President Donald Trump’s latest broadside at the federal courts is not his first to be disempowered by them. He has also faced the opposite danger — the prospect of more assertive federal judges.
A broad line of judicial decisions now has federal judges reconsidering how much governments should disclose to the public about its own operations and practices — not only in the case of information that is supposed to be confidential for national security reasons but also in what is known as the “Brown v. California” case. That case is widely recognized as one of the first judicial clashes over the First Amendment’s right to a free press.
Trump is almost single-handedly reviving that case. His latest attack on media freedom was a tweet last week, where he called on the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to intervene in a case involving the administration’s creation of a new e-privacy policy for executive branch communications. Trump insisted that the issue be assigned to the top court, not the circuit courts that originally examined the question. The D.C. Circuit had resolved the question in 2017, but even then it gave its ruling in a 13-page opinion.