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Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.

Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts. 

In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942. 

More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country. 

Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate. 

Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.

Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance. 

NEWRY, Northern Ireland — The former leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, Jeffrey Donaldson, received a 15-year prison sentence Thursday for sexually abusing two schoolgirls and continuing for decades into their adulthood.

Donaldson, 63, kept his hands clasped together but offered no visible reaction as Judge Paul Ramsey said the former Democratic Unionist Party leader must serve an 11-year sentence for raping one girl and a further 4-year term for sexually abusing another.

Donaldson has been behind bars since June, when a jury found him guilty of 18 counts of sexually abusing the two women — identified in court only as Victim A and Victim B — when they were children. The listed offenses ran from 1985 to 2008.

Ramsey, addressing a packed Newry Crown Court, read from the two victims’ statements, which described abuse that began when they were 7 or 8 years old. One of the victims described recurring nightmares: “I wonder what it is like not to be afraid at night.”

The judge noted how Donaldson, who is appealing the conviction, had “doubled down on his denials” over what he called the veteran politician’s “catastrophic descent into disgrace.”

Donaldson’s former party, which denounced him immediately after his 2024 arrest and scrubbed him from the DUP website, said in a statement Thursday that Donaldson “deserves every day of the lengthy prison sentence he has to serve” for what it described as “vile and disgusting crimes.”

“Our first thoughts are again with the innocent victims who, having suffered such evil, were retraumatized through giving evidence at the trial. They deserve our compassion, support and respect,” the DUP statement said.

Donaldson was an MP representing Lagan Valley from 1997 to 2024, first for the moderate Ulster Unionist Party and then — after belatedly breaking with the party over its support for the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 — as a member of the hard-line DUP.

Donaldson became DUP leader in 2021, when he oversaw the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government in a bitter dispute over the region’s peculiar post-Brexit trade rules. Just weeks before his arrest, he again played a key role in reviving the coalition, the cornerstone of the Good Friday peace deal he had once rejected.

In March 2024, Donaldson was arrested in his secluded County Down home and charged alongside his wife, Eleanor. She was subsequently deemed by the Newry judge not mentally fit to stand trial on charges of aiding and abetting his crimes.

The U.K. government in July removed Donaldson from membership in the Privy Council, a body of parliamentary advisers to King Charles III. The king also stripped him of his knighthood.

Donaldson has been placed in an isolated hospital wing at Northern Ireland’s Maghaberry Prison, alongside other convicted sex offenders, to protect him from potential assaults from other prisoners. He reportedly is spending much of his days behind bars doing puzzles and reading the Bible.

Federal authorities arrested a Saudi national employed at OpenAI and charged him with planting a recording device in a company’s executive conference room, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

On or around Sept. 30, OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device inserted into the back of a television in an executive conference room located in one of its San Francisco offices. The company determined that the device was installed approximately a couple days prior, concealed in toilet paper. The contents of the device were encrypted, according to the DOJ.

The Department of Justice said in a news release that the employee, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Friday and appeared in federal court Tuesday. OpenAI confirmed the incident on social media and said that it was supporting the FBI’s investigation.

“We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier,” OpenAI said in its statement. “At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.”

Alfozan used a “productivity tool” to inquire about the company’s meeting rooms, calendars, and “leadership and exec” locations, according to OpenAI’s complaint to the DOJ. A chatbot account associated with his spouse also indicated that the user submitted prompts in September relating to installing and remote accessing a recording device.

The DOJ said that CCTV footage showed Alfozan, who had been employed as an engineer by OpenAI since July 2025, near and inside the conference room on multiple occasions before the device was discovered. Meetings in the conference room “frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities,” according to the complaint.

The company also discovered another recording device in one of Alfozan’s bags left in the office.

“We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest,” OpenAI said. “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”

The Saudi national, who has since been fired by OpenAI, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release if convicted, according to the DOJ.

“For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian for the Northern District of California said in a statement. “This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint.”

EU lawmakers urged the bloc’s executive to robustly defend the International Criminal Court against U.S. sanctions in a letter sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday and obtained by POLITICO.

“We formally call for the urgent deployment of all instruments at our disposal to protect the International Criminal Court from the consequences of these sanctions,” reads the letter, signed by 58 MEPs, led by ECON chair and S&D lawmaker Aurore Lalucq and EPP Dutch lawmaker Dirk Gotink.

They ask the Commission boss “to draw a clear line towards the US administration.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to demolish the ICC “brick by brick.” Washington has already sanctioned several judges, including judges from France, Italy and Slovenia, after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

U.S. sanctions announced on Friday risk to cut off the whole ICC from the financial system, which runs on the dollar, and from the majority of tech service providers.

Lawmakers said the sanctions are “an attack by a foreign power on an entity on EU territory, using our own financial system.” They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as Blocking Statute, that would prevent EU firms from complying with the U.S. sanctions as soon as a 180-day grace period ends.

After a meeting in Luxembourg, foreign affairs ministers agreed to seek pragmatic solutions to make it possible for EU firms to continue to work with the Court, according to two diplomats. MEPs called for a fiercer reaction.

“The survival of the values the European Union upholds is at stake, as is Europe’s autonomy and credibility in protecting its citizens and entities against foreign sanctions,” their letter reads. “This is about the survival of the Union itself.”

Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant rejected furious accusations from the U.K. region’s unionists Monday that he had “bent the knee” to Irish republicans blocking a long-disputed Protestant march.

Bryant told the House of Commons that his decision to ban what had been a legally authorized parade by the Orange Order — a pro-British Protestant brotherhood reviled by many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics — had been taken principally to avoid violence. Thousands led by Sinn Fein, the main Irish republican party, had spent nearly two weeks blocking the Orangemen’s intended path down the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the town of Portadown, but police kept the two sides apart.  

“The Orange Order obtained a legal right to parade, but … upholding the determination does not come at any cost. Upholding the law also means judiciously preventing serious disorder,” Bryant said in defense of his intervention Friday night.

Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.

Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.”

But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay.

“I utterly reject the charge that I have in any way succumbed to mob rule. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.”

He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s.

The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling. Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets.

A separate Belfast High Court hearing gave the go-ahead for Portadown’s Orange lodge to pursue a legal challenge against both Bryant and Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. That case will be heard starting next Monday.

Boutcher, rejecting unionist calls for him to resign, issued his own lengthy defense of his officers’ management of the Portadown standoff. He appealed to both sides to respect a legal process that could take months to conclude — including potential charges against senior Sinn Féin figures involved in the Garvaghy Road blockade.

The legal fight over whose rights should prevail is fracturing Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, a bitterness on full display Monday night at Stormont, the center of government on a hill overlooking Belfast.

After a three-hour debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly, unionist members voted unanimously to oust the four Sinn Féin ministers from their supposed unity government. Unionists accused all four, led by First Minister Michelle O’Neill, of breaking their ministerial pledge to uphold the law of the land by joining and encouraging the Garvaghy Road protests.

O’Neill accused her accusers on the other side of the chamber of being reactionary bigots.

“It’s no surprise to me that the three unionist parties have signed up to this motion. They have never accepted the reality that an Irish republican is now the first minister, and a woman at that. They have never accepted equality,” she said.

The unionists’ motion of no confidence bore no legal weight because of Stormont’s peculiar power-sharing rules. This would have required Sinn Féin members to join the unionists in voting to punish their own leaders.

In the end, four motions — seeking the expulsion from office for a year of O’Neill, Finance Minister John O’Dowd, Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald and Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins — all failed on virtually identical sectarian tests. While 33 to 34 unionists voted to kick out each one, 35 lawmakers from Sinn Féin and a smaller Irish nationalist party, the SDLP, voted to keep them in office.

O’Neill’s official co-leader of Northern Ireland’s four-party government, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists, said she understood the law as a barrister — and her government colleague had broken it by leading a “mob” that included well-known figures from multiple IRA factions “threatening violence and disorder.”

BRUSSELS — Ryanair has accused rivals Lufthansa and Air France-KLM of trying to ground the low-cost carrier by alleging that its ownership structure violates EU rules.

The two legacy airlines, which face growing competition from budget carriers, belong to the European Network Airlines Association, a lobby group that has filed a legal challenge over Ryanair’s share ownership.

“Now they’re in the Irish High Court seeking to have our license suspended and Ryanair grounded,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said Thursday in Brussels.

The association confirmed to POLITICO that it has spent months urging EU and Irish aviation authorities to investigate whether Ryanair complies with the bloc’s ownership and control rules.

Under those rules, airlines must be majority-owned and effectively controlled by EU nationals or entities to hold an EU operating license. ENAA argues that Ryanair no longer meets those requirements, pointing to the airline’s March announcement that only 30% of its shares are held by EU nationals. O’Leary, an Irish citizen, holds 4% of the stock.

When the Irish Aviation Authority seemed “reluctant to engage on the matter,” ENAA took the matter to court. If Ryanair loses the case, it could be forced to change its ownership structure. The carrier’s operating license would only be suspended if it does not comply with the verdict.

Ryanair has rejected the allegations, arguing that its non-EU shareholders do not have voting rights, which means the airline is under EU control.

In an emailed statement, Ryanair accused its rivals of attempting “to restrict competition and choice for EU air travel” by challenging its operating license.

Grounding risk seen as remote

Augusto Viansson Ponte, a London-based director at Alton Aviation Consultancy, doubted that the legal case would be easily dismissed, but also said it was unlikely that Ryanair would lose its operating license.

“ENAA’s request is sufficiently well-founded to justify examination, but it is way too early to say that Ryanair is violating the rules,” he said.

Regardless of the legal outcome, Viansson Ponte said that a “likely first step would be corrective measures, not immediate grounding.”

Even if the court rules against the budget airline, Ryanair would have several options to address any compliance problems, the analyst said. 

“Ryanair could restrict non-EU [share] purchases, facilitate transfers of shares to EU investors, implement targeted share buybacks or restructure its licensed subsidiaries for example,” he said, adding that the process “should be manageable” for the airline.

Enemies in court, friends in Brussels

Despite their spat, Ryanair, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM all belong to the Brussels-based Airlines for Europe (A4E) lobby, and all are pushing for a reform of the Air Services Regulation, which sets the rules for operating in the EU, including ownership and control.

The lobby’s members jointly support providing “more flexibility … and tackle the risks linked to this change,” they said in feedback to the Commission.

“The potential way forward is to allow institutional investors from selected third countries to hold a limited percentage of shares … which would count towards the EU share of ownership,” the joint position adds. 

If EU lawmakers adopt the proposal, “that would allow a greater access to liquidity in those markets for airlines,” said easyJet CEO Kenton Jarvis, whose company is set to be acquired by U.S. investment firm Apollo.

However, the legal battle between the Irish budget airline and legacy carriers may fracture A4E. O’Leary threatened on Thursday at an A4E press conference to leave the lobby group unless the legal case is dropped by the end of the year. 

A4E later acknowledged that its members “may have differing views on certain issues, [but] we share a common interest in advancing our collective work for the benefit of European passengers, particularly in an increasingly complex and costly regulatory environment.”

Neither Lufthansa nor Air France-KLM commented on O’Leary’s threat to leave A4E.

LUXEMBOURG — The European Parliament can’t review the secret ballot votes that blocked the far right from key positions, its lawyers told a court in Luxembourg today.

In court, the Parliament’s lawyer, Niklas Görlitz, said: “The results of the vote are definitive. There’s no mechanism in our rules to redo the vote.”

The EU’s General Court was hearing a case brought by the Patriots for Europe group, which is challenging the long-standing firewall set up by Europe’s centrist forces — the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, the liberals of Renew, and the Greens — to keep the far right away from decision-making. 

Specifically, the Patriots are contesting elections in which the chairs and vice-chairs of parliamentary committees were selected after the 2024 EU election. Those jobs were filled through voting in secret ballots. The group is also questioning the composition of the Parliament’s international delegations, saying its lawmakers were kept away from key roles.

Lawyers for the Patriots — home of France’s National Rally, Spain’s Vox and Hungary’s Fidesz, among others — said its MEPs being kept from top committee jobs was a “categorical exclusion” and it was “not acceptable” for the Parliament’s third-largest party to be locked out of these positions.

The Patriots have 85 lawmakers in the 720-strong chamber. Top jobs in Parliament come up for grabs again in January 2027, giving the Patriots another chance to try to get into powerful positions. 

Hungarian lawmaker Kinga Gál, the Patriots’ first vice-president, has previously called the mainstream parties’ actions “outrageous” and “against the rule of law.”

The Patriots’ lawyer, Azelio Fulmini, referred to the EU institution’s own description of representation.

“This proportional distribution of leadership positions within Parliament prevents the dominance of political life by just one or two large political groups, ensuring that smaller political groups also have a say in setting the political agenda,” he read.

“I don’t know if there’s a clearer declaration than that,” he said, adding that he was reading directly “from the European Parliament’s website.”

Görlitz told the court that all groups can nominate candidates for key jobs, adding: “Not getting the votes … doesn’t justify your tribunal getting involved in our affairs.”

The Patriots’ lawyer accused the Parliament of going beyond the neutral administration of committee elections, arguing that officials helped implement a political agreement designed to keep the group out of leadership posts.

EPP chief Manfred Weber told POLITICO in May 2025 that giving the far right access to executive posts was a red line. Over the past two years, his group has repeatedly passed legislation with the far right’s support.

The presiding judge, the court’s new president Savvas Papasavvas, did not give a date for the court’s decision.

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. This decision should surprise no one because, about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election.

That second decision, moreover, followed an even earlier one by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. In that matter, Kavanaugh acted alone under a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process that the justices rarely invoke unless they view a case as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally refer it to their colleagues.

So, for those keeping track at home, that’s three times that the Supreme Court needed to decide the same exact question in less than three weeks. 

This happened because of an extraordinary round of defiance by Republican judges in the lower courts. Just minutes after Kavanaugh determined (for the first time) that Missouri cannot use the Republican gerrymander, a Trump-appointed judge in Missouri tried to countermand Kavanaugh’s decision. Then, after the full Court reaffirmed Kavanaugh’s decision, a panel of three Republican appellate judges again tried to reinstate the new maps that the Supreme Court had already twice rejected.

These judges’ behavior is disturbing. But it is also potentially a window into the future of the Supreme Court — at least if Republicans keep winning elections that allow them to fill seats on the federal judiciary.

The lower federal courts are gravid with ambitious Republican judges who reach conclusions that are either too extreme or too partisan for the current Supreme Court — such as the ones they reached in this case. These courts are also full of plausible candidates for a Supreme Court nomination who have shown unwavering loyalty to Trump, the MAGA movement, or the Republican Party — regardless of whether there are legal arguments supporting the GOP’s preferred outcomes.

Indeed, one lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, now functions as a kind of think tank for MAGA legal theories that less partisan judges would scoff at in disgust. This is the same court, for example, that attempted to pull the abortion medication mifepristone from the market. It’s a court that declares entire federal agencies unconstitutional. Or that orders thousands of lawfully cast ballots thrown in the trash after the Republican Party asks them to do so. The Fifth Circuit is also frequently reversed from the left by the Supreme Court.

That means that, if Republicans hold onto the Senate after the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, Trump will be able to easily identify and confirm Supreme Court nominees who make Justice Samuel Alito, the most partisan member of the current Court, look like an icon of disinterested fairness. And many of these ultra-partisan judges are young enough that they will remain viable Supreme Court candidates in future Republican administrations.

Eliminating judicial filibusters transformed who gets nominated to federal judgeships

About 13 years ago, the Senate fundamentally changed how federal judges are confirmed. Prior to late 2013, senators in the minority party could use the filibuster to block any judicial nominee who couldn’t find 60 senators who would support their confirmation. But the Senate voted in November of 2013 to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

Both parties have their own narratives blaming the other for this development. Republicans often claim that Democrats’ decision to filibuster a handful of President George W. Bush’s lower court nominees — before the second Bush administration, judicial filibusters were rare — was a major escalation in the partisan war over judicial confirmations. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Republicans for a significant uptick in judicial filibusters under President Barack Obama.

In any event, Senate Democrats eventually decided to allow judges to be confirmed by a majority vote after Republicans filibustered all of Obama’s nominees to three vacant seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That broke a logjam that otherwise would have prevented Obama from filling any of these seats, but it also created a new world where lawyers who wished to become federal judges or justices no longer needed to worry about winning votes from senators in the other party.

This new world was apparent immediately after Trump took office the first time in 2017. There was a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, largely because Senate Republicans had held it open for a year until Trump could fill it. 

During his first term, Trump largely delegated the task of picking judges to the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. And the Federalist Society was obsessively focused on weakening the power of federal agencies to regulate private business. 

Trump’s eventual nominee for the open seat, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, secured his new job by advertising his eagerness to advance the conservative legal movement’s top priority. Shortly before his nomination, Gorsuch wrote a pair of opinions laying out his plan to make federal agencies subservient to the judges. And one of these opinions, according to the journalist David Kaplan, “proved decisive in clinching” the nomination for Gorsuch.

In the pre-2013 world, judges with Supreme Court ambitions often avoided making their most controversial views public out of fear that doing so would antagonize other-party senators who they might need to support their confirmation to a higher court. In 2011, for example, Kavanaugh, then a judge, was assigned to a panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare. But he dodged the key issue in the case, instead claiming that he lacked jurisdiction to rule on whether Obamacare is lawful.

After Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory opinions scored him a Supreme Court seat, however, lower court judges took notice. And the most ambitious Republican judges started looking for opportunities to prove their conservative bona fides to the Trump White House. Before 2017, for example, Kavanaugh had avoided taking a public position on abortion. Months after Gorsuch’s confirmation, however, Kavanaugh gave a speech to a conservative think tank signaling that he would be a vote to overrule Roe v. Wade if he were given a promotion.

The confirmation process, in other words, now favors candidates who audition for judicial jobs by demonstrating that they are dependable votes on issues that drive their political party. This is especially true for Republican judicial candidates, because the Trump White House has shown such favor toward candidates who are personally loyal to Trump. But Democrats who want a judicial appointment also have similar incentives. 

Gorsuch got his seat because Republicans, who controlled the Senate in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death opened a vacancy on the Supreme Court, refused to confirm anyone that Obama nominated to fill this seat. It now appears, in other words, that no Democrat can get confirmed to the Supreme Court unless their party controls the Senate. So Democrats with Supreme Court ambitions also have no incentive to make nice with Republicans.

The way to get a high-powered judgeship is to convince your own political party that you will use that judgeship to advance its goals.

Republican judges are openly auditioning for the Supreme Court

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are hardly the only judges who started advertising their ideological and partisan loyalty in an apparent effort to get ahead. The lower courts are now full of judges who write extreme and often needlessly provocative opinions that seem designed to catch the eye of someone in the White House.

The Ninth Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke, for example, is a particularly vulgar judge who was reportedly on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court during his first term. He’s best known for opinions mocking his colleagues and left-leaning litigants in a tone more often found on MAGA podcasts than in judicial opinions. VanDyke began an opinion about transgender women last March, for example, with the line “this is a case about swinging dicks.”

Or consider Andrew Oldham, a Fifth Circuit judge known for his opinions undercutting the First Amendment, attacking voting by mail, and standing up for vaping companies’ ability to sell bubblegum-flavored nicotine products — among other things. Oldham’s chambers is a factory pumping out decisions that even cause many of the Supreme Court’s Republicans to cringe — his vaping opinion was tossed out in a unanimous decision by Alito — but that also align perfectly with the Trump administration’s preferred policy outcomes.

The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

Or take Judge James Ho, Oldham’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit, who is also known for his trolly opinions attacking liberal shibboleths. Rather than attempt to summarize Ho’s jurisprudence, I will simply refer readers to my 2023 profile of him: “The edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

I could name more judges who behave similarly — I bring up these three largely because they’ve been discussed in the national media as potential Supreme Court candidates if Trump gets to appoint another justice. But there’s no need to belabor the point. The bottom line is that, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, Trump will have no shortage of judges who appear to have spent their judicial careers looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how eager they are to advance a MAGA agenda, even when that means moving several steps to the right of a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans.

Indeed, the Missouri incident reveals just how widespread these sorts of judicial partisans are within the lower courts. None of the Republican judges who tried to reinstate the Missouri gerrymander after it was rejected by the Supreme Court, for example, have received the same attention that VanDyke, Oldham, and Ho have received as possible Supreme Court candidates. One of them, Judge James Loken, is an 86-year-old George H.W. Bush nominee with no prospects whatsoever of getting promoted.

But the culture in the lower courts has grown so open to partisan decisionmaking that he, along with two younger colleagues, literally tried to give the Republican Party an extra US House seat after the Supreme Court had told them not to do it twice.

Which isn’t to say that every Republican federal judge, or even every Trump appointee, is a partisan hack. One of the most pointed opinions rejecting Trump’s attempt to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, for example, was authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee. But, while Bibas’s opinion in Donald J. Trump for President v. Secretary (2020) was excellent, it also almost certainly guaranteed that he will never become a justice. And it absolutely guaranteed that he will never be nominated by Trump.

There’s no good solution to this problem

The biggest reason why America is stuck in this mess is that its two major parties have polarized on the proper role of judges. Even setting aside the youngest generation of hyperpartisan judges, it’s long been the case that any Republican nominated to the Supreme Court will be a reliable vote against causes like abortion rights, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act, and an equally reliable vote in favor of the “unitary executive” and for religious conservatives who seek exemptions from state and federal laws. Any Democrat, meanwhile, will take the opposite position on these, and a whole array of other issues where the two parties have consistent positions.

This is why restoring the old filibuster rules that existed prior to 2013 will not succeed in moderating the judiciary. If anything, allowing the minority party to filibuster judges again would mean that no one would ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court, because any nominee who is acceptable to one party would be radioactive in the other party.

Ultimately, the only effective way to keep people like Oldham, Ho, or VanDyke off the Supreme Court is to elect senators and presidents who do not want them on the Supreme Court. The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

For a brief moment last week, it appeared that an ICE officer, who allegedly shot a man during the early 2026 occupation of Minneapolis and then lied about it, might actually face legal consequences for his actions.

Christian Castro, the now-suspended ICE officer in question, was confined to a Texas jail and potentially faced two sets of criminal charges. Minnesota prosecutors charged him with four felony counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, and sought his extradition from Texas, where he ordinarily lives, to Minnesota. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, were reportedly planning to charge Castro with a criminal violation of a federal civil rights law.

Castro’s case was on track to become an encouraging example of how the American system can bring rogue law enforcement officers to account — a federal officer facing clear consequences for allegedly breaking the law in the unpopular and violent wave of ICE raids in Minnesota.

But all of that now appears to be in limbo. According to the New York Times, the federal charges, which had to be approved by officials in Washington, DC, “fell apart in the final hours for reasons that remain unclear.” Castro, meanwhile, may never return to Minnesota — and may even flee to Mexico — thanks to a federal court decision permitting Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to effectively sit on Minnesota’s request to extradite Castro until after a state law required Castro’s release.

It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing saga where Trump administration officials, federal courts eager to shield federal law enforcement officers from justice, and now Texas state officials all work together to ensure that ICE and other law enforcement personnel involved in Trump’s violent crackdown in Minnesota face no legal consequences for their actions. 

If Castro gets off scot-free, he will owe his freedom to an unusual combination of federal and state officials who appear to have taken extraordinary measures to shield Castro from accountability. But while his case is unusually dramatic, it is hardly unique. An array of MAGA sympathizers and movement conservatives in state governments, the federal judiciary, and the Trump administration have all pushed to place ICE and similar agencies above the law.

What is the legal fight over Castro about?

Castro allegedly fired his gun through the door of Julio Sosa-Celis’s Minneapolis home in January, striking him in the leg. Although the Trump administration initially claimed that Sosa-Celis and his roommate attacked ICE officers with a broom and shovel, that allegation fell apart after prosecutors viewed video of the incident. Castro was suspended from his job at ICE without pay.

In May, a Minnesota prosecutor filed charges against Castro, and Castro was later arrested in Texas pursuant to an arrest warrant arising out of those charges.

That arrest should have guaranteed that Castro would be returned to Minnesota for trial. The Constitution provides that “a Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz formally sought Castro’s extradition on June 2.

Rather than comply with this request, however, Abbott took two actions that may prevent Castro from ever being tried for his alleged crimes. Abbott initiated an investigation, claiming, on dubious legal grounds, that he may not be able to extradite Castro because Castro does not meet the legal definition of a “fugitive.” Abbott also sent his lawyers to federal court to argue that the court could not order Texas to comply with the Constitution’s mandatory extradition provision.

Meanwhile, a deadline loomed over Minnesota’s request. Though Castro was incarcerated in a Texas jail, Texas law only permitted the jail to hold Castro for 90 days, at least without an order from Abbott saying that Castro must be extradited. During his incarceration, Castro also made several phone calls to his romantic partner in Mexico, and they discussed Castro’s desire to move to that country. 

So Minnesota quite reasonably feared that, if the 90 days were allowed to expire, Castro would flee the country.

Nevertheless, last Wednesday a Trump-appointed Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. backed Abbott’s play. His opinion in Walz v. Abbott rests on an extraordinarily credulous interpretation of Abbott’s treatment of Castro.

Briefly, Rodriguez’s opinion claims that it is too soon for a court to order Abbott to extradite Castro because Abbott has not yet formally “denied the request for a rendition warrant.” Instead, Rodriguez notes that Abbott asked Texas’s secretary of state to investigate whether Castro should be surrendered to Minnesota, and suggests that Minnesota must wait for that “investigation” to play out.

Oddly, Rodriguez’s opinion also includes a footnote indicating that he believes Abbott’s supposed investigation is baseless. The premise of that investigation is that Castro may not count as a “fugitive” because he moved to Texas after ICE directed him to do so. But, as Rodriguez notes, the Supreme Court defined who counts as a fugitive more than a century ago, and the Court’s definition does not exclude people who move because of a job, federal or otherwise.

So, to summarize Rodriguez’s decision, he ruled that Texas may delay complying with Minnesota’s extradition request, based on an investigation into a legal question that the Supreme Court has already resolved, and that it may delay compliance until state law requires Texas to release Castro. Castro was released on Thursday.

Thanks to this decision, it is now unclear whether Castro will ever face charges. Even if he remains in Texas, and even if Abbott eventually decides to comply with the extradition request, Texas authorities will now have to find Castro again and rearrest him. And Castro may flee to Mexico. While Minnesota can formally request Castro’s extradition from Mexico, that process could take years.

And, in case there is any doubt, there’s now strong evidence that Abbott’s “investigation” was a sham, and that Abbott was always motivated by hostility toward Minnesota’s attempt to prosecute Castro. One day after Rodriguez issued his decision, Abbott posted on X mocking Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, which said that Ellison and his legal team “are such bad lawyers.”

The post also labeled Minnesota a “sanctuary state” and threatened to bus immigrants from Texas to Minnesota.

Even if Abbott had complied with the Constitution, Minnesota prosecutors faced an uphill battle in their case against Castro

Even if Castro had been delivered to Minnesota authorities without incident, or even if he is arrested in Minnesota at some point in the future, it’s far from clear whether state prosecutors may bring charges against a federal law enforcement officer who allegedly violated Minnesota’s criminal law while carrying out his official duties. And the biggest obstacle standing against such a prosecution is a fairly sensible Supreme Court decision that long predates modern political fights over immigration enforcement.

The Court’s decision in In re Neagle (1890) arose from a wild incident where a former chief justice of the state of California attempted to kill a sitting Supreme Court justice. David Terry, the former state justice, married a woman who claimed that she was entitled to a share of a US senator’s fortune. After Justice Stephen Field ruled against Terry’s wife, Terry threatened Field’s life, and so Field was assigned a deputy US Marshal named David Neagle as his bodyguard.

Some time after Field’s decision against Terry’s wife, the justice was traveling by train in California, and he was attacked by Terry. Neagle shot and killed Terry. And California attempted to charge Neagle, the federal bodyguard, with murder. 

The Supreme Court tossed out this prosecution, and that decision has long been read to limit state governments’ power to prosecute federal officers who commit a state law crime while engaged in their official duties.

That said, the Court’s more recent decision in Martin v. United States (2025) suggests that Neagle may not be a total bar to state prosecutions of ICE officers. Martin read Neagle fairly narrowly, to say that federal officials are protected from state prosecutions only when their actions “were ‘necessary and proper’ in the discharge of their federal responsibilities.”

So that suggests that, if Castro is tried for violating Minnesota law, the question of whether he is immune from prosecution is likely to turn on whether courts determine that his alleged decision to fire a shot through Sosa-Celis’s door (and, potentially, to lie about Sosa-Celis’s actions) was a “necessary and proper” way for Castro to carry out his responsibilities as an immigration enforcement officer.

It’s hard to predict, however, how the courts would rule on this question. The Martin decision is fairly new, and the rule Martin seems to apply to federal officers charged with state crimes is vague. 

Federal law also provides that Castro’s trial, should it happen, must occur in federal court — although this federal court may still hear a state-law prosecution. And that means that any decision allowing Castro’s prosecution to move forward would appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which is one of the most conservative appeals courts in the federal system.

Of course, if Minnesota lost in the Eighth Circuit, it could potentially bring the question of whether Castro may be charged with violating a Minnesota criminal law to the Supreme Court. But, while the Martin decision suggests that Minnesota may have a chance of prevailing before the justices, several of the Court’s other precedents indicate that this Court is unlikely to rule against a federal law enforcement officer.

The slow death of Bivens

Separately from the legal question of whether someone like Castro can be charged with a crime, there is also the question of whether the victim could sue. It used to be the case that people who are victimized by federal law enforcement officers could sue those officers directly, but the current Supreme Court has virtually shut down these suits. The Court’s treatment of this question is a window into their expansive view of immunity for federal law enforcement.

More than five decades ago, the Supreme Court established in Bivens v. Six Unknown Names Agents (1971) that federal officers who violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” may be sued and potentially ordered to compensate their victim.

But the Court’s current majority is extremely hostile to Bivens, and has walked right up to the edge of overruling it. In Hernández v. Mesa (2020), the Court’s Republican majority held that a Border Patrol agent who allegedly fatally shot a Mexican teenager in the face was immune from a lawsuit brought by the teenager’s family. More recently, in Egbert v. Boule (2022), the Court declared that federal law enforcement officers are immune from suit if there is “any rational reason (even one)” to justify giving them immunity.

In November, the Court will hear the Nielsen v. Watanabe that could potentially overrule what little remains of Bivens.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in other words, has spent the last several years immunizing federal law enforcement officers like Castro from civil lawsuits. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will also immunize Castro from criminal charges brought under state law, should his case somehow wind up before the justices, but it isn’t a hopeful sign for Minnesota prosecutors.

And that’s, of course, assuming that Minnesota law enforcement somehow manages to take custody of Castro. Abbott’s gamesmanship, and Rodriguez’s decision to bless that gamesmanship, may ultimately mean that Castro is never apprehended by Minnesota officials.