The Supreme Court gave the first glimpse into how it will handle a second Trump administration last week by narrowly ordering the State Department to disburse $2 billion in congressionally appropriated funds to USAID contractors for work they had already done. Though the ruling was merely preliminary, it suggested that at least five justices were not willing to give Trump carte blanche.
One case involved the administration’s efforts to fire federal employees. Over the last month, federal agencies have laid off thousands of probationary employees in an attempt to reduce head counts. Federal law does not give full civil service protections to probationary employees, but it does require the government to have some sort of legitimate reason to fire them. Instead, the Office of Personnel Management furnished a template that blandly told each employee that the cause was performance-based without specifying further.
Alsup was particularly incensed by the government’s volte-face on whether a key witness would be testifying. Charles Ezell, the acting OPM director, signed a sworn declaration that his office did not actually direct federal agencies to carry out the firings. After Alsup ordered him to appear at a hearing to testify, the federal government withdrew Ezell’s declaration and said he wouldn’t be appearing.
Trump’s campaign to ban transgender soldiers from the armed forces also ran into deep skepticism from a federal judge on Wednesday. A group of active-duty military personnel are suing to prevent the ban from going into effect, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. A Justice Department lawyer reportedly struggled to answer questions from Judge Ana Reyes on the rationale behind the policy.
Reyes also cast doubt on the studies cited in Hegseth’s order to implement the ban. At one point, she got the Justice Department’s lawyers to admit that they hadn’t read the studies in question and gave a 30-minute recess so that they could familiarize themselves with the material. When they returned, Reyes went through the evidence point by point and asked why she should give any weight to Hegseth’s “cherry-picked” and “misleading” interpretation of it. She indicated that a ruling in that case would likely come next week.
On Thursday evening, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene in an unusual way. The administration did not quite ask the justices to overturn the lower court injunctions altogether. Instead it asked them to end the practice of so-called “universal injunctions” against the federal government and rule that the lower court’s injunctions have no effect beyond the litigants themselves.
Critics of universal injunctions describe them as an abuse of the judicial power, one that exceeds the courts’ traditional limits on jurisdiction and relief. The foremost opponents of the practice today are Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who have written multiple concurring and dissenting opinions over the years denouncing the practice. Every other conservative justice but Chief Justice John Roberts has joined their criticism from time to time, although with varying degrees of enthusiasm about ending the practice.
Whatever the court ultimately decides, it is notable that the Trump administration is being consciously self-limiting here. Trump’s lawyers—and that is how the Justice Department now sees itself—have almost always taken maximalist approaches to their legal arguments, reflecting their boss’s own approach to human interaction. Tactically nuanced litigation is not how they got a Supreme Court ruling that gives presidents sweeping immunity to commit crimes, after all.
I’m sure the Trump administration would like to curtail universal injunctions on its own terms. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if this is an attempt to solicit a “win” from the Supreme Court on birthright citizenship. Granting the administration’s request to limit the injunctions would technically say nothing about the merits of such a case. Trumpworld may nonetheless try to spin it as a victory against birthright citizenship and invoke it against the multitude of legal experts who (correctly) argue that Trump cannot end it by executive order. If the court really does want to curb universal injunctions, it would be hard to find a less fitting case than this one to do it.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump Is Fighting His Court Losses With a Surprising Legal Tactic )
Also on site :