Judges placing temporary holds on Trump’s actions may ultimately help him achieve his bigger goals.
A flood of lawsuits against early Trump administration moves, which have led judges to temporarily block Trump’s spending freeze and force health agencies to reinstate pages removed from their websites, have only created opportunities to leave a lasting mark on how the executive branch operates, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Ironically, in rushing to trip up Trump, these judges may empower him when all is said and done,” GianCarlo Canaparo, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, explaining the judges have in some cases “gotten the law and their own power terribly wrong.”
“Not only do I expect they will ultimately be reversed on appeal, but by overreaching they have given Trump exactly the vehicles he wants to overrule some of those old Supreme Court precedents,” Canaparo continued. “And, of course, they’ve teed up a challenge to nationwide injunctions, which the Supreme Court seems ready to abolish.”
Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have accused judges of wrongfully blocking actions that fall within the president’s power.
A federal judge in Maryland blocked Trump from restricting hospitals that offer child sex-change procedures from receiving federal funds on Thursday. Another federal judge in Washington, D.C. also blocked Trump from terminating foreign aid contracts and grants issued prior to his inauguration.
A federal appeals court rejected the administration’s request on Tuesday to lift an order blocking its funding freeze. The judge who issued the temporary restraining order clarified Wednesday that his order did not prevent the administration from ending funding based on “actual authority in the applicable statutory, regulatory, or grant terms,” permitting them to move forward with pulling funding from the housing of migrants in New York.
A federal judge lifted a temporary freeze on Trump’s buyout offer for federal workers on Wednesday.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also defending challenges related to several other executive orders, including those targeting gender ideology and ending birthright citizenship.
The executive order on birthright citizenship, which four federal judges have already blocked, will likely end up at the Supreme Court. But the most lasting change Trump’s actions could make at the high court might be surrounding the role of executive power.
“President Trump is acting fully within his Article II powers with these executive orders,” Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, told the DCNF. “Activist judges are attempting to steal his executive power over nothing more than political differences. This is unacceptable, and these activist judges are creating a constitutional crisis. If it comes to the Supreme Court to put an end to this, then so be it.”
Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted in The New Yorker that lawyers likely predicted Trump’s early actions would be challenged and ultimately land at the Supreme Court. “This makes Trump’s legal strategy intelligible,” she wrote.
“[W]hat is playing out through a veneer of chaos is a deliberate and organized tactical program to undertake actions that provoke a raft of lawsuits, some of which could become good vehicles for establishing a constitutional vision in which the President has sole authority over the entire executive branch,” she wrote.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris notified the Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin on Wednesday that the Trump DOJ would seek the reversal of a nearly 100-year-old Supreme Court precedent preventing presidents from removing agency officials without cause.
“To the extent that Humphrey’s Executor requires otherwise, the Department intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision, which prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President’s behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions,” Harris wrote.
A judge ordered Hampton Dellinger, leader of the Office of Special Counsel, to be reinstated Wednesday after Trump announced he was fired.
“The Constitution vests the executive power in the president, and all of it must be accountable to the voters through him. That said, the president should also work with allies in Congress to get Congress to take back the legislative power that it has delegated to the executive. The president should not be our chief lawmaker, but he is our chief executive,” Canaparo told the DCNF. “That’s a very important distinction that the Founders appreciated but we have forgotten.”
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