President Trump didn’t prove particularly adept at accomplishing his most popular policy proposals — he either tried rushing sloppily through them or put them off altogether — but it’s not entirely his fault.
Liberals who tied the administration down in lawsuit after ridiculous lawsuit, often able to find some weird district judge to agree with them, are just as much to blame. Democrats pursued that avenue over and over, most aggressively on any policy from the White House that aimed to reduce the number of illegal immigrants crossing into the country at the southern border.
Fortunately, a majority of justices on the Supreme Court have chosen on more than one occasion to grant emergency requests by the White House to reverse the lower court’s rulings, at least temporarily, until the justices can determine whether they will hear the case later.
That has been a good thing for the separation of powers, though an opinion piece in the New York Times this week tried to say it was an example of how the Supreme Court is “quietly enabling” the president.
“The Trump administration, with a majority of the justices’ acquiescence, has quietly racked up a series of less visible — but no less important — victories by repeatedly seeking (and often obtaining) stays of lower-court losses,” wrote University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck on Wednesday.
He added in the piece that emergency stay orders from the Supreme Court have “become a de facto vindication of these programs.”
That’s nonsense. At most, the stay orders are an acknowledgment that the president has expansive legal authority that obscure individual judges cannot veto. This is especially true as it pertains to immigration, foreign policy, and the military — which happen to be the very policy areas in which liberals are trying their hardest to block the president. There’s no reason some district judge should feel entitled to insert himself where the president’s power is understood to be strongest, delaying and blocking new policies until the courts can settle the legalities, perhaps over the course of years.
Vladeck talks about the White House’s frequent requests for emergency stay decisions, as though Trump were abusing that option. He noted that while the Bush and Obama administrations asked for a total of eight stays over the course of 16 years, Trump has asked for almost 30 so far in just the past three years. But that probably has something to do with Trump facing an obscene number of lawsuits from Democratic-run states, New York and California chief among them.
According to data compiled by Marquette University political science professor Paul Nolette, the Trump administration has faced 103 lawsuits brought by states. New York brought 36 of them, and California brought 31.
That’s more than the 78 that former President Barack Obama faced in two full terms. In Trump’s first year in office, his administration faced 40 lawsuits. In Obama’s first year, it was four.
This is why the president has been forced to ask for emergency stay orders. Without that option, liberal judges in Los Angeles would effectively be setting immigration policy and determining how the military is run.
The stay orders from the Supreme Court, no matter how many times they have to issue them, are a good thing.
