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.

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The polls said it wasn’t going to happen. The polls were wrong. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani took the primary and will be the candidate for Mayor of New York City. Was it his policies, free everything and tax the rich? Was it his position on Israel, which wasn’t at all antisemitic but supported globalizing the intifada, which totally didn’t mean kill Jews? Was it defunding the police and warehousing the homeless in the subways?

Was it the fact that he was a young, charismatic, well-spoken, good-looking millennial who knew how to use social media? Continue reading →

Far be it for me to argue that an assistant United States attorney wouldn’t lie. Some would. Some have. Some do. That said, the lies generally aren’t of the nature of making things up out of whole cloth. They are also not of the nature that could be readily disproven, whether by written evidence or the testimony of a room full of people with similar claims to credibility. Career AUSAs do not tend to lie, or even massage the truth, when there is a strong possibility that they will get nailed to the wall.

Career assistant Erez Reuveni had been on the job for almost 15 years, long before the current administration and throughout Trump 1.0. It wasn’t until he was given the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a matter of such significant profile that it wouldn’t be handed to the office goofball, that a problem arose. Reuveni did the one thing that his DoJ superiors found intolerable. He told Judge Paula Xinis the truth, that the rendition of Abrego Garcia was a mistake. The Trump DoJ doesn’t make mistakes. Or to be more precise, it doesn’t admit to the mistakes it makes. Continue reading →

Why? Who knows. It’s not as if the 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court explained its reasoning. In staying Boston District Judge Brian Murphy’s preliminary injunction against ICE removing aliens to third-party countries without notice or due process, those nifty/nasty details the Court previously admonished Kristi Noem to provide to Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others similarly situated, the Supreme Court did not consider it worthwhile to provide either explanation or guidance.

Or perhaps it did not because, well, there just wasn’t anything rational to say. Continue reading →

The first two sentences of Richard Fausset’s article in the New York Times leaves nothing to the imagination.

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite.

Remember the old Checkov quote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass”? Fuggedaboutit. Fausset leaves nothing to chance, lest you not realize who’s the bad dude in the story before you find out why he’s the bad dude. Damsky took a seminar taught by “Trump-nominated” (and, unmentioned, former federal defender) federal judge, John Badalamenti, which concluded with a paper worth  65% of the grade. Continue reading →

Not too long ago, many people believed the “predictions” of Nostradamus that the world would end in 2025, and that it would come from war in the middle east, where certain nations were bent on the destruction of the decadent west. Whether or not one was inclined to buy into the metaphysical, there was good reason to fear war in the middle east. One thing that was clear to all, at least then, was that Iran, now under the religious rule of an Ayatollah and the primary supporter of radical Islamic terrorism, could not be trusted to have nuclear weapons.

Was Iran on the verge of having nuclear weapons? Who knows? Bibi Netanyahu has been saying so for years. Whether he was right or wrong, and that Iran’s weapons program was set back by Israeli intervention, is unknown. Much of this, by its nature, is unknown, which is a huge issue following George W. Bush’s assurances that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Trust, once squandered, is lost and hard to find again. Continue reading →

It’s a given in the legal academy that publication in the Harvard Law Review is prestigious. Whether it’s the most important law review is a matter of debate, but that it is important is beyond question. Law profs submit their articles to this student-run journal because it accomplishes two important things. First, it establishes their bona fides as a legal scholar. Second, it means their article is taken seriously, Given the desperate need of most prawfs to be taken seriously rather than fade into the universe of legal background noise, it’s one of the few places where they can “matter.”

But as Aaron Sibarium writes in the Washington Free Beacon, articles that make the cut at HLR might not reflect important legal thought, but rather that they checked the woke boxes of race, gender and sexuality. Continue reading →

After Justice Neil Gorsuch’s muddled opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, the door seemed at least ajar, if not wide open, to ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio to argue that discrimination against transgender people violated the Equal Protection Clause, and that like sex discrimination in Bostock, it deserved higher scrutiny than rational basis analysis if a state was to enact a law that discriminated against transgender people.

The State of Tennessee prohibited medical procedures, characterized as “gender-affirming care” by its advocates and supporters, and more precisely as puberty blockers and hormones as surgical intervention was already off the table, for minors. The catch was that the same medical treatment was permissible for other reasons, such as precocious puberty, but not for gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria, of course, is the diagnosis that gives rise to someone being transgender, although being transgender is not limited to gender dysphoria. Continue reading →

A mayor. A congresswoman. A judge. A senator. And now, the New York City Comptroller and candidate for mayor. There is a response to the government’s actions against all of them, that no one is above the law, which is both objectively false and subjectively simplistic. Each of these situations was different, involved different legal issues and raised different questions of culpability.

But they all share one common theme: the government, primarily ICE but also the other alphabet agencies whose function has been reduced to ICE’s anti-immigrant handmaidens, is actively pursuing state and federal officials who get in their way. Often, as was the case with California Senior Senator Alex Padilla and now Brad Lander, with the use of some degree of force. Continue reading →

Buried in the House version of the most Trumpian-named omnibus reconciliation bill ever, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” was that dubious nugget that would preclude courts from holding the government in contempt for violating court orders. The Senate was having nothing of it, and seized the opportunity to take the House’s ham-handed effort and . . . make it worse.

As Sam Bray explains at Divided Argument, the House version went after the courts’ authority to hold the government in contempt for violating a court injunction, making it replete with constitutional issues as well as having a practical flaw that would allow judges to fix the required bond at $1, thus defeating the effort and allowing the president to violate the Constitution with impunity. Continue reading →