NewsBusters: ABC and NBC on Thursday worried that Donald Trump is “taking shots at one of the pillars of this country,” judges. Of the three networks, only CBS This Morning bothered to explain that there is nothing unusual about a president fighting with the judiciary. Reporter Jan Crawford highlighted the long history of Democrats, including Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, of attacking judges. ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today skipped this point.
Crawford explained, “President Obama berated conservative justices who were sitting right in front of him during the 2010 State of the Union address.” She added, “President Clinton suggested at one point he would ask a lower federal court judge to resign over one of his controversial decisions.”
She concluded, “In fact, one President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tried to change the entire composition of the Supreme Court because he was so unhappy with its rulings.”
As noted by Crawford, FDR tried to “pack” the Supreme Court simply because the then-conservative majority wasn’t going along with his legislation. The May 2005 issue of Smithsonian recounted:
Three days later, on February 5, 1937, Roosevelt shocked Congress, his closest advisers and the country by unleashing a thunderbolt. He asked Congress to empower him to appoint an additional justice for any member of the court over age 70 who did not retire. He sought to name as many as six additional Supreme Court justices, as well as up to 44 judges to the lower federal courts. He justified his request not by contending that the court’s majority was reactionary, but by maintaining that a shortage of judges had resulted in delays to litigants because federal court dockets had become overburdened.
Regarding Clinton, in 1996, he attacked a federal judge, saying that members of the judiciary should not be entitled to “a gag rule on everyone else.”
As Crawford noted at the time, Clinton’s blistering criticism of Judge Harold Baer did not go unnoticed: MORE
Seems CBS isn’t as slow as I thought. May be hope for them yet.
When the electoral college looks more intelligent than the judiciary, guess which one should go.
The media is trying to pull it’s collective
left leaning broke ass out of the deep hole
it created.
It’s like playing whacka’a’mole. Just keep
kicking them in the shit every time they try
to actually do news. It’s a sham. Bankrupt them.
My local radio guy Jaime Allman played this CBS piece, then asked “How did this get done by CBS? Who is this Jan Crawford? Is she fired yet? How in the world did this happen?” Funny.
CBS? Tell the truth? That’s one in a row.