Last Friday the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on President Trump's authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, and it went against him by a vote of 6-3. Since the announcement, the liberal media has used the decision in an attempt to fortify their accusations of Trump's "disregard" for the Constitution, and portray his criticism of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both of whom he appointed, and who both voted against the President's position, to be unprecedented and dangerous. But there's a lot they are leaving out.
A good example of the media's convenient amnesia occurred Sunday on MS NOW's Velshi, where host Ali Velshi and his guest Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe presented a one-sided version of the story, which was devoid of any context whatsoever. Velshi introduced a clip from Trump reacting to the decision on Friday.
VELSHI: ..And now, not even Trump's beloved handpicked Supreme Court Justices are safe from his ire. Here's how President Trump responded to Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, siding with the left leaning Justices and ruling against his tariffs.
TRUMP: Very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution...I think it's an embarrassment to their families, you want to know the truth.
Velshi then played a clip from his Saturday show where former federal judge and Never-Trumper J. Michael Luttig inveighed that Trump "displayed, spectacularly once again, his utter disrespect and contempt for the Constitution and for the Supreme Court of the United States, in the plainest language, unequivocal language, frightening language to the world and to the American people."
And Velshi couldn't have agreed more. He suggested that on these cases, you can't challenge judges as "biased activists." When they rule against Trump, they're "neutral arbiters."
VELSHI: More and more, this administration is painting judges who rule against it, who dare to challenge it as biased activists, not neutral arbiters of the law. But when judges appointed by both parties keep reaching the same conclusions, the problem is likely not with the courts. as Trump said, the problem may be the conduct that the courts are being called upon to judge.
This isn't judicial activism, it's judicial obligation. The framers created an independent judiciary for exactly this moment, a moment in which executive power tries to expand. And someone, someone must enforce the limits that the constitution placed on it. Courts are not opposing the presidency. They are preserving the Constitution. What this administration calls judicial bias is accountability. What it calls judicial activism is simply the rule of law, actually doing its job.
Were the courts unbiased arbiters just "doing their job" when they overturned Obama? A journalist interested in providing their audience with as much information as possible, might have informed them that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Obama Administration nineteen times, with nine of those rulings 9-0, three more were 8-0, and one more 8-1. This information was published by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) back on March 7, 2016. Somehow Velshi left this out. Later, he went back to Trump's criticism of Gorsuch and Barrett.
VELSHI: There's a distinction in the type of criticism Donald Trump has for certain judges, including those on the Supreme Court. He wrote off the liberal judges as people who wouldn't look at the merits of the case, they would just vote against him no matter what. But his two the two appointees of his, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, who who were part of that, that decision, he called them disloyal. These are big, big accusations by the president of the United States. And this kind of talk has resulted in actual threats, in some cases, death threats, but other forms of intimidation against these judges, they seem to be holding strong despite that.
TRIBE: They are they're showing great courage. Amy Coney Barrett's family has been threatened. More people are likely to be threatened as a result of of the red meat that the President tossed out in that hour long press conference. This is serious stuff. When people who are just doing their job find that they and their families are under threat of death, partly as a result of the President's reckless rhetoric, the nation is in serious danger.
First, threats against Barrett and her family came last year and prior. And noticeably absent from the discussion, the violent rhetoric against conservative Justices from the left, including racist attacks on Clarence Thomas, the attack on Ali Velshi's own show from Elie Mystal who charged that Chief Justice John Roberts is the "biggest enemy towards black people" on the Supreme Court since the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision from1857. And let's not forget the assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, after Senator Chuck Schumer appeared to threaten Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch in 2020.
Fake news by omission is the worst kind of fake news.
