The Difference Between An Obama Judge And A Trump Judge

The last few days have seen President Trump escalate his tirade against judicial bias in America's higher courts following his initial comments responding to yet another liberal California judge earlier this week blocked one of President Trump’s policies - this time a new asylum rule that would have required applicants to arrive at a designated port of entry (a lot to ask, I know) - the understandably frustrated president lashed out at liberal courts in general.

“I think it’s a disgrace when every case gets filed in the 9th Circuit,” said Trump.

“That’s not law, that’s not what this country stands for. Every case that gets filed in the 9th Circuit, we get beaten and then we end up having to go to the Supreme Court, like the travel ban, and we won.”

Prompting a response from Chief Justice John Roberts...

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement.

“What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Which sparked a whole new spat:

Donald J. Trump ✔
@realDonaldTrump

Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have “Obama judges,” and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an “independent judiciary,” but if it is why......

....are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security - these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!

Justice Roberts can say what he wants, but the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster. 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. 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!


But, as law professor Scott Douglas Gerber writes for The Daily Caller, Chief Justice John Roberts’ rebuke of President Trump for criticizing a federal judge who issued a temporary restraining order blocking the administration from barring migrants who enter the U.S. illegally from seeking asylum isn’t the first time that Roberts has tried to suggest that judges aren’t political.

The most famous prior occasion was when Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his 2005 confirmation hearing:

“Judges are like umpires … whose job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” He also said that “umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.”

No serious student of the modern judiciary took Roberts’ 2005 comments seriously.

They shouldn’t take his most recent attempt at myth-making seriously, either. After all, if there wasn’t a difference between “Obama judges” and federal judges appointed by Republican presidents, President Trump’s opponents wouldn’t be moving heaven and earth to try to stop him from appointing conservatives to the federal courts. Surely, the chief justice can’t already have forgotten the trials to which Brett Kavanaugh was subjected.

Of course, Roberts was appointed by a Republican president, but that president — George W. Bush — like Roberts himself, was an establishment conservative, and establishment conservatives resent President Trump’s 2016 election victory almost as much as Democrats do. Perhaps that helps explain the chief justice’s seemingly unprecedented attack on the president.

Two additional points are also worth noting. First, President Trump isn’t the only president, or future president, who has criticized a federal judge for making a political decision. Second, Chief Justice Roberts himself wrote one of the most political opinions in Supreme Court history.

The most significant example of a president or future president criticizing a ruling issued by a federal court is almost certainly Abraham Lincoln’s response to the 1857 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States and could not sue in federal court, as Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, had done to gain his freedom after living briefly in Illinois and Wisconsin. Lincoln publicly condemned the decision, stating that blacks were entitled to the same freedom as whites. Lincoln was obviously correct in his criticism of the Court’s racist politics in the Dred Scott case and the nation became a better place because he criticized the court.

With respect to Roberts himself, in 2012 the chief justice joined with the four liberals on the Court to uphold Obamacare, and he invented out of whole cloth a new definition of taxation that contravened long-standing precedent to do so. As both the law’s opponents and the court’s dissenters pointed out, the so-called individual mandate that required most Americans to have a basic level of health insurance coverage or pay a fine was labeled a “penalty,” not a tax, in the statute; it was designed to encourage people to buy health insurance, not to raise revenue; and President Obama himself had rejected claims that the law was a tax when it was being considered by Congress.

But the chief justice did what he did for a political reason: he had made the calculation that he did not want a conservative Supreme Court being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of the Obama administration. (Congress reduced the individual mandate penalty to $0 effective in 2019 as part of tax reform legislation passed last December.)

In short, all President Trump did was state the obvious: it matters who the judges are. Indeed, the first question that every litigator asks is, who is the judge? President Trump isn’t a lawyer, but he was elected president of the United States in large part because he made it clear to the American people that he knows that it matters who gets to nominate the judges. “Obama judges” are different from “Trump judges,” and judges nominated by Hillary Clinton would have been different from Trump judges too.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...udge-and-trump-judge

I think the major distinction is that one understands the law, the constitution and swears to uphold it

the other doesn't

A mob of foreign nationals who do NOT respect the rule of law, entering the US using a "magic word" get more protection from hierarchical elites than hard the working Americans who actually fund them. These people are public servants. They are appointed to serve and uphold the rule of law. If the majority of decisions these "justices" make are overturned, then that tells you they are more like witches and warlocks wearing black robes, exploiting a nation with the utterance of single word - "asylum".

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
A mob of foreign nationals who do NOT respect the rule of law, entering the US using a "magic word" get more protection from hierarchical elites than hard the working Americans who actually fund them. These people are public servants. They are appointed to serve and uphold the rule of law. If the majority of decisions these "justices" make are overturned, then that tells you they are more like witches and warlocks wearing black robes, exploiting a nation with the utterance of single word - "asylum".

I'm with you, but lets not lose track of who created this "Asylum" issue in the first place. I think this judge is 110% wrong in his decision, but had the garbage on capitol hill and in the White House not passed legislation that laid the ground work for this violation of the law, we'd be in a whole lot better place than we're in today. Congress stabbed us in the back. This judge is just twisting the knife.

Who Is John Roberts to Judge Trump?
- Daniel J. Flynn

Political interference of an extraordinary kind.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts lectured the president this week in a prepared statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

The rebuke came in response to the president dismissing the ruling of an “Obama judge” on the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country,” Trump fired back. “It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an ‘independent judiciary,’ but if it is why are so many opposing view (on Border and Safety) cases filed there, and why are a vast number of those cases overturned. Please study the numbers, they are shocking. We need protection and security—these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!”

In lecturing the president as though he had transgressed norms, John Roberts violated one. The unusual aspect of the exchange involved a member of the court delving into politics. Presidents, long before Trump, criticized, attacked, and even questioned the court possessing the right to deem acts by the legislative and executive branches unconstitutional.

Andrew Jackson, upset over the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, responded that “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate,” which somehow morphed into “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney feared arrest for overturning the president’s suspension of habeas corpus. How seriously Abraham Lincoln considered arresting the chief justice of the Supreme Court remains debated by historians.

“I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,” Theodore Roosevelt said of Oliver Wendell Holmes — his own appointee.

When Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover judges threatened Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the president unwisely attempted to stack the Supreme Court by creating new seats when he could not fill vacancies. “A part of the problem of obtaining a sufficient number of judges to dispose of cases is the capacity of the judges themselves,” the president, himself vulnerable to such a charge due to his ailments, contended. “This brings forward the question of aged or infirm judges — a subject of delicacy and yet one which requires frank discussion.”

Dwight Eisenhower famously regarded his appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice, “The biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”

President Obama used the members of the Supreme Court present at his 2010 State of the Union Address as props in dressing them down over the Citizens United decision. “Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama claimed (falsely, it turns out, regarding foreign corporations). “Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities.”

Trump’s criticism of the Ninth Circuit Court, then, strikes as hardly atypical. Presidents, political actors dependent on the electorate, behave as political actors dependent on the electorate. They criticize jurists when they believe those jurists act as political actors — or even when they merely disagree with them. The indiscretion here, strangely, involves recognizing jurists politicizing the bench rather than the act of jurists politicizing the bench.

A chief justice weighing in on political matters through a prepared statement seems as the extraordinary part of all this. In injecting himself into the rough-and-tumble of Washington, Roberts validates Trump’s criticism. Defending the judicial branch as detached from politics in such a political manner seems self-refuting.

Trump finds himself in good company in criticizing rulings from the federal bench. One president went further — and did so by criticizing John Marshall, a man who served longer in John Roberts’s position than any other.

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy,” Thomas Jefferson, coming out on the wrong side of Marbury v. Madison, reflected after his presidency. “Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.”

Whether Jefferson would agree with Chief Justice Roberts that there’s no such thing as “Obama judges” or “Trump judges” seems the stuff of counterfactual historians. Actual historians tell us that he certainly believed in such a thing as “Federalist” judges.

https://spectator.org/who-is-j...erts-to-judge-trump/

The ninth isn't called the "Ninth Circus Court" for nothing.

If there wasn't a difference, why do Trump's opponents fight his appointments so hard?

Roberts is living in a dream world - no touch with reality

John Roberts could have saved us, but he stuck us with Obamacare. He's lower than whale dung in the Mariana Trench.

Presidents seem to eventually regret their SCOTUS appointments; just ask Dwight Eisenhower about how he felt about Earl Warren.

on the contrary, I think Bush knew EXACTLY who he was appointing and is very pleased with himself

he appointed a RINO just like himself

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
Presidents, long before Trump, criticized, attacked, and even questioned the court possessing the right to deem acts by the legislative and executive branches unconstitutional.

Is this not their duty?

We may not care for the decisions they make, but it seems to me that this what they are supposed to do according to the Constitution.

Roberts has been a disappointment. At best he occupies a seat so a dyed in the wool Leftist can't.

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
Roberts has been a disappointment. At best he occupies a seat so a dyed in the wool Leftist can't.

It's funny how the leftist decide every case in accordance with the progressively socialist Democrat agenda but Roberts says it's not political.

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
Roberts has been a disappointment. At best he occupies a seat so a dyed in the wool Leftist can't.

Funny how Roberts decides to say something now. Tonight Fox News pointed out during the 2010 State of the Union Osama complained about a recent SCOTUS decision. Not one word from Roberts.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010...vs-obama-whos-right/

Anyone else remember what Roberts said when Ruth Buzzy Ginsberg slammed Trump? Me either.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12...mp-toobin/index.html

I suspect that Left-leaning judges possibly do actually believe that their actions comport with the Constitution--they don't think they are acting against it. Their world-view is such that they truly believe that our Constitution embodies all the humanitarian causes that they adhere to. Of course, we (and probably the majority) think they are deluded (at best) or dishonest, but I'm not convinced that they see it that way. The damage they do is real, nevertheless.

I don't think the solution is better education; I believe removal/replacement with true Constitutionalists is the only answer.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I think the major distinction is that one understands the law, the constitution and swears to uphold it

the other doesn't

I’m not sure I agree. It is unlikely that too many folks make it to the point of being appointed as a Federal judge by any President and get confirmed without understanding the law and the Constitution, and all Federal judges swear to uphold the Constitution.

I believe the difference is that the Trump judges actually intend to honor their oath and truly support and defend the Constitution as it was written rather than as they would like it to be if at all.

https://www.americanthinker.co...inate_on_my_leg.html

November 23, 2018
Did Chief Justice Roberts just urinate on my leg?
By John Dietrich

Chief Justice John Roberts recently wrote, "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges."

The chief justice knows that this is not true, and I find it extremely insulting that he believes that I am stupid enough to believe it. As he relieved himself on my leg, he told me it was raining. Roberts's statement was a response to President Trump's criticism of "Obama judges" who ruled against the administration.



The president replied, "Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have 'Obama judges,' and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country. It would be great if the 9th Circuit was indeed an 'independent judiciary'[.]"

Dov Fischer at the American Spectator claimed, "[I]t sounds ridiculous – even borderline delusional – to deny that today's federal judiciary is chock-full of Obama judges and Clinton judges on a mission to stop President Trump's agenda."

Justice Roberts is not delusional.

Justices do not have the name of the president who nominated them in their titles. In this respect only, Justice Roberts is correct. However, they generally reflect the philosophy of the president who nominated them. Robert Barnes of the Washington Post remarked, "[S]tudies show there are clear ideological differences between judges nominated by presidents of different parties." Do we actually need studies to illustrate this?

Yet the pool of potential judicial nominees is dominated by progressives, and even "conservative" nominees can turn out to be quite liberal. U.S. district judge Timothy Kelly – a Trump appointee – ruled against the administration in its attempt to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta's White House press credentials.

Judges are human beings. They reflect a wide range of personality types and philosophies. There are "wise Latinas," "wise Yentas," and even "wise old Crackers." Their core responsibility is to make decisions free of bias using the U.S. Constitution as a guideline. This is not always the case. Justice Thurgood Marshall is famous for saying, "You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it's our turn."

Like any statement by the president, this one will be attacked by his opponents in government and the media. Sen. Richard Blumenthal tweeted, "Thanks Chief Justice Roberts for your powerful rebuke to Trump – refuting his demagogic denunciation of an 'Obama judge.'" Blumenthal claimed, "When the history of this dark era is written, our independent judiciary (& free press) will be the heroes. Our gratitude goes to them this Thanksgiving."

One of the most troubling aspects of the Judiciary's failings is what appears to be its sympathy for the criminal. Theodore Dalrymple commented, "The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame." Although he was commenting on the French judiciary, the remark applies to judicial systems throughout the West.

There are countless examples of this "laxisme." During the sentencing hearing for a man convicted of molesting an 11-year-old girl Judge Durke G. Thompson told the girl and her family "it takes two to tango." The late Robert Bork commented, "Today the Court has lined up with the cultural elite and against the majority of the electorate. The same thing is true in many of the lower courts, federal and state."

The elite will not relinquish its control of the courts without a fight. President Trump's next Supreme Court nominee will undergo unprecedented scrutiny.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts degree in international relations from St. Mary's University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Is Justice Roberts an 'Obama Judge'?

By Daniel John Sobieski

If the Kavanaugh hearings showed Chief Justice Roberts anything, it should have been that the notion that the Supreme Court is in a pristine bubble immune from political considerations and thoughts is false and has been at least since the days that the character assassins of Robert Bork made his name a verb in the dictionary his failed nomination left on the ash heap of history:

The year was 1987. It was fall. It was November 11. It had been a tough year for President Ronald Reagan. Liberals were going bonkers with Iran-Contra as a hopeful tool to destroy a great president on the verge of winning the Cold War. The media was dubbing Iran-Contra the worst mistake of Reagan’s presidency. It was not. What happened on November 11, 1987 would, in due course, constitute the worst mistake of the Reagan presidency: the nomination of Anthony Kennedy for the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Kennedy pick was supposed to calm the waters after the storm generated by the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg nominations. Bork would have been a brilliant justice, but leftists savaged the man, transmogrifying him into an ugly beast -- a gargoyle. Bork suffered the ignominy of the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy portraying him as “anti-woman.” A new verb was introduced into the political lexicon: the process of being “Borked.”

It had dawned on the Democrats that they could bypass the cumbersome legislative process still tied to that inconvenient “consent of the government thing” by concentrating on the courts and populating it with judges who believed in the “living constitution” which was to be interpreted in the context of the times inflamed by public passions and the liberal cause du jour. Original intent was an anachronism.

Bork’s nomination scared the hell out of Democrats who thought the unalienable right to life Thomas Jefferson placed in the Declaration of Independence didn’t really mean that:

When President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court, there was no serious question about his qualification for the bench. Just five years earlier, he had been unanimously confirmed for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, having earned an “exceptionally well qualified” label from the American Bar Association. But in the interim, the Democratic Party had taken control of the Senate. The late Senator Ted Kennedy orchestrated a smear campaign against Bork so breathtaking in its distortion that even the liberal Washington Post denounced it as a “lynching.” On Oct. 3, 1987, Bork’s nomination was rejected by the Senate on a 58-42 vote.

Bork was an originalist, meaning that he believed the Constitution contained no “penumbras” and “emanations” one could hang an imaginary right to an abortion on, a fact which prompted Chappaquiddick’s champion of women’s rights, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to cross that bridge when he came to it in his epic rant on Bork’s nomination:

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution," Kennedy said.

With a Senate cowed by political considerations and the passions of the moment, we got Anthony Kennedy’s America, a land of weather-vane SCOTUS decisions and coat-hangers continuing to be beaten into scalpels. Thanks to President Trump, who realized that the Supreme Court was and still is a political arena, at least for those who confirm SCOTUS picks, the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have shifted SCOTUS back in an originalist direction. Are they “Trump” justices per se? Perhaps not, but they share his views on the role and limitations of the Supreme Court.

Roberts’ rebuke of President Trump for saying there was such a political animal as an “Obama judge” makes him a poster child for hypocrisy harkening back to the day that he sat silent as President Obama scolded the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address over the Citizens United victory for free speech:

…Roberts sat quietly through President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union Address when Obama sharply attacked Supreme Court justices sitting in the audience for their ruling in the Citizens United case, which allowed unlimited political campaign contributions by unions and corporations.

President Obama falsely claimed in this speech that the Citizens United ruling allowed massive political contributions by foreign corporations. It did no such thing.

As the justices sat in the House chamber listening to his speech, President Obama embarrassed the court directly and fiercely. Not a peep from Roberts. Only Justice Samuel Alito quietly mouthed to himself “no, no” as Obama railed against foreign campaign contributions. Roberts has said nothing about Obama’s remarks in the eight years since.

Some would say that makes Roberts an “Obama judge” and the case could be made that his subsequent role in judging the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Roberts was rebuked for caving in to Obama by Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia (who would make a damn good attorney general):

Many believe that Roberts caved to political criticism by President Obama and his Democratic cohorts in a case where Roberts was the decisive vote in a ruling that found ObamaCare was constitutional -- a historic victory for Democrats.

Roberts clearly accepted the claim by Democrats in that case that the Supreme Court could not overturn ObamaCare or the high court would forever harm the republic and subvert the legislative process and the will of the people.

It is widely believed that Roberts changed his vote at the last minute to stop the Supreme Court from overturning ObamaCare in that landmark case because of pressure from outside forces directed against him.

Indeed, the wording of various dissents in the ObamaCare case -- especially Justice Antonin Scalia’s – made it clear that Roberts’ decision to find that ObamaCare was constitutional was political and nothing more -- not a decision based on the Constitution or on the law.

The ObamaCare ruling was a legacy opinion for Roberts because he couldn’t take another wave of criticism like what he received from the liberal media, Obama and the Democrats after his ruling in the Citizens United case.

Roberts capitulated and said ObamaCare was constitutional because it was a tax, a gross distortion that injected into the law the false notion that government could legally force people to buy a product they did not want. He knelt before the power of the state and not before the Constitution, the document that is supposed to limit government power that he was sworn to uphold and protect. In this instance at least, John Roberts became a judicial activist aiding and abetting a community organizer. He became an an Obama judge.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.co...e.html#ixzz5Xmd062oj

quote:

Their world-view is such that they truly believe that our Constitution embodies all the humanitarian causes that they adhere to.

And yet these idiots are sworn to uphold the constitution!

How can they uphold something which they clearly do not understand, know anything about?

The constitution is pretty clear.

It leaves no room for "interpretation".

Just because it does not support their anti-American agenda/beliefs does not give them the right, or even authority, to change it!

What puzzles me is how those 2 women nominated by obummer could sail thru the confirmation process with nearly 100% approval.!