The rare and public spat between President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts last week kicked off a nationwide debate regarding the independence and authority of federal judges. Supporting the president’s position that the judiciary has become politicized, South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy agreed that both journalists and politicians often refer to judges by who put them on the bench.
Compromised court system
“I wish Chief Justice Roberts were right. I wish there were not a politicization of the judiciary,” Gowdy said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “But it’s not just politicians.”
Gowdy continued, explaining how Trump was simply pointing out the obvious when he said District Judge Jon S. Tigar was an “Obama judge” for temporarily banning the administration’s attempt to deny asylum to a mob of economic migrants at the U.S. southern border:
Every print article that you will go find this afternoon refers to judges based on the president that put him or her in office. And you see terms like conservative and ultra conservative and liberal and moderate, which are political terms but they’re used to describe judges. So I wish Chief Justice Roberts were right. I wish that we did not refer to judges based on which president put them in office as if that is somehow going to inextricably lead us to the conclusion. But it’s been happening since I was a kid. It’s been happening for 50 years that we have used political terms to describe judges.
It has become standard media practice to point to a judge’s political ties to explain their legal decisions. This was on display most recently when CNN sued the White House to restore a disruptive correspondent’s press credentials.
When Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in CNN’s favor, publications like The Washington Post exulted in the media’s victory, producing headlines that read: “Trump-appointed judge: Get CNN’s Jim Acosta back in the White House.”
Subject matter expert
A legal scholar with a lifetime of judicial service, Gowdy knows a thing or two about justice and courtroom procedure. He worked for six years as a federal prosecutor, taking down “America’s Most Wanted” suspects and tirelessly prosecuting crimes ranging from narcotics trafficking, bank robbery, child pornography and the murder of a federal witness.
While serving as the 7th Circuit Solicitor, Gowdy championed drug courts and victim advocacy projects and was nationally recognized for “excellence in death penalty prosecutions.” Representing South Carolina’s 4th District, Gowdy is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Judiciary Committee.
Before he retires at the end of his current term, Gowdy would like to see both politicians and the media stop injecting partisan opinions into the judiciary. “I wish we would stop. But President Trump is not the first person to do it,” he said. “I think President Obama criticized the Supreme Court to their face in the State of the Union. So I wish everyone would stop, including the media, referring to judges based on which president put them in office.”
The last word
The 9th Circuit Court has been a thorn in the president’s side, and Trump complained that any lawsuits that are heard in the liberal-dominated court are an “automatic loss.” In response to this and other statements decrying the transparent partisanship among federal judges, Justice Roberts criticized the president in a rare moment of judicial dissent.
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said, releasing a statement through the court’s public information office. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Some of Roberts’ colleagues on the Supreme Court have disagreed with this assessment, complaining that small, district judges are abusing their limited authority by enforcing sweeping injunction which undermine the president’s authority at the national level.
“These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote earlier this year in his concurrence with the court’s travel ban ruling.
Trump, however, had the last word, taking to Twitter to render a fact-based rebuttal of the chief justice. “Justice Roberts can say what he wants, but the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster,” he tweeted on Thanksgiving morning. “It is out of control, has a horrible reputation, is overturned more than any Circuit in the Country, 79%, & is used to get an almost guaranteed result.”
“Judges must not Legislate Security and Safety at the Border, or anywhere else,” Trump concluded. “They know nothing about it and are making our Country unsafe. Our great Law Enforcement professionals MUST BE ALLOWED TO DO THEIR JOB! If not there will be only bedlam, chaos, injury and death. We want the Constitution as written!”
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