Politics
Judges shouldn’t be above the laws they interpret
It was a very bad summer for the federal judiciary.
First, Judge Joshua Kindred of Alaska resigned from the federal bench in scandal after a 20-month investigation uncovered appalling abuse and sexual harassment in his chambersleading to a referral from the Judicial Conference for possible impeachment in the House of Representatives.
Then, back-to-back reports were released — one from the Federal Judicial Center and National Academy of Public Administration, the other from the U.S. Government Accountability Office — underscoring issues that judicial accountability advocates have been raising for years: The federal judiciary’s insistence on insular “self-policing” and internal dispute resolution mechanisms have led to a lack of accountability for judges who mistreat employees.
The federal judiciary’s insistence on insular “self-policing”…have led to a lack of accountability for judges who mistreat employees.
Furthermore, a federal public defender attempted to sue the federal judiciary for allegedly mishandling her sexual harassment complaint, further underscoring the ineffectiveness of self-policing by the third branch.
Given the lack of guardrails to prevent, discipline or redress judicial misconduct, these issues of sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying, abusive conduct and retaliation are pervasive in courthouses nationwide. Law clerks routinely signal that they have not and would not report misconduct to the federal judiciary, as they do not feel protected against retaliation. Worse still, they do not think their concerns will be taken seriously, so they too often suffer in silence.
Despite this pervasiveness, the foundational federal statutes — such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — still do not apply to the judiciary, making it one of the only employers in the entire country whose employees are not protected by federal civil rights laws. This means that these employees cannot access legal remedies and seek financial recourse for harm to their career, reputation and future earning potential.
Simply put, federal judges are above the laws they interpret.
We are not strangers to these issues. They are personal to us both and we have dedicated our careers to fixing them: one of us by serving his constituents as the representative of Georgia’s 4th Congressional District, and before that as a magistrate judge and criminal defense attorney; the other by starting a nonprofit dedicated to providing support and resources to law clerks after experiencing harassment at the hands of the judge she clerked for in the D.C. Superior Court.
We come together to shed light on the fact that harassment in our federal courthouses is rarely shared publicly due to the culture of silence surrounding the judiciary. The enormous power disparity between law clerks and life-tenured federal judges makes it incredibly difficult to speak out.
Fortunately, there is a fix.
…harassment in our federal courthouses is rarely shared publicly due to the culture of silence surrounding the judiciary.
The Judiciary Accountability Act (JAA) would extend federal antidiscrimination protections to the more than 30,000 judicial branch employees, including law clerks and public defenders. Judges, the most powerful (and unaccountable) members of the legal profession, should be held to the highest ethical standards, not the lowest. And the antidiscrimination laws they interpret, which apply to all nonjudicial civilian government employees, should apply to them, too. The JAA is similar to the Congressional Accountability Actwhich extended these protections to Congress and its staff in 1995.
The JAA — which will be reintroduced in Congress this month by Rep. Johnson — is commonsense legislation that would align the federal judiciary with not just the rest of the federal government but with private sector workplaces as well. It would standardize the internal dispute resolution mechanisms (currently the only mode of redress for harassment) throughout the judiciary. It would revise the judicial complaint process so investigations against judges can continue even when a judge resigns, retires or passes away. Crucially, it would extend whistleblower retaliation protections to clerks who report misconduct, thereby encouraging more robust reporting.
And it would require the federal judiciary to finally collect and report data — to the public and to Congress. Quantifying the scope of these problems is the first step toward crafting effective solutions. The judiciary’s unnecessarily secretive and insular resistance to transparency is a red flag and must be remedied.
There has never been a better time to enact the JAA, as the judiciary continues to claim to “self-police,” yet scandal after scandal has shown the judicial branch cannot get its own house in order. The judiciary has repeatedly signaled a lack of concern for the well-being of employees, routinely claiming it has “robust reporting mechanisms.” Yet these mechanisms have failed to enact meaningful internal policies in the more than six years since notorious harasser Judge Alex Kozinski stepped down from the same circuit as Judge Kindred.
In the face of clear, repeated evidence of unaccountable judges committing egregious misconduct, Congress has the power and the duty to fix it and ensure judicial employees using their voices and bravely sharing their experiences do not do so in vain. Democrats and Republicans can unite behind this commonsense, nonpartisan legislation, as historically, judicial accountability has not been a partisan issue. Both Democratic and Republican judicial appointees harass their clerks, just as liberal and conservative clerks are mistreated by their powerful bosses, all without legal recourse.
Judges are uniquely unaccountable and immune from scrutiny. Simply put: There is no substitute for legislative action on this issue. Congress must step in and extend legal protections to the over 30,000 employees in our federal judiciary. These employees deserve safe and respectful workplaces, free from discrimination and harassment, and yet that’s not a commitment the judiciary can currently make in good faith to thousands of recent graduates embarking on federal clerkships this month.
It is the height of injustice that judiciary employees who support the daily functioning of our courts lack basic workplace protections. These protections are already provided to congressional and executive branch staff. Why should we continue to exempt our third branch of government?
Rep. Hank Johnson is a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Courts. He has represented Georgia’s Fourth District since 2007.
Some top congressional Republicans have privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and they are now focused on limiting the scale of the defeat and salvaging the party’s Senate majority.
Five senior Republican lawmakers, all granted anonymity to speak candidly about their party’s dire position, told Blue Light News the House had all but slipped away.
One senior House Republican said the GOP’s goal at this point was to “save as many Republican seats as we can.” The president, this person said, was not helping.
“President Trump has made this election all about himself,” the lawmaker said. “Now we have to survive that political storm.”
A second Republican member of Congress said the movement of campaign advertising made plain which side was in control of the midterms. This lawmaker predicted Democrats would pick up about 10 seats, more than enough to take control of the chamber.
Even in newly redistricted red states like Florida and Texas, this person said, Republican candidates were “hanging on with their fingernails.”
Republicans have already fallen back from several contested House districts that they feel are no longer winnable, including those held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey. Trump carried their districts just two years ago. The party last week gave up on an Omaha-based district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon.
Trump officials and other top GOP operatives say more candidates may be cut off in the coming days, in order to shift advertising money to races where it can make more of a difference. Republican groups have already given up on multiple races where they once hoped to unseat Democratic lawmakers.
The Republican Party is under extreme pressure across the Midwest, where it is now spending heavily to defend Senate seats in once-reliably MAGA states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.
Bacon, a maverick often at odds with the White House, said there was no mystery in his party’s political tribulations.
“I’ve talked to some who are making these decisions: The biggest problem is the president’s polling numbers and unfavorables,” Bacon said.
White House officials insist they’re not giving up on either chamber of Congress. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump remained “committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.”
As he departed on Tuesday to campaign in Alaska for embattled GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan, Trump professed optimism about the midterms but acknowledged that sitting presidents typically see their party lose seats in the off year.
“But I’m doing a tour right now and I’m doing rallies,” Trump added. “The level of enthusiasm for the Republican Party is way up.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, flatly declaring during a campaign stop in deep-red Texas that “the polling is wrong” in showing his party on the brink of a broad defeat.
Yet at a tactical level, the Republican Party’s moves to shift money away from defending the House and toward saving the Senate are clear enough. In recent days, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super PAC for House Republicans, canceled advertising for key House candidates in Nebraska and Iowa and allowed the Senate Leadership Fund – a Republican group focused on the upper chamber – to swoop in and claim the airtime to support Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa.
“These are not the moves of a party that’s going to keep the House,” a third Republican lawmaker said.
In statements to Blue Light News, both CLF and the National Republican Congressional Committee said they had no intention of giving up on the fight for control of the House.
NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said districts are won “one by one,” and that the GOP has “the financial firepower and ground game needed to win.”
Chris Winkelman, president of CLF, said his group would keep moving money around to maximize the impact nationally.
The goal, he said, was to “keep the pressure on the most vulnerable Democrats and preserve a path to 218 seats.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who lost his swing seat in Trump’s first midterm election eight years ago, said his former colleagues were clear-eyed about where the election seemed to be headed.
“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo said. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House — not in recent weeks, anyway.”
Megan Messerly, Lauren Fedor, Lisa Kashinsky and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Tuesday he will not run for president in 2028 and committed to serving a full six-year Senate term if reelected.
“I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” Ossoff said during a Georgia Senate debate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Asked by Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whether he would serve his full term if he wins in November, Ossoff replied: “Yes, I will.”
The remarks are Ossoff’s most forceful rejection yet of a potential 2028 presidential bid even as his name has repeatedly surfaced in national Democrats’ conversations about possible contenders for the party’s nomination. His public commitment to a full Senate term on Tuesday is the latest of his campaign’s many efforts to tamp down that speculation.
Ossoff gained national attention this year given his strong fundraising numbers, his consistent lead in public polling against Collins and his ability to generate viral moments on the campaign trail, particularly through his attacks on President Donald Trump. Democrats are bullish about Ossoff’s ability to hold onto his Senate seat — so much so that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said Tuesday it was removing its ad spending in Georgia for the week.
He’s also taken steps to boost the state Democratic party in Georgia, a perennial battleground that has been and will be key to winning the presidency. If November brings historic wins up and down the ballot, Ossoff will get some of the credit — and he’ll have confirmed his status as a leader in the swing state.
Democrats may be discovering the political power of calling something rigged.
They’re leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.
Messaging from Democrats that tied corruption to housing, health care and the cost of living increased voter support for Democratic congressional candidates by about 3 percentage points, according to a national survey last month conducted by Blue Rose Research and Democratic-aligned Winning Jobs Narrative Action, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The findings align with a shift in how Democrats are talking about corruption — and help explain why that message has exploded on the campaign trail. From Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia to James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Democrats have zeroed in on a common argument: Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans.
“We have a corruption crisis in this country, and it is leading to an affordability crisis,” Iowa Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek said during his Senate debate against Rep. Ashley Hinson last week.
It’s a message that is reverberating across campaigns. In a recent presentation delivered to Democratic groups on Capitol Hill, longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson offered a succinct playbook: “Corruption is why your costs are high,” according to the presentation viewed by Blue Light News.
His presentation also encouraged Democrats to lead with the acknowledgement that costs are high and then go into corruption, acknowledge that it happens across parties and avoid making President Donald Trump the sole focus of their attacks. “Trump works as an example of corruption that raises costs, not as the whole case,” the presentation said.
Since April, Democratic candidates and outside groups in House and Senate races have spent roughly $104 million on advertising mentioning corruption, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. Republicans, meanwhile, have spent $36 million across House and Senate campaigns over the same period.
“It’s not just like, ‘oh, look at what’s happening with the ballroom,’ or ‘boy, Donald Trump’s made a lot of money on crypto,’” Democratic strategist Chris Meagher said. “You have to be able to tie it to the impact on people’s lives.”
“The narrative works best when it’s an outsider candidate who is linking a rigged economy to a rigged political system,” longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of the anti-corruption messaging.
Running against corruption is not new. But as Democrats looked for a way out of the political wilderness after 2024, they began turning a familiar attack — anti-corruption — into a broader message tied to voters’ economic pain. What once was an attack largely focused on Trump has become a more expansive argument for candidates trying to connect it to why Americans are struggling financially, potentially providing a blueprint for the party beyond November.
“Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs,” Ferguson, the Democratic strategist, said.
The issue — and messaging around it — is also coming to the fore in a cycle when anger over the suppression of Epstein files hit a fever pitch and public pressure to ban Congress from trading stocks continues to mount.
And it’s not just the research by Blue Rose that shows the potential potency of that message.
In another recent survey from the Democratic group Navigator Research, obtained by Blue Light News, the vast majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — say corruption is driving up their costs. That same survey of registered voters, conducted in August, found majorities, including roughly a quarter of Republicans, say Trump is bringing more corruption to Washington than fixing it.
And new results from the nonpartisan Center Square’s Voter Voice Poll, conducted this month by Noble Predictive Insights and shared first with Blue Light News, show 10% of voters ranking government corruption as the second most important issue facing Americans, tied with the economy and jobs, and only behind inflation and price increases.
In some instances, Democrats have wrested the word “rigged” away from Trump who has used it in the context of unproven election fraud and turned it into a mobilizing political talking point. That’s a departure from March 2024 when Democrats criticized then Rep. Katie Porter for accusing special interests of spending money to “rig” the California Senate race after she lost in the state’s primary. But now some Democrats are embracing that language as a way to rail against what they see as a corrupt system.
“They’re rigging the rules to benefit their wealthy donors and corporate special interests,” former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in a message to supporters announcing the launch of his campaign to return to office.
But the corruption resonates across parties. Republicans who spoke with Blue Light News said Democrats do not own the issue — voters everywhere are animated by it. While polling shows that voters in both major parties believe the government is corrupt, Republicans accuse Democrats of lacking credibility on the issue.
“Americans have been disgusted by the level of self-serving corruption that spread like herpes through the slimy politicians who run the Democrat Party, and now they’re suddenly changing their tune because it’s an election year,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Voters see through the facade, and they know Republicans are cleaning up the rot left behind by Democrat leaders.”
On the Senate side, National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Bernadette Breslin pointed Blue Light News to a poll in Minnesota — a rare offensive opportunity for Senate Republicans this cycle — that shows there are just about as many voters who blame Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for widespread fraud of federally-funded government programs in the state as there are who blame the criminals. Walz’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is running for Senate against Republican Michele Tafoya, and corruption under Democratic rule is a key theme for Republicans in the race.
“The overwhelming majority of Minnesotans blame the Walz-Flanagan administration — and the criminals it aided and abetted — for plundering their hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Breslin said. “They’ll vote for Michele Tafoya to right the ship this November.”
Steve Pierce, executive director at Winning Jobs Narrative Action, said one of the biggest shifts for Democrats this cycle on corruption has been a move away from a message largely rooted in concerns over democratic norms, which have struggled to break through in a way that moves voters in past cycles.
“You’ve seen Democrats, rather than connecting corruption to democracy, connecting it to affordability, connecting it to the top concern that voters have,” said Pierce. “It’s connecting it in a way that’s meaningful to voters around the things that they are thinking about every day.”
The anti-corruption message has played out across the country, and as an explanation for frustration against different economic pain points, including rising electric bills and local data center projects.
A recent memo on data centers from House Majority PAC, the main super PAC working to elect House Democrats, noted the “message environment in the 2026 election cycle has been dominated by costs, with an important secondary theme around corruption that began to emerge last year.” The group’s spokesperson, CJ Warnke, told Blue Light News that “every single poll and every single focus group shows affordability to be voters’ number one issue, and they specifically point to corrupt politicians as being responsible for driving up prices.”
Next month’s midterms will offer the clearest test yet of whether Democrats can turn this message into votes. But Democratic operatives increasingly see anti-corruption messaging as more than just a short-term political weapon — as long as they try to do something about it if they win control next year.
“I think the thing for Democrats, if they do want to keep it on the radar heading into 2028, and I think they should because I think it is a really potent issue for them, they are going to have to also deliver on it,” said Pierce.
“They have to be able to show up to get caught trying,” he said.
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