David Catron writes for the American Spectator about a significant development for the American judiciary.
Late last week NBC ran a “news” story featuring a dozen disgruntled federal judges whose rulings against various Trump administration policies have been stayed or overturned by the Supreme Court. These lower court judges, none of whom had the courage to allow NBC to name them in the article, bewailed the failure of SCOTUS to provide sufficient justification for ruling against them. It’s blindingly obvious, however, that the real issue they are whining about is the Court’s refusal to countenance their usurpation of the President’s Article II powers and frustrate implementation of his agenda.
The real story here is about the failure of the “judicial insurrection.”
Upon assuming office, the President signed a number of executive orders involving a variety of issues. Many of these EOs were challenged by lawsuits filed in district courts presided over by activist judges. Inevitably, these judges issued “universal injunctions” that halted implementation of the EOs nationwide. The administration filed emergency appeals with SCOTUS to ensure these cases received expedited attention.
According to the NBC story, “The Supreme Court has granted Trump administration requests to block lower court rulings in more than 70 percent of cases brought by the administration that were decided via the shadow docket.” It should be noted that NBC uses the term “shadow docket,” which is nothing more that a colloquial term for the Court’s emergency docket, because it suggests dark doings behind closed doors. This is tendentious nonsense, of course. Indeed, Justice Samuel Alito has lambasted the media for using the term to imply that “sinister” motives lie behind the Court’s rulings on the recent deluge of universal injunctions.
This shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Universal injunctions have long been criticized by legal scholars and members of the Supreme Court itself.
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