President Trump began his first days in office seeing firsthand what he warned voters of throughout the presidential campaign of 2016 – the Federal Court system is broken and must be fixed. While many in the mainstream media scoff at Trump’s claims that Federal Judges are treating him unfairly, a recent AP report shows that he is right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg offered a picture of what Trump saw in the judicial system as a whole. Ginsburg, who like all justices should be above politics, made public statements in which she called then Republican presidential nominee Trump, “a faker” and further said, “I can’t imagine what the country would be – with Donald Trump as our president.”
Trump responded in a series of his now famous tweets in which he called Justice Ginsburg an “incompetent judge” and called for her resignation.
But is such blatant bias isolated to one Supreme Court Justice or, as Trump claims, is the Federal Court system tilted against conservatives in general and the President in particular? An Associated Press review offers proof that it may well be.
The AP examined the opinions of almost 40 federal district court and appellate judges about the President’s ban on travelers from predominantly Muslim countries and found only one judge nominated by a Democratic president who upheld Trump’s authority in the ban.
After examining 26 decisions by 38 judges the AP had two key findings: A majority of the judges (24) were nominated by Democratic presidents. Of those 24, only one supported Trump’s Presidential authority to block all travelers.
Republican judicial nominees accuse their Democratic counterparts of second-guessing the president’s claims of national security concerns by appealing back to his campaign statements.
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee was the lone dissenting voice when the 9th Circuit ruled it would not revisit its previous ruling that ordered the ban halted. He observed, “Even if we have questions about the basis for the President’s ultimate findings — whether it was a ‘Muslim ban’ or something else — we do not get to peek behind the curtain.”
Judge Bybee understands something that too many Federal judges apparently don’t – Donald Trump is the elected chief executive of this country, not any of them.
Following the first rulings against the travel ban and Trump’s order to end DACA he made a series of public statements and tweets that called attention to the Federal court’s bias and blamed them if there any future terrorist attacks. In one such tweet he said:
If these judges wanted to, in my opinion, help the court in terms of respect for the court, they’d do what they should be doing.
Amidst all the negative media and the seemingly rash tweets that mark Trump’s first year and soon to be six months, the good news is that a subtle but profound change is in the future for our court system.
Trump and his team have managed to get a record-breaking 12 appeals-court judges confirmed during his first year. That’s four times more than President Obama did at the same point in his first term. To date, the President has nominated almost 80 federal judges and 24 have already been confirmed by the Senate. In total Trump still has 139 open places on Federal benches to fill.
Noting their appointments are for life, Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said, “ “They will way outlast most of us.” Most will certainly outlast Donald Trump’s place in the Oval Office.
Reaction to the impact Trump’s judges will have often splits along party lines. Nearly 70% of Americans said they had faith in the Judicial Branch in September 2017. Democrats are now less trusting of the courts than they were a year ago but Republican faith in the system has surged from 48% toward the end of the Obama era to 79% last fall.
Now at least one federal judge is calling Robert Mueller’s hand on his investigation. At a Friday hearing for Paul Manafort, Judge Ellis, a Reagan appointee, chided the Mueller team for “lying” about the scope of its investigation. He told Mueller’s team, “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort. You really care about what information [he] can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment …”
Are Federal judges biased against Trump? No doubt, but the President is changing things for the future.
~ American Liberty Report
