"It’s clear that the curtain must fall on the notion that hundreds of unelected district court judges of often outlying political beliefs and of various levels of judicial temperament and legal ability should be permitted to act as Chief Executive."
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| Posted by Andrea Widburg |
. . ."The more urgent question is, what right does a district court (which handles the matters in a designated geographic area) have to issue a nationwide injunction, and that matter is now being raised to the Supreme Court by the Administration in a case challenging the President’s order on birthright citizenship which district court judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington have blocked nationwide." . . .
. . ."Justice Neil Gorsuch has been critical of them and the Harvard Law Review notes how this practice politicizes the law.
Morley said a single judge's power to enter a nationwide injunction incentivizes "extreme forum shopping," in which plaintiffs strategically bring their case in a specific court before a judge who will be most favorable to their arguments.
"There are outlier judges on all sides," he said. "You can go to that outlier judge and are systematically having the most controversial, cutting-edge, hot-button constitutional issues being settled and resolved by the ideological outliers rather than a more representative cross section of the judiciary."
In fact, the examination of nationwide injunctions published in the Harvard Law Review found that 92% were entered by judges appointed by Democratic presidents during the Trump administration. For the Biden administration, that portion grew to 100% imposed by judges named to the federal bench by Republican presidents.
"If you see that kind of pattern, it cannot help but call the judiciary into disrepute," said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. "It doesn't look like they're applying the law in a clear way. It will erode the judiciary's legitimacy, no question about it."
Bagley, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about these injunctions in 2020, pointed to one key factor behind their rise: Politics. . . .
Trump throws down the gauntlet to the out-of-control federal district court judges *UPDATED* Andrea Widburg
UPDATE: And as if on cue, a Clinton judge in California (which has long been the most overturned federal jurisdiction in America), orders Trump to rehire every fired probationary employee. It's highly questionable, though, whether the legislature has -- as the court suggests it does -- the constitutional authority at all to dictate how the president manages federal employees.
