It looks as if there’s a chance that Sam the Sham Alito may retire after this SCOTUS term. Evidence isn’t Sam’s jam but we have some, he’s scheduled a book tour for October during the next term. That’s led to some judicial performative art from some of the more extreme Trump appointees who hope to replace Alito. And that is why Judge Lawrence Van Dyke is malaka of the week.

Van Dyke is not only a malaka, he’s a troll. In fact, I’m going to call him Judge Troll out of respect for his robe and disrespect for his Trumpian rudeness and stupidity.

Judge Troll was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019 by the Insult Comedian. The ABA (the b is for bar, not basketball) was appalled. It rated him:

“not qualified” upon his nomination, calling him “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.”

Time and time again, Van Dyke has validated the ABA’s concerns about his lack of judicial temperament and decorum. The featured image comes from a video Judge Troll made as part of his dissent on a California gun control case. Judges do not make videos, trolls do. The judicial malakatude, it burns.

Judge Troll’s dissent in a trans rights case provoked mockery, ridicule and condemnation even from his 9th Circuit colleagues. He began, “This is a case about swinging dicks.”

I am not making this up, Judge Troll did. The case dealt with a Korean bathhouse that tried to ban trans people on religious grounds. The term swinging dick makes no sense in this context. A swinging dick is an overly aggressive dude with anger management issues not a naked trans person. You know, like Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth. They’re total dicks as is the dick who began a judicial opinion with locker room talk.

You say locker, I say malaka. Let’s call the whole thing off.

I dig how Joe Patrice of Above The Law characterized this dipshit’s opinion, so let’s go there:

VanDyke’s stream of consciousness dump reads sort of like Ulysses meets CPAC meets severe concussion patient, careening from its crude opening into calling his colleagues “woke judges,” who are “complicit” in harming women and girls, invoking President Trump and Asian American discrimination (neither of which have anything to do with the case), and vomiting up an Establishment Clause theory and a private club exemption… arguments of dubious value at any rate, but also arguments the spa never bothered to raise anyway.”

Some on the right have made excuses for Judge Troll’s vulgar language and lack of professionalism:

Through a series of separate writings VanDyke has adopted a postmodern approach to the circuit-court opinion genre that ironically turns the text against itself. He has embraced the fact that an opinion as opinion can have meaning beyond the arguments it presents. His is an ironical approach to the practice of judging deployed in support of deeply sincere normative legal views. It’s an approach that can be disturbing to those with a traditional view of the judicial enterprise and that is truly unique in the federal judiciary.”

Van Dyke is an ironic postmodernist? I have no idea what that means but it sounds fancy to wingnut lawyer and former Mitch McConnell aide, Michael A. Fragaso writing in The National Review. You say Fragaso, I say vaffanculo. Let’s call the whole thing off.

I remember when TNR was home to elaborate language and elegant center-right discourse, not convoluted defenses of dickishness. They’ve gone from channeling founder William F. Buckley to sounding like Kid Rock on a bad day. Does he have any good days? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Judge Troll’s dickishness provoked a backlash from the majority of his 9th Circuit colleagues but does he care? Hell no. He’s indulging in what Slate legal eagles Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern called the “most grotesque Supreme Court audition yet.”

They’re not wrong. They rarely are. Judge Troll is consistently and flamboyantly wrong. And that is why Judge Lawrence Van Dyke is malaka of the week.

The last word goes to Ween: