Eyebrows are being raised to the sky after extremely fishy behavior in the D.C. Circuit, which is hearing the it’s illegal for a president to impose tariffs without congressional approval.
There are 11 active judges available to sit on cases in the D.C. Circuit, with each appeal supposedly randomly selected to avoid bias. Of these 11 judges, three of them are Trump appointees: Roa, Katsas, and Walker.
Guess which three have been appointed to hear Trump’s claim? Yup, the Trump istration’s case will be heard by the exact he’d personally choose – an outcome that’s been dubbed him winning “the appeals court lottery”.
Trump wins the appeals court lottery in D.C.
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) June 3, 2025
The hearing emergency appeals this month appears to be: Rao, Katsas, Walker.
All three are Trump appointees — in fact the only Trump appointees on the DC Circuit.
They are handling one of the key tariff appeals. pic.twitter.com/ilbJ2cSPum
So, is this just one of those weird coincidences, or does the math suggest something is very much up? To figure this out, we need to know the likelihood that three specific judges would be selected. After crunching the numbers, an 11-judge selection results in 165 possible three-judge s.
Given that we’re figuring out the probability that precisely one specific is picked and no other, we divide one by 165. Converted into a percentage and rounded, this means the probability of Trump having these three specific MAGA judges to hear his appeal is 0.61% or betting odds of roughly 3:497. Please feel free to check my math!
What a crazy coincidence!
You can be the judge of whether that’s something that could feasibly happen by coincidence, perhaps if Trump were the luckiest man on the planet? Or, alternatively, whether someone’s interfering with the judicial selection at the DC courts to ensure that Trump’s case is heard before three very friendly judges?
Whether anything will be done about this remains to be seen. Presumably, information like this could be the subject of an appeal that could request an investigation into who chose the and whether they have MAGA sympathies or links to the Trump istration. But then, that would mean going to the Supreme Court, which is already stacked with six conservative justices and just three liberal ones. So what’s the point?
At this point, you might be wondering why the United States even has a politically appointed judiciary. After all, the concept of blind impartial justice should mean that judges consider the facts of the case before them without bringing their personal political opinions or biases into play. But that’s just going to have to be a debate for another time.
Either way, expect Trump’s appeal to be rubberstamped without much fuss by these Trump appointed judges, and the ongoing tariff chaos to continue into the foreseeable future.
Published: Jun 3, 2025 06:53 am