On behalf of the United States, the Department of Justice has done the bizarre, incomprehensible and incoherent. In the District of Maryland, Trump has sued its political enemies, all 15 judges of the Maryland district court.

In a 22-page complaint, lawyers for the Justice Department noted — as many administration officials have in recent weeks — that courts across the country have issued an avalanche of injunctions against various parts of President Trump’s agenda almost from the moment that he returned to office.

The lawyers sought to set their suit against Judge Russell and his colleagues in that context, saying that the new standing rule intruded on the White House’s inherent powers to “enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

District of Maryland Chief Judge George Russell III issued a standing order that directed the clerk to automatically enter an injunction in all habeas petitions prohibiting the government from removing aliens for a period of . . . one day.

This lawsuit involves yet another regrettable example of the unlawful use of equitable powers to restrain the Executive. Specifically, Defendants have instituted an avowedly automatic injunction against the federal government, issued outside the context of any particular case or controversy.

According to the complaint, the reason for this standing order is that judges didn’t want to work on nights or weekends, as opposed to the courts needed at least one day to consider the habes before the aliens were shipped to El Salvador, South Sudan or Libya, from whence there was no return according to the government.

The automatic injunction is admittedly motivated by Defendants’ “frustrati[on]” with hearings related to the Administration’s immigration enforcement actions and a desire to avoid handling cases outside regular business hours. But a sense of frustration and a desire for greater convenience do not give Defendants license to flout the law. Nor does their status within the judicial branch.

There is, of course, a mechanism in the ordinary course of litigation to challenge the standing order called an appeal, but this administration doesn’t care much for the ordinary. Instead, it sought the extraordinary means of suing the judges of the court for intruding on Trump’s executive power to deport people without the delay that complying with law, and its consequent judicial review, would cause.

On its face, the spectacle of the Trump administration suing an entire district court made clear just how ugly and bizarre the relationship between the executive and judicial branches has become. Mr. Trump and his top aides have repeatedly — and personally — attacked federal judges in case after case, blaming them for ruling against him with little acknowledgment that the rulings have often come in response to policies that have probed, if not overstepped, the boundaries of the law.

So what cause of action did the government raise?

COUNT ONE – VIOLATION OF REQUIREMENTS FOR INJUNCTIONS

COUNT TWO – VIOLATION OF JURISDICTIONAL BARS

COUNT THREE – VIOLATION OF REQUIREMENTS FOR LOCAL RULES

Remember these causes of action from law school? Of course not, because they don’t exist. When a party believes a court has ruled in error, the party appeals the ruling. No independent action exists to sue the judges of a court because you don’t like the rule, or believe the rule was wrong. That’s why they build appellate courthouses.

And then we get into the procedural problems. Initially, should a judge be sued, he would normally be represented by the Department of Justice, because contrary to Trump’s limited grasp of governance, the judiciary is a co-equal branch of the United States government, not some outside enemy to be taken to court. Except here, the DoJ is representing the United States against . . . the United States. Is Attorney General Pam Bondi sharp or what?

Obviously, the DoJ can’t represent both sides of the litigation, raising novel problems. Who will represent the judges? Assuming they will require outside counsel, who will pay for their representation? Will Congress authorize payment? Will Trump’s puppy, Scott Bessent, approve payment? Will they provide sufficient funds to cover the cost of defense? Will they provide funds at all?

I’m informed that Maryland law firms like Kramon & Graham are already gearing up to assist the judges in their defense, though it’s unclear under the circumstances how this is supposed to happen.

Moreover, the suit was brought in the District of Maryland, suing all the judges of the District of Maryland, meaning that there is no judge in the district who would not be required to recuse him or herself from hearing the matter. This means that the circuit will have to assign the case to a judge from another district.

If you’re wondering how cases such as this have been handled in the past, stop wondering, as there has never been a case such as this in the past. Yet again, the Trump administration has put itself in unknown territory by doing things so fundamentally outside the law that it makes no sense. What this suit does do, however, is reflect Trump’s view that judges applying law that gets in the way of his whims and commands are his enemies, to be fought and crushed.

Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that both the government’s lawsuit and the standing rule it sought to do away with were extraordinary. But Mr. Rozenshtein pointed out that the fact that Judge Russell had put the measure in place to begin with suggested just how bad things had gotten between the branches.

“What’s important is not the procedural minutiae of how this case was brought,” he said, “but rather the fact that the administration has completely lost the trust of the judiciary — and rightly so.”

In the past, the greatest strength of the Department of Justice was that judges reflexively believed its lawyers, accepted their representations and, to a regrettably great extent, assumed that whatever claims they were pursuing were valid and meritorious. The default position of district court judges was that the government wins unless and until proven otherwise. No more.

The flip side, unfortunately, is that Trump has put district court judges on notice that if they rule in ways that make him angry, they too could be facing a lawsuit by the DoJ with the problems of who will represent them and the “procedural minutiae” of dealing with Trump’s bizarre, incomprehensible and incoherent actions. To those judges, I say welcome to the club. Now you know what its like to be a defense lawyer fighting the government in every case.