Federal judge says he will stop blogging; Ted Cruz post isn't the reason
Screenshot of Judge Kopf’s blog.
A federal judge says he is pulling the plug on his blog, but the reason isn’t due to the controversy over his blog post this week declaring Ted Cruz to be unfit for the presidency.
U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf said his decision to end his Hercules and the Umpire blog was made after learning that employees of his federal court felt the blog had become an embarrassment.
The District of Nebraska’s chief judge, Laurie Smith Camp, had supported Kopf’s blogging. But she told him about the sentiment expressed at a recent retreat for employees, Kopf wrote in a July 9 blog post. The subject came up during a discussion of honesty in the workplace. An employee asked Smith Camp if she felt Hercules and the Umpire had become an embarrassment to the court.
“She responded that she thought 95 percent of the posts were insightful, entertaining, well-written, and enlightening,” Kopf wrote. “Then she asked for a show of hands, inquiring how many of the employees felt the blog had become an embarrassment to our court. The great majority raised their hands.”
Smith Camp promised to share those sentiments with Kopf, who says he learned about them a few hours before deciding to stop blogging.
It’s not the first time Kopf said he is giving up blogging. The first time, on the first day of 2014, Kopf told readers that he had “written all that I want to write and then some.” He started blogging again in March 2014 when he announced that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and would be starting treatment.
Kopf says in his latest blog post that his cancer is in remission and he is “perfectly healthy.” As for his cognition, “I am no more goofy now than I was when I was appointed,” he says.
Kopf ticks off other reasons he’s not blogging. He says it’s not because of the Ted Cruz post in which he took the Republican senator to task for a proposed constitutional amendment to make Supreme Court justices subject to retention elections. At least one observer questioned whether Kopf had violated a canon of the ethics code for federal judges that states a judge should not “publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office.”
Kopf wrote that, as far as he knows, he isn’t the subject of any disciplinary complaint. Even if he was, that wouldn’t discourage him from blogging, Kopf said.
Kopf has previously raised controversy in blog posts advising the U.S. Supreme Court to “stfu,” telling Congress to “go to hell,” and offering fashion advice to female lawyers.
Hat tip to How Appealing.
