Trump Judicial Nominee Is A Ghost Hunter, Proving The Bar Can Always Go A Little Lower

Trump has nominated a ghost hunting lawyer to the bench because why not?

I’m naming him “The Specter of Lochner”

Few things are stupider than ghost hunting shows. Ghost Adventures, The Dead Files, Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International. Astoundingly, dumb people flock to their television sets to watch a bunch of bros on night-vision cameras yelling, “yo, you hear that!” and “that’s freaky, bro” — which sounds like an amateur porno but is somehow a lower form of entertainment. Yet these shows proliferate because there are people willing to believe implausible hocus-pocus. And those people are really, really willing to check out the ads for reverse mortgages. COINCIDENCE?!?!?

Anyway, one of the few things that qualifies as stupider than a ghost hunting show is nominating a ghost hunter to an Article III judgeship. Well, that’s happened now.

Brett Joseph Talley, Trump’s 30-something nominee to serve on the Middle District of Alabama court, has earned the ABA’s fourth “Not Qualified” rating of this young administration for a judicial nominee. I didn’t know that was an option on the ABA’s form! This organization thought Charlotte School of Law had its act together for years — they’re not exactly harsh critics. But he’s also a ghost hunter per Bloomberg BNA:

The nominee is currently a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and has interesting hobbies: writing award-winning short horror stories and hunting ghosts.

A Washington Post reporter joined Talley in a ghost hunt in 2014, saying the then-speechwriter for Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) likes “to find graves that seem interesting and ask questions out loud in case a spirit wants to answer,” while armed “with just a voice recorder and flashlights.”

Oh for f**k’s sake. No wonder the Heritage Foundation is so jazzed for this guy — an Originalist who can actually ask George Mason what he was thinking.

The reporter said it seemed Talley channeled voices “with a wink and a smirk. He knows it is absurd.”

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Of course he does! No ghost hunter believes this stuff because they know they’re not hearing voices. What makes the prospect of Judge Talley: Vampire Hunter so disturbing isn’t that he believes in ghosts, it’s that he takes Washington Post reporters to cemeteries and acts like a tool.

It’s just amazing how this administration keeps lowering the bar. Again, this is the FOURTH nominee to get the “Not Qualified” rating. And that’s not counting that John Bush was a lawyer who landed on the Sixth Circuit for bashing gays on a blog who met the ABA’s very permissive standards or that Damien Schiff is sitting on a potential Federal Claims confirmation — the ABA doesn’t evaluate those nominees — despite a rash of dubious claims.

I FORGOT one! I was literally pulling together in my head a list of all the ludicrous nominees out there and I completely FORGOT Jeff “Satan’s Plan” Mateer. And some might point out that Donald Trump has also nominated a number of qualified, conscientious conservative jurists, and that’s true. But let me repeat something I wrote about Mateer because it bears repeating:

But it’s equally unfair to suggest that this administration hasn’t made a laughing stock of the federal judiciary through this process. With jobs of such import, the administration cannot and should not be judged by “getting it mostly right.” When the Bush administration used to justify national security excess with by saying “the terrorists only have to be right once” it may have made a mess of rational policy analysis, but when applied to judicial nominations, the calculus rings true: the administration should be judged — and judged harshly — more by its failures than any successes.

And those failures just keep on mounting. I thought John Bush was the bottom. Or Schiff. Or Grasz. But the bar just keeps going lower. And every one of them is going to get confirmed because we live in a post-standards society.

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Roy Moore had better lose this Senate seat over these pederast allegations because the only way they top putting redneck Egon Spengler behind a district court bench is throwing morally dubious Fruit Salad on there.

Trump’s Fourth ABA ‘Not Qualified’ Pick Is Youthful Ghost Hunter [Bloomberg BNA]

Earlier: In Wake Of Trump, Liberals Start To Realize They’ve Had The Judiciary All Wrong
Another Day, Another Comically Unfit Judicial Nominee
Can A Summer Associate Please Blow A Goat Or Something?