you appeal it and you appeal it again, and that's our system. But you can't get rid of the judge. The Constitution gives us life tenure. That's the Constitution, and so impeachment is just not on the table. There's no basis. It's not a high crime or misdemeanor. There's been rising criticism, not just from Trump, but as you mentioned, congressional Republicans and also conservative activists. Are you confident that the judges can tune out all of this criticism? Judges read the news too, and there have been reports of rising threats to judges. I've been in that position where I've been publicly attacked, publicly criticized. The question is, does that deter you? Does that scare you? Does that intimidate you? That's the threat. Do you become intimidated? You do have family, you have spouses and children and parents, and there has been violence against judges. You know the history as well as I do. One judge lost her son, and another judge lost a husband and a mother. Terrible things have happened, so you can't help but worry about your security in an age where we've seen on TV, in a loop that never stops, what the January 6 rioters did, how they acted, how they tore through that building. It only takes one nut, and you or your family could be in danger. They're doing it to cause a chilling effect, but I think most judges are not going to be deterred. They're going to continue to stand up. They're going to continue to do what they think is right, but it's unfortunate that they have to, even in the back of their mind, worry that a judicial ruling could mean that they're physically in danger — them and their family. That's sad, but I don't think they'll be deterred. They certainly haven't been. It seems to me [that Trump has] been losing most cases at the trial level, no matter who appointed the judge, whether it's a so-called Republican appointee or Democratic appointee, either way. He's been losing in the district courts, and he lost again in the Ninth Circuit. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to add? Roberts' decision to speak out was unusual, almost unprecedented. He gives a state of the judiciary speech once a year, but I think only once before, maybe twice in all the years he's been chief justice, has he just come out and decided to make a statement. I think the last time was when Trump was president at the beginning, and he kept criticizing judges for being an Obama judge or a Clinton judge. And Roberts said there is no Obama judge. There is no Clinton judge. There's no Reagan judge. They're all federal judges, and they all do what they think is right. It was very unusual that immediately after Trump himself called for impeaching judges, [Roberts] must have said to himself, 'Enough is enough. I'm going to speak out. I'm the chief justice. They can't touch me. I'm going to say what I think.'
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Infamous stop-and-frisk judge Shira Scheindlin overstepped her bounds in legal saga with the Ramones, ex-manager claims
An infamous Manhattan judge turned arbitrator overstepped her bounds in a long-running legal battle over the Ramones, a former business manager for the iconic punk band claimed. Shira Scheindlin — who ruled in 2013 that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional and was later booted from the case by an appeals court for impartiality — has allegedly shown 'outrageous and improper behavior' throughout the dispute between guitarist Johnny Ramone's widow, Linda Cummings-Ramone, and lead singer Joey Ramone's brother, who goes by the stage name Mickey Leigh, according to court papers. Lawyers for Leigh wants to vacate Scheindlin's December decision forcing former business manager David Frey to step down, claiming the jurist lacked jurisdiction. Frey violated the terms of RPI's agreements when he failed to present deal for a potential Netflix movie about Leigh's book, 'I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir,' to the company for approval, Scheindlin found. It took decades for the band, whose four founding members were from Queens, to become a commercial success with its eponymous April 1976 debut going gold 38 years after it debuted. Earlier this year, Frey sued Cummings-Ramone for defamation after she previously accused him of threatening to leak a sex tape of her. 'Judge Scheindlin exceeded her bounds and usurped jurisdiction on issues over which she lacked the power to decide,' Frey's lawyer's claimed in a January filing seeking to vacate her decision and also accusing her of 'often screaming at defense counsel for inconsequential acts.' A transcript included in court records shows Scheindlin chastising Frey's lawyers for failing to provide evidence ahead of time and for dragging out proceedings. 'Ms. Scheindlin had no authority to invalidate the RPI's consent to make the I Slept with Joey Ramone movie,' spokesman Owen Stone said. Scheindlin did not return a request for comment.
