A federal judge on Monday rejected the Associated Press’s emergency request to restore full access to White House press pool events, but he ordered an expedited review of the case given the serious constitutional issues at stake, reports said.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden—an appointee of President Donald Trump—declined to issue a temporary restraining order against the administration while recognizing the urgency of the matter. The First Amendment challenge arises from Trump’s recent executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and the Associated Press’s refusal to adopt the new nomenclature.
Despite his ruling, McFadden warned that existing case law does not support the administration’s attempt to block the Associated Press from press pool access solely because it refuses to use the new name “Gulf of America.” He cautioned that the White House might need to revise its policies, which currently give the White House Correspondents’ Association broad discretion in managing press access for the wider media corps.
The Associated Press filed the lawsuit after its reporters were barred from covering Oval Office events and traveling on Air Force One.
The outlet sued three senior White House aides—press secretary Karoline Leavitt, chief of staff Susan Wiles, and deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich—arguing that the ban infringes upon First and Fifth Amendment protections against government interference with press freedoms.
In response, administration lawyers argued that no media outlet is constitutionally entitled to “special access” to the president.
Meanwhile, also on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a chance to change its previous decision that allowed buffer zones around abortion clinics, even though two of the court’s most conservative members were against it.
The court said in two orders released Monday that it would not hear challenges to laws in Carbondale, Ill., and Englewood, N.J., that stop anti-abortion activists from “sidewalk counseling” people who are going to an abortion clinic.
Both Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken up the case, but it needed the votes of four justices to be carried out, The Hill reported.
Based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, lower courts upheld the ordinances in both cities. That decision said that a similar law in Colorado did not violate the First Amendment.
Since then, groups against abortion have tried to overturn the precedent. Some conservative justices recently said that the decision was an abuse of free speech, including in the high court’s ruling overturning constitutional protections for abortion.
“Hill has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty,” Thomas wrote, though Alito did not offer a written dissent.
“Hill was wrong the day it was decided, and the case for overruling it has only strengthened ever since,” Paul Clement, a veteran conservative Supreme Court attorney who previously served as solicitor general, wrote in the petition challenging Carbondale’s ordinance.
“Petitioner wants to fast-track a request that this Court overturn Hill just as it overturned Roe v. Wade. This Court should deny that request. This case is a far cry from an ideal—or even passable—vehicle for revisiting Hill,” Neal Katyal, another veteran Supreme Court advocate, who served as acting solicitor general under former President Barack Obama, wrote on behalf of the city.
In Englewood, resident Jeryl Turco fought against a similar law that the city passed in 2014 to create a buffer zone around an abortion clinic because of violent protesters from a group called Bread of Life.
Englewood urged the court to turn away the case, saying it “is extremely fact-sensitive and involves material credibility issues that the District Court has resolved. Also, the facts of this case are unique because of Petitioner’s method of sidewalk counseling.”
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