More Fake News Regarding Reagan Judges

Sometimes, the sheer mendacity of the MSM takes your breath away.

Recently, The Hill, which follows all things political in Washington, D.C., chose to invent a supposed trend to attempt to embarrass the sitting Republican president, Donald Trump, by citing the decisions from the appointed judges of a former GOP president, Ronald Reagan.

The title of the piece tells it all – “Reagan judges surface as unfiltered assessors of Trump.”

Clearly, the point of this entire article is to make the claim that Donald Trump is so extreme that even former conservative judicial officials of the Reagan administration have had enough of Trump’s extremism.

This article, however, is nothing more than partisan BS, which the author – and The Hill paper – know full well.

How do we know this?  Well, consider this – there are a total of five Reagan judges who are mentioned in this piece:

• U.S. District Judge William Young – who sits in Massachusetts. 
• U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth – who serves in Washington, D.C. 
• U.S. District Judge John Coughenour – who sits in Washington State.
• U.S. Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson III – who serves on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
• U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf – who sits in Massachusetts. 

These five judges are the individuals used to demonstrate the article’s thesis that Reagan judges are turning against Donald Trump. But this very list demonstrates that this theory is a lie.

That is because, as every educated political observer knows, district court judges – along with United States Attorneys – are actually selected by an agreement between the sitting (two) U.S. Senators in the state in question and the U.S. President. All of this is called the “blue slip” process. And of the five above judges, two of them were chosen in Massachusetts by President Reagan with the agreement of two Democrat Senators, one being the “Liberal Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, and one was chosen in Washington State by Reagan and another powerful Democrat Senator, Henry “Scoop” Jackson.  

I know this is true because during my tenure in the U.S. Senate, my two former Republican bosses in Pennsylvania operated their own commission, which produced district court judges and United States Attorneys for the president to nominate, under both Republican and Democrat presidents.

The types of judges that would meet the approval of Sens. Kennedy and Jackson are not going to be hard-core conservative and Republican judicial leaders. They may be Republican, although in Massachusetts, that almost surely means that they would be real RINOs, and the most "conservative" would be widely respected moderates in the Republican Party. 

But things get worse in this article. It quickly becomes apparent that The Hill also knows this fact about how district judges are appointed. At the very bottom of the article, it is written:

Some conservative court watchers assert that the Reagan judges’ personal ideologies don’t align with Reagan’s own storied conservatism, and perhaps, never did.  They place blame on the Senate’s “blue slips” practice, which lets home-state senators weigh in on presidential nominations to district courts and U.S. attorney positions.

Observe how The Hill writers use the language “(s)ome conservative court watchers” to attempt to discredit those political observers who, indeed, know how district court judges are selected. Even if they are conservative (like me).

But it gets worse. This article is meant to demonstrate how extreme the Trump administration is, so that Reagan judges are turning against it. But another one of the judges, Royce Lamberth, although perhaps a legitimate conservative Republican at one point, is known from early on – i.e., during the Reagan administration – “for speaking his mind,” according to Wikipedia, a left-wing news source. Lamberth was even removed from a case, “(a)fter a particularly harsh opinion in 2005, in which Lamberth lambasted the Interior Department as racist” concerning Native Americans. And that occurred during the Bush administration.  

All of which means that Judge Lamberth started earning “strange new respect” for turning against other Republicans/conservatives from the media long before the first term of Donald Trump.

So, removing all these judges from the list in this article, we are left with U.S. Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson III, who does seem to have been a Republican/conservative mover and shaker in the judicial world until the Trump administration.  

But one judge does not make a trend.

For deliberately and maliciously – see the “blue slip” language – inventing a trend to attempt to lie to the American people about Reagan conservative judges turning against the Trump administration, The Hill newspaper deserves to be endlessly ridiculed and mocked for its partisanship masquerading as journalism.

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