Becky Noble writes for RedState.com about one Supreme Court justice’s warning to activist judges.
On Thursday, in a rare instance of public comment, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch called out lower courts and their judges for repeatedly ignoring Supreme Court rulings. In a ruling that allows the Trump administration to move ahead with cutting millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Gorsuch slapped back at a lower court, writing in an opinion that it was the “third time in a matter of weeks” that the Supreme Court was forced to reverse a lower court ruling on an issue they had already ruled on.
Along with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Gorsuch flexed some Supreme Court muscle, writing, “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.” And it is something that has obviously become problematic enough for Justices to address, yet still keeps happening. In April, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that the Trump administration could continue the termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-related teacher training grants.
In June, a lower court allowed a lawsuit “involving materially identical grants” from the NIH to proceed, but that court cherry-picked the dissenting justices’ opinion and ignored the majority ruling. That judge ultimately blocked the Trump administration’s ending of DEI and gender ideology-related grants. Gorsuch wrote of this instance of lower court defiance:
“If nothing else, the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the ‘persuasive authority’ of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion on an equivalent record.”
But as we have seen since Trump took office, there are plenty more examples of lower courts and judges blatantly ignoring SCOTUS decisions. Gorsuch mentioned them as well.
