@Cyber Liberty @Hoodat @Elderberry I don't care what the judge says.
If the plaintiff's special rights were not being violated by a process failure, then no special process was at issue, i.e. no tedious "process" was due.
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The press pass did constitute a "right" for Acosta to be in the conference room. That might sound like a special right indeed, but it was a sovereignly granted right--not an innate right for Acosta in particular, not a sacred/protected right that was merely formalized by the pass. Unfortunately, the judge treated this "right" as a specially protected right precisely because Acosta was made a member of the White House PRESS corps. In short, the case was implicitly being handled as a 1st Amendment case even though the judge tried to say otherwise.
The judge wound up on the wrong side by snarling issues together and pretending that he was not snarling issues together. He's not a clear enough thinker to issue an unimpeachably honest ruling. His ruling is stupid. It is clearly not right for Trump not to summarily remove a disruptive jerk from the Press Corps. (Heck, it one wants to talk about "process," how about the White House "process" of patiently tolerating Acosta's inarguably bad behavior for way too long?)
(By the way, does the White House now have to draft written rules that also say that a reporter is not allowed to chew tobacco and spit on the conference room floor? Reductio ad absurdum.)
I gather from Elderberry's post of the Schiller link (and case summary) that Judge Kelly actually followed the Schiller case's ruling in reaching his own decision in the Acosta case.
But the crux of the Schiller case was the 1st Amendment itself. The Schiller case ruling found that press credentialing has to follow a clear protocol--not using seemingly capricious/political criteria for denying credentials.
Kelly evidently used the Schiller ruling to jump right
past any argument as to whether the 1st Amendment applied in Acosta's case. Kelly
started off with the position that the 1st Amendment
definitely applies in cases like Acosta's case. What could be more obvious (by the way)? The peculiar thing about this obvious legal presupposition is that it allows Kelly to claim that Acosta's case was "
not a 1st Amendment case," whereas it necessarily was. (Again, what could be more obvious?)
Therefore, the judge's insistence that the Acosta case was not a 1st Amendment case is terribly misleading. Worse still, the legal parsing gives Kelly cover for a lousy ruling ostensibly
centering on due process, as though it is not a matter of due process centered on the 1st Amendment. Consider this: Acosta's refusal to yield the floor and hand back the microphone, followed by Acosta trying to grab it back (and also laying a hand on the WH intern during that struggle), should not be covered by "due process
protocols." The only "process" that was Acosta's "due" was obviously a
summary dismissal.
