Justice Neil Gorsuch called out lower courts on Thursday for a pattern of defying Supreme Court rulings.
Allowing the Trump administration to move forward with cutting millions in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants marked the “third time in a matter of weeks” the Supreme Court had to reverse a lower court on an issue it had already addressed, Gorsuch wrote.
“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote in an opinion joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
In April, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with terminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-related teacher training grants.
Yet a lower court in June allowed a lawsuit “involving materially identical grants” from the NIH to move forward, citing the dissenting justices while ignoring the majority ruling. The judge proceeded to block the administration’s terminations of DEI and gender ideology-related NIH grants.
“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,” Gorsuch wrote.
Gorsuch noted the district court’s behavior in this case was not a “one-off,” highlighting two other recent instances of lower court defiance.
In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court blocked in July a district court judge’s attempt to circumvent an order allowing the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations. Even Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented from the original decision, sided with the conservative justices to enforce the order.
“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” she wrote.
The majority shot down another lower court decision blocking President Donald Trump’s effort to fire three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in July. The Supreme Court had granted a similar request from the president to fire members of administrative agencies in May.
In its order, the Supreme Court reiterated that its emergency docket decisions are “not conclusive as to the merits” but should “inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases.”
“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,’” Gorsuch wrote.
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