The Federal government is a very strange entity. It’s not only stranger than you know, sometimes it’s stranger than you can believe.
Reforming it, draining the swamp, requires peeling layers of the onion, and understanding just how rotten that onion is and how far it goes.
Case in point, the Trump administration is trying to decertify National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ).
That’s right, judges, about the most powerful people in the country, with virtually no limit to their power, have their own union. Just like steelworkers or janitors.
Management is not eligible to form a union. Otherwise we’d have unions of CEOs or Senators. Middle management for that matter is not supposed to have unions. Yet, bizarrely, National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) actually exists.
If you have actual power, if you make policy, you can’t be in a union.
So the DOJ is taking this to the National Labor Relations Board. And the media will soon be showing pictures of crying immigration judges.
Judge Ashley Tabaddor, an Iranian community activist, who had previously been ordered by the DOJ to recuse herself from Iranian immigration cases, heads the NAIJ. (Tabaddor was able to sue the DOJ and won damages.)
And she’s been the public face of the opposition to the Trump admin’s plans to move cases through the courts.
So the NLRB move is natural and long overdue.
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