How Trump is reshaping the courts

Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

 ― Marian Wright Edelman

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded. 

~Jon Ronson

Axios – “President Trump has already appointed a record-breaking number of federal judges, but his judicial legacy is even bigger than that: More than half of those judges replaced Democratic appointees,

• The Senate has confirmed 17 Trump nominees for federal district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees.
• Trump has also filled 16 vacancies on federal appeals courts (the last stop before the Supreme Court). Six of those appointees replaced judges who were nominated by Democratic presidents.
• There are still 140 more vacancies in the federal district and appellate courts, and Trump has put forward nominees for about half of them.
• There could soon be 100 judicial nominees pending in the Senate, according to the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.

The bottom line: Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have already set a breakneck pace for judicial confirmations. If Republicans still control the Senate after this year’s midterms, no matter what else happens, that pace will continue — and the impact will be felt long after Trump’s presidency.”

“Rah-rah-style motivational forums” and a $40 million chit for US consultant Marty Cohen helped to shape the aggressive cross-selling Commonwealth Bank sales culture which led, in part, to the customer disaster now unfolding at the banking Royal Commission and billions in losses. Michael Sainsbury reports.  Marty Cohen: the man behind CBA’s sales culture unveiled

HEY WOULDN’T DO THAT … WOULD THEY? Yes, they would and they are, according to former House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. The “they” here are the Department of Justice officials who Issa claims are “lying through their teeth” about their “slow-walking” responses to congressional document requests and subpoena in hopes they will be drowned by a blue wave in November.

TaxProf Blog op-ed:  David Cay Johnston's Op-Ed Contains 'A Number Of Breathtaking Distortions And Omissions,' by Michael L. Wyland (Sumption & Wyland, Sioux Falls, SD):

In his op-ed Bradley Smith's WSJ Op-Ed Is A 'Breathtaking' Distortion Of The Facts Of The IRS 'Scandal', Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author David Cay Johnston has forgotten an old aphorism.  When one points an accusing finger at someone, three fingers of the same hand point back at oneself.  In short, Johnston’s response to Bradley Smith’s Wall Street Journal commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the IRS scandal contains a number of breathtaking distortions and omissions of its own.

 

 Wisdom of a Non-Idiot Billionaire Peggy Noonan, WSJ. “‘I saw Bernie Sanders and the kids around him,’ says Ken Langone. ‘I thought: This is the antichrist!'”

 

 There’s now clear evidence that anti-poverty programs like welfare and Social Security work Yahoo Finance

Lesson From The Tax Court: The Reach Of Equity

Justice Holmes famously said that people “must turn square corners when they deal with the government.” It is no coincidence that he said that in this 1920 tax case. Tax law has many sharp corners that frustrate both taxpayers and the IRS alike. For an example of where the sharp corners of procedure caused the IRS to lose a $10 million assessment, see Philadelphia-Reading Corp. v. Beck, 676 F.2d 1159 (3rd Cir. 1982).

But equity can sand down some of those sharp corners. Last week's post looked at the innocent spouse case of the Commie L. Minton a.k.a. Connie L. Keeney v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2018-15 (Feb. 5, 2018). That case illustrated how Congress had inserted a statutory command for the IRS and the Tax Court to use equity to relieve a spouse of an otherwise jointly owed liability. This week, the case of Emery Celli Cuti Brinckerhoff & Abady, P.C. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2018-55 (Apr. 24, 2018), teaches another lesson about equity in the Tax Law. Here, there is no Congressional command to use equity. Instead, the Tax Court uses a long-standing principle of equity created and apply by the courts. It is called equitable recoupment.