William Pryor is a conservative Republican former Alabama Deputy State Attorney General, who fiercely opposed overruling laws that criminalized same-sex encounters between two consenting adults. Appointed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals by President George V. Bush in 2003, Pryor called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law,” and said Roe created “a constitutional right to murder an unborn child … out of thin air.” Unsurprisingly, he was on President Donald Trump’s short list for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Andrew Brasher is a conservative Republican lawyer who was Alabama’s Solicitor General until Donald J. Trump (over unanimous Democratic opposition) appointed him to the 11th Circuit in 2020. In 2024, President Joe Biden appointed Embry Kidd to the same court.
Those three unanimously held that Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton was so frivolous that Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba (whom Trump later tried to appoint U.S. Attorney for New Jersey) were so frivolous that Trump/Habba should be ordered to pay the defendants $1 million to defray attorney fees.
Legally, “frivolous” means that an argument is obviously not the law, and there’s no reasonable argument that the law should be changed.
The trial court stated that several legal theories were flatly forbidden by previous decisions “that the most basic research would have revealed.” As Pryor wrote, Trump alleged “‘a malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution’ and a ‘trade secret claim without a trade secret,’ plus “‘seven counts . . . which did not allege any cause of action,” which the trial court called, “the high—water mark of shotgun pleading.”
Pryor’s opinion also stated that in deciding Trump acted in bad faith the trial court had properly considered Trump’s other stupid litigation constituting “a pattern of misusing the courts.” (In my four decades lawyering, fighting hard for clients, taking aggressive positions, no judge ever found my argument frivolous.)
Again, two of these three were conservative Republicans who share Trump’s repulsive views! Another three-judge appellate panel, with two Trump-appointed judges, torpedoed Trump’s “meritless” lawsuit against CNN, holding that using the Hitler-related term “Big Lie” to describe Trump’s false claims of election fraud was First Amendment-protected opinion.
Trump’s pattern of bad faith litigation is indistinguishable from his “revenge tour” indictments of James Comey and others. When no prosecutor would prosecute Comey, Trump installed a U.S. Attorney with no criminal law experience, who lied to the grand jury to procure an indictment, screwed up procedurally, and wasn’t even properly appointed.
This gang really can’t shoot straight. Trump’s response to Habiba’s incompetence? Send the Senate her nomination as New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney; withdraw her failing nomination; then name her “interim special attorney” to avoid required Senate confirmation. Three appellate judges, two appointed by Bush, overturned Trump’s chicanery, ruling unanimously that she could not legally run the office without Senate approval. That helped maintain our separation of powers and could help stem Trump’s other power grabs.
Pete Hegseth is the poster child for Trump’s disastrous appointment of unqualified cronies to important positions. Result: poor security, war crimes, and a cover-up full of inept lies.
Trump resembles a pro football team owner who calls all the plays, though he was too scared to play football as a kid, and insists the coach play friends and relatives who are loyal or good-looking, but played third-string at Division 2 colleges.
No fan wants that.
Nor do thoughtful and patriotic U.S. voters.
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[The above column appeared today, 7 December 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]
[Not a lot more to say – or, way too much. Just continually amazed. An enterprise run solely to satisfy the leader’s ego and fill his pockets is not likely to do real well for others, except – while it lasts – ass-lickers like Kash Patel, Bondi, Rubio, Hegseth, and others. Some, like Rubio and Vance, should know better; and someone recently posted a clip of each of them, and Cruz, and a couple of other toadies, saying, before he beat them, that he was a vile human being and a danger to our democracy. But they’ve forgotten. ]
