(NewsNation) — A few hours ago, President Joe Biden celebrated his student loan forgiveness plan.
It’s both wildly popular with young progressives and highly constitutionally questionable.
Just ask Nancy Pelosi, who said he couldn’t do it.
So, who defied Pelosi and gave President Biden a huge win just before the midterms? Justice Amy Coney Barrett. A Trump judge. In fact, she did it unilaterally.
Barrett reviews emergency appeals from the state of Wisconsin. By chance, that’s where the most aggressive challenge to student loan forgiveness came from, thus she and she alone could deny Supreme Court review. Which is exactly what she did. The rest of the court didn’t matter.
Evidently who appointed Barrett didn’t matter to the Associated Press; not one mention that Barrett is a Trump judge.
In fact, our reporting Justice Barrett as a Trump judge or Trump justice might be the first time you’ve heard her referred to that way. Just compare that to the hysteria over the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, from none other than Pelosi.
And it’s not just about Roe; seemingly any decision made by a judge that the left disagrees with becomes about Donald Trump.
Consider Vox’s article about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s their lead sentence.
“Three judges appointed by former President Donald Trump handed down an astonishing decision on Wednesday.”
Journalism 101, leads should be the most important thing. To Vox, the most important thing isn’t what’s done, but who appointed the judges who did it. In this case, declaring funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional, both sides of the case have merits. But who cares who appointed the judges?
Axios certainly does: “Three Trump-appointed judges in Texas declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding structure unconstitutional on Wednesday in a decision with the potential to reverberate throughout the financial industry,” Axios wrote.
If you aren’t impugning the integrity of Trump judges, why include them? There isn’t any other reason but to question the integrity of the institution.
Just 47% of the public trusts the judicial branch of government. That’s down from about 80%. Just 40% approve of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job.
For all the complaining these days about institutions and trust in institutions and attacks on institutions,
it’s not the chicken and the egg. One decidedly came first.
Politicians and the press attack the institutions and then we lose trust. It should come as no surprise that if Democrats relentlessly question the ethics of Trump-appointed judges, collectively we lose faith in the institution Trump judges support.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.