A change to libel law could backfire on President Trump
Is Justice Clarence Thomas joining President Donald Trump's war on news media?
Trump's near-constant complaints about the "fake news" media received an unexpected boost Wednesday. In a solo opinion, Justice Thomas said the high court should make it easier for public figures to sue for libel.
Sure, it might not get anywhere. But it could.
His argument is not totally without merit. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom Thomas occupied the conservative end of the high court, also criticized the landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision that sharply limited defamation claims in state court by famous people.
Trump has said since his days as a candidate in 2016 that we should "open up" libel laws so politicians could sue the networks and big newspapers for "fake news," which, as we have learned through ample experience, he tends to define as stories that he doesn't like.
And Trump doesn't confine his wrath to straight news coverage. Earlier in the week, for example, he tweeted his wrath against NBC's "Saturday Night Live," a program that, by the way, our former reality TV star has hosted twice and criticized many times.
This time Trump found "Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!" Then he asked, "how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real collusion!"
Really? "Retribution?"
Ah, how our president must envy the sweeping powers of his despotic pals such as the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Russia's Vladimir Putin. Those guys know how to rid themselves of critics without necessarily bothering to stop in a courtroom.
We're not there yet. But if the right case comes along and let's say Trump's two appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, agree with Thomas' or Scalia's views, they could help to ring a death knell for a longstanding and very important protection of free speech and political news coverage.
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