Gross. Let it be a lesson to anyone who thinks it is a good idea to have a judiciary system that is packed to the brim with self-serving, partisan goons who are loyal only to their party.
The lesson is: using the old fasion way of lies, cheating elections, violence, murder and intimidation to stay in power works really well if you're a totalitarian leader? Nobody can stop you and you can do literally anything you want to stay in power?
They're appointed by the National Assembly. Mexico is currently trying to replace their system with one where each judge is democratically elected. Critics are calling this a "power grab" by AMLO though since the judiciary has often been the opposition's main way to check him and his party's ambitions. Almost every federal judge in Mexico is on strike because of this
I'm afraid so. Trump is in "total war" mode because if he loses the election, the court cases are no longer going to be delayed, and he's going to be destroyed. So he's going to claim "voter fraud!" in every state he loses, maybe even in every precinct he loses, and he's going to file a blizzard of cases. It's not going to be 60 cases this time; it's going to be a lot more. Most of them are going to be dismissed, like last time, due to lack of anything that looks like evidence.
But he also may have some state election people who are willing to march to his orders. That part concerns me a lot. And he probably has a fair number of people who will take to the streets to "stop the second steal". And I fear that he's going to try to use them.
TBH if that's the totality of the battle plan, that'll be fantastic news. The "stolen election" ruse only came so close to working last time because he had his hands on the levers of executive power, and could thus disable/sideline all of the usual law enforcement while fighting it out in the court of public opinion (what the baseless court cases were for).
But really the only way we're going to get out of this societal catastrophe is for Trumpism to be resoundingly rebuked at the ballot box. The Republican party needs to choke on the inevitable results of this festering radical populist destruction that they had been stoking but containing for decades (eg rush Limbaugh), until it finally escaped.
And please don't read my comment thinking I'm sitting here positively pro-Democrat or pro-system. As a libertarian, I've got many indictments of the current corporatist anti-individual-freedom system, the two party duopoly, the "deep state", etc. But staring down the choice of the destruction of the American bureaucracy in favor of cult of personality autocracy, I've begrudgingly had to support the solidly conservative option of the bureaucracy. And I'm willing to admit that it had been far too easy to take it for granted.