In a curious lapse from her attacks on the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, Linda Greenhouse raises an interesting question. Should reporting about federal judges include the president who nominated them?

Back when I was a reporter covering the Supreme Court in the early 2000s, journalists in the nation’s capital had begun routinely to identify judges by the presidents who appointed them. I argued vigorously against this approach. The practice was reductive and corrosive, I would say. It implied to readers that a given judge was doing politics rather than law — a serious accusation and in most cases an unfair one. To the extent that journalism plays a role in civics education, as I believe it does, it seemed to me that portraying the legal system in such a misleading way amounted to journalistic malpractice.

This was the view taken by Chief Justice John Roberts, who asserted in 2018 that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” They are all judges, and as judges, are expected to rule with neither fear nor favor. They are not minions of their patron. They are not representatives of a political ideology. They are judges. Isn’t that enough?

Was I naïve back then? I don’t think so. The most liberal justice on the Supreme Court at that time was John Paul Stevens, appointed by a Republican president, Gerald Ford. The most prominent liberal justices of the previous half-century, from Earl Warren to Harry Blackmun to David Souter, had been Republican appointees, often to the dismay of the presidents who chose them. It was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, named to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, who wrote in one of the early post-Sept. 11 decisions during the George W. Bush presidency that “a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Beyond the Supreme Court, there were plenty of judges named by presidents of both parties whose rulings had no obvious political valence.

Was Greenhouse naïve, or was she merely taking a Utopian view of what judges should be, rationalizing it based on those decisions where judges’ rulings overcame the appearance of a “political valence” and demonstrated the intellectual neutrality one would expect of a federal judge?

Then something began to change: not the journalistic resolve but the reality in the country’s courts as the culture wars grew hotter and judges, by way of their opinions, began to sort themselves into ideological camps. This was apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Democratic-appointed judges tended to defer to government decisions about the kinds of restrictions to impose, while Republican appointees were more likely to view restrictions as assaults on individual liberty.

Covid might be one example, but another rather flagrant example were the rulings in Title IX campus sexual misconduct cases, where judges appointed by Democratic presidents strongly tended to rule in favor of colleges and against male students who were denied due process. Even when they found the sex tribunals to be flagrantly wrong, they rationalized how it wasn’t because of sex discrimination, but because of bias in favor of victims and against accused rapists. Just because male students tended to be rapists while female students tended to be “survivors” couldn’t be helped.

That was then. Now partisan identification of federal judges has become indisputably relevant. Something remarkable has happened in the face of the second Trump administration’s assault on civil liberties and the separation of powers. The judiciary’s response has transcended partisanship. Republican- and Democratic-appointed judges have reacted with shock at the breadth of the president’s claims that his actions cannot be reviewed by the courts and with horror at his personal attacks on judges and his call for impeaching those who dare to cross him.

Where before, identifying judges by the presidents who appointed them was meant to suggest partisan favoritism for their patron, it is now becoming more utilitarian to show the legitimacy of the judicial branch, where Republican-appointed judges are ruling against Trump’s unlawful and unconstitutional usurpation of power. Witness Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III.

While Judge Wilkinson has long been one of the country’s most prominent jurists, few people who read or heard about his opinion would have recognized his name or known anything about his four decades on the bench. What they learned from the reporting on his opinion is that he is a conservative Reagan appointee.

Even more obscure to the public is Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who ruled against Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. Was he one of those “left lunatic judges” Trump loves to talk about? Not quite, since Trump appointed him. But had that bit been left out of reporting about his decision, would the public have known? No doubt many of the MAGA faithful would have denigrated his decision as anti-Trump, but that’s harder to do when you realize he was a Trump judge.

While Greenhouse’s, and CJ Roberts’, view that labeling judges by the president who appointed them is in stark conflict with what we should expect of the judiciary, and is reductive and corrosive, the current circumstances show value to preserve the legitimacy of the “Least Dangerous Branch,” whose power stems solely from the public belief in its legitimacy. Does naming a judge’s patron enhance or undermine that legitimacy? Is it necessary under current circumstance, but something to avoid in the future? Once it becomes the norm, can reporting on judges ever go back to the days of judicial impartiality?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.