For a while this past year, it seemed that Democrats had figured out how to harness our judicial system to block Donald Trump’s agenda, something they failed to do at the ballot box. Thus, they mounted an unprecedented number of legal actions challenging the veritable blitz of executive orders he issued upon entering office and exploited jurisdictional rules so as to have the cases presided over by judges who had previously demonstrated a liberal bent in their judicial decisions.
What’s more, they typically were able to persuade judges not only that a particular Trump executive order was so beyond the pale that it would undoubtedly ultimately be found to be illegal, such that an immediate, albeit temporary, injunction on its enforcement nationwide was also warranted – despite the fact that a decision on the merits had yet to be made. Since litigation can take years, it didn’t take too long to realize that this sort of “one-two punch” threatened the Trump administration’s ability to govern.
Ironically, it was the growing instances of such ploys that led the administration to seek parallel relief from the U.S. Supreme Court. As reported by The New York Times, in the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, his administration filed 19 emergency applications asking the justices to pause universal injunctions while the lawsuits continued.
That is the total number of such applications the Biden administration filed over four years, and far more than the eight applications filed over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
To be sure, the spike was a result of the increased numbers of Trump executive orders since he took office. But it also seems clear that a majority of the justices seemed to appreciate the governance issue that was in play, favoring the Trump administration in nearly all of its emergency cases – including those dealing with immigration, transgender troops, and the independence of government agencies.
Significantly, according to The Times, over the years, emergency stays were most commonly filed by death row inmates seeking stays of execution. These days, such stay applications almost never succeed. And even excluding applications in capital cases, the Trump success rate in emergency cases has been notable: He has won almost three times as often as other applicants seeking emergency relief.
Of course, the piece de resistance was the decision at the end of the Court’s term in June, largely disallowing the imposition of temporary universal injunctions by district court judges.
In our view it was high time that the President of the United States was allowed to go about doing his job unimpeded by out-of-control partisanship.
