White House Moves to Un-Appoint the Judge It Appointed, Erasing His Own Ruling
Officials say the cleanest way to overturn an inconvenient decision is to make it as though the judge who wrote it never existed in the first place.
The White House Counsel's office confirmed Monday that it is drafting paperwork to retroactively rescind the appointment of the federal judge overseeing the press-access lawsuit, on the theory that a ruling issued by someone who was never appointed cannot legally be a ruling at all.
The plan, described internally as "appointment reversal," would not remove the judge from the bench going forward, officials clarified, only erase the fact that he was ever placed there in the first place, a distinction they insisted was both legally sound and easy to explain to reporters, assuming reporters were still allowed in the building.
"We came together as one appointment, divided," said a spokesperson for the effort, before adding that the office was also exploring whether previous administrations could be un-elected using the same logic, purely for research purposes.
Meanwhile, the four networks that ceased coverage of White House briefings in solidarity with the banned outlets said they would continue not reporting on the story indefinitely, on the grounds that reporting on their own absence from reporting felt like exactly the kind of coverage they'd been trying to avoid.
Asked whether un-appointing a judge to void his ruling might itself be challenged in court, the spokesperson said any such challenge would presumably be heard by a judge, who could then also be un-appointed, a process officials described as "self-correcting" and possibly permanent.