President Donald Trump submitted a new slate of judicial nominees to the Senate Wednesday, naming nine appointees to federal courts across the country.

The list is the second such slate that the president has submitted to the Senate. The White House also indicated that Trump will officially nominate three more judicial candidates in the coming days.

The nominations are the latest in what are expected to be monthly waves of nominations.

The most high-profile nominations include Justice Allison Eid for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Ralph Erickson for the 8th Circuit, and Stephanos Bibas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who will be nominated to a seat on the 3rd Circuit in the near future.

Eid appeared on the president’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Read more from “Trump, Keeping Campaign Promise, Picks More Conservative Judges” HERE)

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The Trump administration announced Tuesday evening it would delay the implementation of a smog rule that’s been called one of the costliest clean air regulations ever.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt sent a letter to governors saying there’s “insufficient information” to fully implement the 2015 rule on its current timeline. The rule lowers the national ground-level ozone, or smog, standard from 75 to 70 parts per billion.

Pruitt said states would have an extra year to meet the tightened ozone standard, and the EPA would address concerns over outstanding issues, like background ozone and smog coming in from China and other East Asian countries.

“We share the goal of clean air, a robust economy and stronger, healthier communities,” Pruitt said in a statement.

“We are committed to working with states and local officials to effectively implement the ozone standard in a manner that is supportive of air quality improvement efforts without interfering with local decisions or impeding economic growth,” he said. (For more from the author of “EPA Delays One of the Agency’s Most Expensive Regulations Ever” please click HERE)

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On Tuesday, I filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily pausing the entry of foreign nationals from six terror-prone counties.

Supreme Court review is needed because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit recently ruled against the valid executive order. I am leading a multistate coalition asking the Supreme Court to permit the president to exercise his lawful authority to protect the homeland.

What the 4th Circuit completely missed is that the executive order is a tailored response to a very real threat to our national security.

A pause on entry from countries with heightened security concerns—such as Libya, where authorities arrested suspects linked to the horrific attack in Manchester—is justified to ensure that new arrivals are thoroughly vetted.

Liberal activists are upset that Trump is keeping his promise to secure our border, protect our country, and keep Americans safe from acts of terror.

Unfortunately, it seems that some federal judges, like the majority of the court that opined against the president’s executive order, are now substituting their “politically desired outcome” for the law, to quote dissenting Judge Paul Niemeyer.

The multistate brief that I filed shows courts have long recognized that the federal government has the power to exclude aliens.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly described the ability to refuse the admission of aliens into our country as a core federal prerogative, which is “inherent in sovereignty” and necessary “for defending the country against foreign encroachments and dangers.”

Moreover, Congress clearly vests the executive branch with the statutory authority to exclude aliens.

8 U.S.C. § 1182 authorizes the president to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions which he may deem to be appropriate.”

There are many prior incidents of administrations barring entry of aliens based on their nationality. Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama used the exact same statutory authority claimed by Trump to refuse admission to aliens from Sudan, Sierra Leone, Venezuela, and Libya.

Federal law makes it plain that the power to exclude is subject only to the president’s finding “that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

That requirement is easily met here. Indeed, the Obama administration previously identified the six countries covered by the Trump executive order as national security concerns.

It is equally clear under Supreme Court precedent that courts have no business overriding the president’s use of full federal authority to deny classes of nonresident aliens into the United States.

Simply put, nonresident aliens who have never set foot on American soil do not possess rights under the United States Constitution regarding entry into this country.

The president’s predecessor had years to strengthen the vetting process. He failed to do so and therefore opened the United States to the types of attacks executed in Germany, France, Belgium, and England.

Had Obama taken the threat seriously, the temporary pause in entry called for in the executive order may not have been necessary.

For years, Texas has been concerned about refugees and immigrants coming into the state from countries whose governments are official sponsors of terrorism. We asked our federal government for information so that Texans were not left in the dark about the individuals placed in our neighborhoods.

But our pleas to the Obama administration to ensure proper vetting fell on deaf ears.

We finally have a president who is serious about securing our borders and keeping Americans safe. It is widely accepted that terrorist attacks are the product of networks that stretch across borders.

Trump’s executive order on foreign entry will allow the time necessary to shore up our nation’s screening procedures and help prevent bloodthirsty extremists, like those who aided and abetted the attacks in Manchester, from infiltrating our homeland.

Trump promised in his oath of office to protect our democracy. His travel ban delivers on that promise. As attorney general of Texas, I fully support his administration’s commitment to defend this action all the way to the Supreme Court. (For more from the author of “I’m an Attorney General Asking Supreme Court to Uphold Trump’s Travel Ban. Here’s Why.” please click HERE)

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Last week, when pressed to answer questions about reports that Jared Kushner set up back-channel communications with the Russian government, White House press secretary Sean Spicer frequently responded by considering the source—or lack thereof.

“I’m not going to dignify partisan accusations of anonymous sources and alleged—unsubstantiated attacks,” Spicer told reporters Tuesday during exchanges that became testy at times when answering questions about President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

The use of anonymous sources in stories critical of the president have been under the Trump White House’s skin for some time, though Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, which studies journalism and the media, wasn’t sure there are more stories based on anonymous sources under Trump than past presidents.

“Anonymous sources are bad in theory, because generally, journalists should try to get people on the record,” Edmonds told The Daily Signal. “But sometimes that is the only way to get ledes and background. If a reporter stands on principle and says, ‘I will not do that,’ they will miss out on information.”

Edmonds said there is typically a different set of rules in Washington than at news outlets in other places.

Most of the anonymously sourced stories have been about alleged ties to Trump and Russia. Other frequent topics are about infighting in the White House.

During his speech in late February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump went so far as to accuse the media of making up anonymous sources.

“I’m against people that make up stories and make up sources,” Trump said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use the name. ‘A source says Donald Trump is a horrible human being.’ Let them say it to my face. There are some great reporters, honest, talented as the day is long. But also dishonest people doing a disservice to the country.”

The Society of Professional Journalists tightened the organization’s code of ethics in 2014 to dissuade the use of anonymous sources. It calls for journalists to “identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability,” and to “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.”

The Associated Press Stylebook lays out the parameters for using anonymous sources. The stylebook says:

Under AP’s rules, material from anonymous sources may be used only if:

The material is information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the news report.

The information is not available except under the conditions of anonymity imposed by the source.

The source is reliable, and in a position to have accurate information.

Reporters who intend to use material from anonymous sources must get approval from their news managers.

Explain in the story why the source requested anonymity. And, when it’s relevant, describe the source’s motive for disclosing the information.

The story also must provide attribution that establishes the source’s credibility; simply quoting a source is not allowed. Be as descriptive as possible about the source of information.

“If you have to attribute facts to an anonymous source to nail down the story, that is one matter,” Edmonds said. “What I dislike is opinion, simply pushing negative opinions and using anonymity as cover.”

A major problem with nameless, faceless sources is that the motives of the leakers for the anti-Trump stories “might be pure, or could be poisonous,” wrote Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, of the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group. Regarding recent stories in The Washington Post, they wrote:

Earth to the Post: your new motto is ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ but anonymous sourcing is darkness. Every source who hides behind a wall as he tries to ruin other people’s careers is a self-serving coward with a personal or political ax to grind. Without knowing an identity, the public has no way of telling … anything. It’s idiotic for the press to demand transparency in government at the exact same time it rewards government officials who refuse to be transparent themselves.

Journalists pat themselves on the back that they would never be ‘stenographers to power,’ but they’re worse than that now. In their zeal to destroy Trump, they’ve become stenographers to anonymous power.

The use of anonymous sources prompted controversy on the left and the right. In 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for fabricating stories based in part on anonymous sources. Also, New York Times reporter Judith Miller came under heavy scrutiny for reporting—based largely on anonymous government sources—about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Paul Steiger, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and founder of ProPublica, noted that leaks are absolutely needed to get to the truth.

“It is not the publishing of these secrets that threatens national security. Publishing these secrets threatens the secret-keepers,” Steiger said. “It protects the public interest by letting us know what powerful people are doing when they think no one is looking … We need more journalists revealing more secrets, not fewer.”

Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for The Washington Post and a former public editor for The New York Times, noted famous instances of anonymous source usage such as Edward Snowden and surveillance of Americans during the Obama administration, going back to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate during the Nixon years. Sullivan wrote:

In a government increasingly obsessed with secrecy, and guilty of rampant overclassification, leaks are necessary and, largely, a very good thing.

And although there are legitimate national security concerns in some cases, I’d far rather live in a leaky America than one sealed up tight—with whistleblowers and journalists behind bars.

Identifying sources is particularly important today when so many people are throwing around the phrase “fake news,” said Andrew Seaman, the Society of Professional Journalists ethics chairman.

“The public has the right to know as much as possible about a story, including the messenger, who should be identified,” said Seaman, a journalist with Reuters.

He noted that Washington journalists were resistant to the change in 2014, and insisted anonymous sourcing is “the way Washington works.” The Society of Professional Journalists doesn’t have to approve of how Washington works, he added.

“Anonymous sources can be important, but journalists also need to be more aggressive and push a source to go on the record,” he said. “First ask, where else does this exist? It’s very rare that only one person knows about something in government.”

An example of using someone off the record to steer in the right direction would be the most famous anonymous source of all, Deep Throat of Watergate, who turned out to be the former No. 2 at the FBI, Mark Felt. He was never quoted in Washington Post stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, but rather guided them on where to look. That said, the Watergate stories still included many other anonymous sources.

Ultimately, government officials at the highest levels have an obligation to be transparent, he said.

“An uptick in anonymous sources often happens as access becomes more scarce with shorter and fewer press briefings,” Seaman said. “If the administration wants to cut back on anonymous sources, they will be more transparent and open.” (For more from the author of “Trump Doesn’t Like So Many Anonymous Sources, and Neither Do These Journalism Experts” please click HERE)

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