But my point is that it's far easier for a journalist to suggest that any judicial decision in a case involving the government is motivated by political bias -- either the judge decided for the government because Trump appointed him or against the government because Obama appointed her and anyway she's Mexican/Black/Jewish/Muslim -- but most of us have no way of knowing whether a generic judge, as it were, would have decided matters any differently since we don't know enough in detail about the law and how it applies to the facts of a particular case.
That's my concern -- I am prepared to believe that some US judges allow politics and other concerns to sway their decision-making, in contravention of their judicial oaths but I want to see the allegation supported by some evidence, in the form of some quotes from impartial legal professionals giving their considered opinion that the decision appears, on the face of it, serious inconsistent with existing law.
The two articles -- this judge refusing to hear a case and an earlier article about his refusing to recuse himself from a civil case about the "pee tapes" concerning Buzzfeed and a Russian "businessman" -- didn't provide that sort of context.
All I know from the two articles is that he ruled in favour of the White House in this case and that his decision is being appealed, which I imagine would have happened anyway had the decision gone the other way, but I don't know what the grounds are for the appeal or how convincing they look. Nor does the other article about the earlier case tell me much, since the only comment there from an apparently impartial legal observer was to the effect that, while the judge would have been justified in recusing himself had he so wished, but certainly there was nothing about his somewhat tangential connection with the Trump election campaign that would have required him so to do.
So I'm left with no real way of assessing whether a judge appointed by a different administration would have ruled any differently on the facts of the case, and anyway, since the case was bound to be appealed whatever the outcome, I don't see any particular harm is done by the ruling.
Some of the press coverage over here of the Gina Miller's case forcing the government to seek parliamentary approval for leaving the EU left me deeply uncomfortable, since the law on the subject was genuinely unclear and the case obviously had huge constitutional implications quite apart from Brexit, and we had the anti-EU Conservative press, plus several politicians who should know better, howling for the blood of senior judges they were calling "saboteurs" and "enemies of the people" because they weren't simply agreeing with the government.
We've still got Nigel Farage bashing on about that, btw, along with similar complaints about anyone else who questions the legality of anything about the Leave campaign's distinctly questionable funding.
Similarly, more recently we saw highly emotive and unpleasant comment about judges involved in two different cases where hospitals wanted to take profoundly ill and dying children off life-support since all it was doing, in the hospital's view, was needlessly prolonging their suffering, much of it from US-backed religious campaigns who seemed to think the whole ghastly business was proof positive that "socialised medicine" meant the government would murder children and the fact that one of the judges involved was gay conclusively demonstrated he was motivated by anti-family, anti-religious bias.
That's wrong, and does nothing more than help promote distrust of the legal system in general, which is, as I keep saying, to the benefit of no one other than right-wing populists (which is presumably why they do it) who want to discredit any independent bodies that stand in the way of "the will of the people" as defined by particular self-appointed interpreters of that "will".
All I am asking for is that reporters think a bit before making that kind of allegation and, crucially, provide some credible evidence for it. In this particular case, the evidence may be there but it was never produced.