A Brief Glossary for Trump's Judicial Nominees

Matthew Petersen, a lawyer and member of the Federal Election Commission, recently struggled to answer basic questions about trial procedure (for example, “What is a ?”) at a hearing on his nomination to serve as a U.S. district judge. The resulting is heartrending; watching it calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s perhaps apocryphal remark about a famous scene in Charles Dickens’s : “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”