In yet another step down the road towards American totalitarianism, two Trump-appointed appeals judges have overruled a lower court ruling in Trump's favour.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has ruled that the Trump administration is within its rights to pick and choose which news media can access (and ask awkward questions at) media scrums at the White House Oval Office, on the Airforce One plane, and in other (unspecified) "restricted presidential spaces".
The initial lawsuit was brought by Associated Press (AP), one of the world's largest, oldest and most respected news organizations, which was banned from Oval Office for not following Trump's edict of calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America". Given that AP is a global organization and the rest of the world still uses the historical and generally-recognized "Gulf of Mexico" label, that seems pretty reasonable to me, but the Trump administration has used this as an excuse to bar AP from Oval Office media events, despite them being part of the White House press pool. AP took them to court over it, and won in a lower court.
The ruling was appealed to a Trump-appointed majority appeals court, which has now reversed that decision, in a 2-1 decision, arguing, unconvincingly, that the Oval Office and certain other areas are "not First Amendment fora" (i.e. that freedom of speech does not apply there), and that the White House can indeed restrict journalistic access "on the basis of viewpoint" in the President's "private workspaces".
The (Obama-appointed) dissenting judge called this "a novel and unsupported exception to the First Amendment's prohibition of viewpoint-based restrictions of private speech", arguing that such a precedent would potentially lead to media outlets self-censoring what they write about Trump for fear of being "uninvited" to subsequent events.
Which is, of course, exactly what Trump wants. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (whom I am learning to hate at least as much as some of the many objectionable Trump press secretaries of the past) crowed online that "we will continue to expand access to new media ... rather than just the failing legacy media", by which she means friendly right-wing influencers rather than critical (or even objective) professional journalists.
AP say they are reviewing their legal options at this point, although recourse to the mainly Trump-appointed Supreme Court may be pointless, because these supposedly legal decisions have become purely political and partisan.
As exemplified by so many decisions, in recent months in particular, the US Supreme Court is no longer a wholly juridical institution, and decisions are usually made on purely ideological, not legal, grounds. It's a sad truth. And the American public knows it: a recent poll shows that 63% of Americans believe that the SCOTUS makes decisions based on politics alone, and 30% (naively) believes that it makes its decisions based on the law.
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