This was a surprise. Linda Greenhouse, despite her many years of writing about law and courts, her position as a lecturer at Yale Law School following her retirement as legal pundit at the New York Times, apparently had an epiphany. The person elected president not only gets to nominate justices of the Supreme Court, but lower court federal judges as well.

As is mandated by the current journalistic regime, she opens with an anecdote to set the appropriate emotional tone:

In a recent issue of Judicature, an academic journal for judges published by Duke University Law School, Timothy J. Corrigan, a federal district judge in Florida, reflected on “the most multifaceted, emotional, and challenging task a judge performs ” — sentencing convicted criminal defendants. Judge Corrigan wrote about the broad discretion that district judges exercise, describing experiences from his 14 years on the bench that were both heart-rending (tear-stained letters from young children begging mercy for their parents) and hair-raising (an assassination attempt). The article’s title, across the journal’s front cover, said it all: “Who Appointed Me God?”

Ironically, Judge Corrigan, sensitive soul that he was, was appointed by George W. Bush, the president most reviled by progressives ever until the next Republican president. The president who gave us Sam Alito. Is Shrub suddenly looking good, or is there some other point to be made here?

But as Judge Corrigan’s essay reminds us, the Supreme Court nomination, crucial as it is, is the tip of a very big iceberg. That high-profile nomination will mark only the beginning of the Trump administration’s effort to gain control of a federal judiciary that has gradually, almost imperceptibly slipped into Democratic hands during the Obama years.

Well, that’s kinda how it works, since the president gets to nominate federal judges during his term of office. When Obama was president, he nominated judges, though to characterize the federal bench as “Democratic hands” reflects either a shocking naivete on Greenhouse’s part or a deliberate effort to make people stupider.

The judiciary is not, and has never been, a bastion of liberalism under any president. There have been a few judges along the way, a justice here and there, but the range of thought on the federal bench has generally been focused on how high to hang ’em. But they get hanged either way.

During the Obama years, there has been a shocking lack of confirmations, leaving benches without judicial butts to fill them, a backlog of cases and an inability on the part of the judiciary to fulfill its duty. The blame falls squarely on Senate Republicans for jamming up the works of confirmation, though nobody forced voters to not elect Democratic senators to unjam it up. So now, there are tons of empty benches to be filled, a Senate in Republican control, and Harry Reid’s gambit of changing the rules to allow nominations, other than Supreme Court, to be confirmed on a majority vote.

We changed the Senate rules to guarantee a president’s nominees a fair, simple-majority vote, and declared that a president’s nominees should not be stymied with procedural hurdles and a requirement for supermajority votes. (Supreme Court nominations still have this requirement.)

What seemed like such a fair idea when Obama was president suddenly seems like a catastrophic mistake now.

Against all odds, and in part a result of the elimination of the filibuster for non-Supreme Court nominations in 2013, the Obama administration managed to get 327 judges confirmed. As a result, Democratic appointees in active service — that is, not counting senior judges who usually carry less than a full caseload and whose assumption of senior status creates a vacancy — constitute just over half of the district and circuit courts.

How is this a problem? Because the next president, like the last president, will appoint judges as well.

In his recent statistical study, Russell Wheeler of Brookings calculated how many judges now serving on the circuit courts would be eligible for senior status by 2020. The total was 98 of the 179 judgeships on those courts. Of the 98, 48 are Democratic appointees. “If Trump replaced all 48 eligible Democratic appointees, every court of appeals would become a Republican-appointee majority court,” Mr. Wheeler wrote. He added “that’s not going to happen” — presumably because many of those newly eligible judges would choose to remain in active service for years to come. On the federal districts courts, 216 judges are currently eligible for senior status or will become eligible by mid-2020. Most of those, 61 percent, are Republican appointees; some number of those currently eligible have perhaps been waiting for the outcome of the election before deciding whether to exercise their right to reduce their workload and create a vacancy.

Judges come. Judges go. They get appointed. They take senior status. They retire. They die. So it is. So it’s always been. How Greenhouse was unaware of this is mystifying.

But this isn’t about the banal filling of federal judgeships at all. This is about fearmongering, the implication being that Trump will put mini-Trumps in black robes on hundreds of federal benches who will eviscerate the Constitution, and not in the ways progressives demand it be eviscerated. Why now, after the election has been held, might appear confusing, since promoting irrational fear after it’s too late doesn’t accomplish much.

But there is method to Greenhouse’s madness. Since the election of Trump over Clinton was inconceivable, and there was no reason to raise the myriad secondary ways in which Trump would destroy everything, the tactic now is to make America stupider and more afraid by screaming the sky is falling about everything the incoming administration will do, all in advance of its actually doing anything.

To the extent having a full complement of judges on the federal bench is a good thing at all, Trump will get to make appointments, subject to the “blue slip” of senatorial winks. There is no cadre of mini-Trumps waiting in the wings. Trump will likely appoint the same sort of people every president before him appointed, Biglaw refugees, academics and prosecutors. They will span the full gamut of political thought, from deny the stay of execution to deny the stay of execution with a sad tear and an explanation.

And if there was any more irony to be found in Greenhouse’s double secret polemic, it’s in her use of the mean ol’ Fifth Circuit’s Buck v. Davis case to make her readers literally shake:

Under the convoluted law governing habeas corpus, which is the procedure by which federal courts review state-court criminal sentences, an inmate who loses a case before a federal district judge does not have an automatic right to appeal. The district judge or federal appeals court must first grant a “certificate of appealability,” reflecting a finding that the issue to be appealed is one on which reasonable judges can come to different conclusions.

How horrible that sounds, the “convoluted law” undermining the Great Writ. What terrifying president signed off on such a thing?

The choices have always been bad and worse, with the distinctions usually being too small for the human eye to see. Remember Judge Corrigan’s title, “Who Appointed Me God?” There’s an old joke: what’s the difference between god and a federal judge? God doesn’t think he’s a federal judge. Catch your breath, Linda. Nothing has changed.