ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Between the impending conclusion of the Mueller probe and the promise of oversight from various Democratic-controlled House committees come January, it's clear that the president is starting to panic. And it's easy to see why--given his tax returns, financial dealings, Russian investments, and other wrongdoing being surfaced in litigation, he has a good deal to worry about.

But that brings us once more to the greatest and least appreciated place at which President Donald Trump is proving to be the losing-est loser of all: the courts. Because they happen so frequently, it's almost impossible to keep track of all the massive and consequential rulings against this president and his administration that are logged every week and rarely viewed in the aggregate. But let's try: Late Monday night, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the president's Nov. 9 rule that barred migrants from applying for asylum unless they made the request at a legal checkpoint. The judge's order applies nationally. Last Friday's decision--by a Trump-appointed judge--to side with CNN against the White House in a dispute about revoked press credentials is only the most recent iteration of a near-constant drip-drip of legal losses. Even with a bench now containing almost 1 in 6 Trump appointed judges (and these are not your President Bush-edition conservative judges), Trump mainly loses, and then loses some more.

Here's another set: On Nov. 9, a federal judge in Montana temporarily blocked construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, ruling that the Trump administration had failed to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires "reasoned" explanations for government decisions and reversals. (The president immediately decried the ruling as "political" and "a disgrace.") Indeed, this is just the most recent in a line of environmental cases Trump keeps losing in the federal courts. One recent tally shows the Trump administration has actually lost in all but one of the legal challenges its brought in its efforts to undo Obama-era regulations. The government has either lost or ditched its position in 18 others. As a recent Brookings roundup notes, this 5 percent "win rate is far below the normal agency win rate, which averages 69 percent across eleven studies."

But there's so much more.

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