The Judicial Coup Is Collapsing | The American Spectator

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 problem here is 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 and they were entered on the Court’s “shadow docket.”
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.”
This shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Universal injunctions have long been criticized by legal scholars and members of the Supreme Court itself. Justice Elena Kagan, hardly a far right ideologue, has been particularly outspoken on the subject. During a seminar at Northwestern University’s School of Law, she succinctly explained her view on such injunctions: “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.” Finally, on June 27th of this year, the Court handed down a ruling in Trump v. CASA that supported Kagan’s comment:
Because universal injunctions likely…