CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic worries that “Defeat in Texas shows how the conservative judiciary can thwart Biden’s agenda.”
A federal judge’s action Tuesday preventing President Joe Biden’s 100-day pause in deportations demonstrated the land mines that await the new administration in the nation’s courts.
The short-term order by the Texas-based judge could also force a confrontation up to the US Supreme Court, where the Biden legal team already faces hard choices over how aggressively to press new legal positions before the nine justices — six of whom are conservatives, with three appointed by former President Donald Trump.
US District Judge Drew Tipton, also a Trump appointee, sided on Tuesday with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump loyalist who has challenged Biden’s temporary suspension of deportations.
The nationwide scope of Tipton’s order further intensifies debate over broad-scale actions against the executive branch imposed by a lone judge, which were the bane of the Trump administration.”
These nationwide injunctions have frustrated presidential policy for most of the President’s term with no clear end in sight,” then-Attorney General William Barr declared in a 2019 speech.
Trump Justice Department lawyers routinely were able to convince the Supreme Court to lift those injunctions, although that sometimes took months. The conservative Supreme Court majority may not be as sympathetic to Biden’s ventures as it was to Trump’s.
All told, Tuesday’s court action against an administration barely a week old reveals how tough it might be to advance a new agenda on immigration or any domestic policy if hit with lawsuits before judges who became increasingly right-wing during the Trump tenure.
As Biden promotes new programs and encounters legal objections, there is no escaping that they will be resolved by life-tenured judges, 30% of whom were named by Trump.
[…]
Paxton, who led a failed lawsuit at the Supreme Court contesting Biden’s election victory over Trump, contended that the 100-day suspension violated federal procedural requirements and breached a pact the Trump administration had made with Texas just before Trump left office. It dictated that the Department of Homeland Security would consult with the state before changing certain immigration practices.
It is not clear whether such recent agreements made with various states could be legally enforced. Tipton said he would need more time and additional legal briefing to review the question as he set the 14-day temporary restraining order.
But crucially, Tipton agreed with Texas that it appeared the suspension violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s safeguards against “arbitrary and capricious” executive action.
The January 20 memorandum “not only fails to consider potential policies more limited in scope and time, but it also fails to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations,” Tipton wrote.
I have no strong view of the wisdom of Biden’s moratorium but am bemused by the process.
Despite having an unusually strong interest in politics going back more than four decades and having studied Political Science for almost as long—including quite a number of law and public administration courses—I somehow managed to make it into the Trump presidency oblivious to the Administrative Procedures Act. It seemed obvious to me that, if one President created a policy via Executive Order, a successor ought to be able to reverse it with similar dispatch. It turns out, not so much. Despite incredibly better staff work than his predecessor, it appears Biden is now getting stumped by the same requirements.
We shall see if Biskupic is correct about the courts being less disposed to Biden’s cause than to Trump’s. Certainly, Trump lost much more than he won in court. Of course, that had more to do with his administration’s sloppiness than ideology.
Regardless, while Barr turned out to be an abysmal Attorney General, putting his loyalty to the President who appointed him over his duty to the Constitution and the public, I wholeheartedly agree with him that having a single district court judge be able to overturn presidential action for the whole country turns the entire Constitutional order on its head.
It may be time to create a special court that deals solely with challenges to the federal government. I don’t know what it would look like, exactly, but it would have original jurisdiction over these cases, with appeals going directly to the Supreme Court. That would prevent judge-shopping, consolidate expertise, and streamline the process.
