The Senate Must Not Confirm Any More Trump Judges Who Are This Bad at ParkingA closer look at Judge Ryan Nelson’s deeply embarrassing bid to fight a stranger in a mostly empty parking lot.
Last week, the Idaho State Journal reported that Judge Ryan Nelson, whom President Donald Trump appointed to the Ninth Circuit in 2018, is facing criminal charges in Idaho stemming from his participation in a time-honored, quintessentially American ritual: starting a fight about a parking space in a mostly empty parking lot. Security footage of the incident, which took place on April 2, shows Nelson’s gigantic truck parked at an angle that anyone familiar with drivers of gigantic trucks will recognize, sprawled boldly across the white lines in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to use the adjacent spaces without initiating a chain reaction of mangled park jobs. As Nelson enters the frame, a man driving a white truck—the Journal is not naming him because he is the victim of an alleged crime, so I will refer to him as Bewildered Bald Guy—pulls up next to Nelson, cuts the engine, and tells Nelson to “learn to park.” This is both (1) admittedly kind of rude and also (2) based on the available evidence, not an unreasonable request for Bewildered Bald Guy to make.
Nelson—who is, again, a life-tenured federal judge—proceeds to immediately and completely lose his mind. “I’ve been here for two minutes!” he shouts. He snatches Bewildered Bald Guy’s sunglasses off his face and throws them across the lot; tries to grab Bewildered Bald Guy’s phone out of his hand; and then, for good measure, scurries after him and stomps on the sunglasses before Bewildered Bald Guy can pick them up. Although the audio is fuzzy, at about the 0:49 mark, you can pretty clearly hear Nelson asking Bewildered Bald Guy if he is “fucking crazy” and/or “wants to go,” in the classic style of men of a certain age who have no interest in fighting but desperately want others to perceive them as willing to fight. Given the very real potential for scenes like this to escalate dramatically in a country stuffed to the gills with semiautomatic firearms, it is a minor miracle that this one resolved itself without further violence. Instead, after Bewildered Bald Guy recovers the remnants of his sunglasses, the two men engage in a rather unproductive debate about which one of them is the real asshole before Nelson gets in the truck and drives away. According to the Journal, when contacted by police, Nelson admitted to “knocking” the glasses off Bewildered Bald Guy’s head and “stomping” on them, but denied “touching” him. Unfortunately for Nelson, his assurances that he possesses borderline superhuman fine motor skills did not deter prosecutors from charging him with battery and malicious injury to property, which in Idaho are misdemeanors punishable by fines of up to $1,000 and jail terms of 6 months and 12 months, respectively. Per Bloomberg, Nelson has pleaded not guilty, and a pretrial conference is set for June 18.
In a statement provided to David Lat at Original Jurisdiction, Nelson’s lawyer says that Nelson has since apologized to Bewildered Bald Guy, and that his behavior was “out of character.” Two former Nelson clerks echoed this sentiment: One described Nelson as “not an angry person,” and said that he must have been having a “bad day.” Another former clerk with especially well-ordered priorities told Lat that they felt “heartbroken” for Nelson, because “this one incident will now show up prominently whenever people Google him.” Speaking of incidents that appear prominently whenever people Google him: According to this Wall Street Journal report from 2018, as of that year, Nelson had logged at least 28 traffic citations over the preceding two decades, including one from 2011 in which police clocked him driving a Hyundai Elantra on the freeway at 100 MPH. As a former Hyundai Elantra owner myself, I honestly did not think it was possible for one to attain such a speed without Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis driving it off a cliff first. On Monday, Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Murgia announced that the Judicial Council would open an investigation into Nelson’s conduct. But whatever that investigation yields, only Congress has the power to impeach and remove him from office, and as Chris Geidner points out at Law Dork, in the weeks since, Nelson has continued to hear oral argument and issue opinions as if nothing unusual had happened. So long as at least 34 senators decide that he is exhibiting sufficiently “good Behaviour,” Ryan Nelson’s job is safe, no matter how shoddily he parks, or how far he chucks the personal effects of strangers who make him upset. As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading. |
The Senate Must Not Confirm Any More Trump Judges Who Are This Bad at Parking
