(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Despite the media’s emphatic insistence that federal Judge Jack Coughenour is a “Reagan” Republican, records indicate that in the 45 years since he took the bench, the Seattle-based NeverTrump jurist’s values may have taken a dramatic turn.
“The rule of law is, according to [President Donald Trump], something to navigate around or something ignored, whether that be for political or personal gain,” Coughenour ranted on Thursday.
The comment came as Coughenour was doubling down on a 14-day injuction he had issued previously to block Trump’s executive order challenging the century-old “birthright citizenship” policy, which allows illegal immigrants to exploit the booming birth-tourism industry.
“In this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon, which I intend to follow,” claimed Coughenour, who previously said that Trump’s policy change was “blatantly unconstitutional.”
However, public records indicate that Coughenour himself has donated to Democrat candidates, raising questions as to whether the 84-year-old judge’s judgment may, in fact, be clouded by his own biases.
The situation bears close resemblance to Trump’s previous encounter with radical leftist Judge Juan Merchan, who refused to recuse himself in the Republican leader’s New York porn-star trial, despite having previously made campaign donations to defeat Trump in 2020, in violation of New York law.
Merchan—whose daughter Loren received millions from Trump’s political enemies as a campaign strategist—repeatedly bent the norms of due process to accommodate George Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the case, which ulltimately succeeded in convicting Trump of multiple felonies but failed to derail his reelection effort.
In November 2015, Coughenour donated $50 to the reelection campaign of then-County Commissioner Helen Price Johnson, a Democrat. His wife, Gwen, also donated $50.
Johnson went on to lose a race for the state senate in 2020 to Republican Ron Muzzall. According to a Ballotopedia survey to which she responded, her top priorities were affordable housing and healthcare access, and she was adamant that “Climate change is real and needs action now.”
Notwithstanding her own loss in 2020, Johnson celebrated the “heartening, historic win” of Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
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But Johnson wasn’t the only one on the Puget Sound cheering the dubious outcome in 2020’s presidential race. The Coughenours’ houseboat may also have been taking a victory lap around Whidbey Island.
Gwen Coughenour donated a total of $450 to the Biden campaign in 2020, and in the most recent election cycle she gave a total of $500 to Harris.
She also gave $50 to the victory fund for Yevgeny Semyonovich “Eugene” Vindman—the twin brother of notorious anti-Trump traitor Alexander Vindman, whose leak of a phone call between Trump and newly elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Democrats the ammo needed to launch a spurious 2019 impeachment effort.
The fact that Eugene Vindman was running in a congressional race all the way across the country, in Virginia, suggests that Gwen Coughenour may not have been that interested in his stance on affordable housing and healthcare, but rather that she had contracted a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Although John Coughenour understandibly shied away from donations that would show up in the Federal Election Commission’s database and impugn his impartiality, he did say of his relationship with his wife in a 2001 profile that the secret to a long and happy marriage was to “marry the right woman,” and mentioned nothing to the effect of “opposites attract.”
Much to the chagrin of Ronald Reagan, no doubt, in the same profile the judge lavished effusive praise on communist Russia, a country with which he had a “longtime fascination.”
Coughenour had first visited the Soviet Union in 1980—a year before Reagan nominated him to the District Court for the Western District of Washington. As of 2001, he had made seven trips to the Soviet Union/Russia.
That obsession with Russia has also informed his judicial philosophy, in particular his leniency toward convicted criminals and antipathy toward those in power.
“I’m paraphrasing now, but Dostoevski said you can tell a lot about a people by how they treat their prisoners in their prisons,” Coughenour revealed in a 2006 Seattle Times profile, two years after the George W. Bush administration’s Abu Ghraib scandal.
“That, I think, is quite applicable to this country today,” Coughenour added.
Coughenour was not the only judicial activist trying to thwart Trump’s ambitious promise to undo the damage done by the Biden administration’s open-border policies.
On Wednesday, Maryland judge Deborah Boardman decreed birthright citizenship to be a “most precious right.”
Another hearing was scheduled for Friday in Massachusetts.
In total 22 states, mostly Democrat-led, as well as activist organizations, were waging lawsuits against Trump’s “birthright citizenship” order.
Although the leftist judges have asserted that the policy was established by the post-Civil-War 14th Amendment, from a legal standpoint, it did not fully take effect until 1924—56 years after the amendment’s ratification.
While former slaves were more or less protected under it—granting them full citizenship rather than the three-fifths outlined in the Constitution—Chinese–Americans and Native Americans were among those initially excluded.
In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the United States to Chinese parents, qualified for citizenship. However, the current process for naturalization was not codified until 1906, and federal immigration laws were not fully consolidated until the 1950s and ’60s.
“Prior to 1906, the proceedings for naturalization since 1802 were as follows: one must give notice of intent for citizenship for a certain number of years, then present to the court with documentation of identification and ‘proof of good moral character’ (be it through
witness reports or participation in the community), and finally recite the oath of allegiance to the United States of America,” according to a University of Virginia researcher.
Even by those more relaxed standards, many of the present-day illegals who have taken up residency in the U.S. do not meet the basic criteria.
Thus, the Trump administration argues, they do not meet the 14th Amendment’s standard of being “subject to the jurisdiction” of U.S. law.
Currently, the U.S. is one of only about 30 countries to apply the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” for anyone born in the country.
Nearly all others require at least one parent to be a citizen in order to qualify for automatic citizenship.
Supporters of federal immigration enforcement note that the abuse of immigration laws has given Democrats a loophole to short-circuit democracy by importing an unlimited number of potential voters, whom they bribe with free government benefits and other perks as part of the Great Replacement strategy.
The lawsuits intended to undermine Trump’s agenda were “nothing more than an extension of the Left’s resistance,” noted White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields.
“Radical Leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump,” he added.
Ben Sellers is the editor emeritus of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
