Trump slams judge he appointed as 9th Circuit takes up troop cases
President Trump has often locked horns with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, making the once left-leaning court a permanent drag on his first-term agenda.
And now, even after remaking the bench with his own appointees, the President is still swamped with the West Coast Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — a situation ready to boil over as the circuit grapples with many challenges to the use of the National Guard to police American streets.
“I appointed the judge, and it goes like this — I didn’t serve well,” Trump told reporters after temporarily blocking federalized troops from deploying to U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland.
“To have a judge like that, that judge should be ashamed of herself,” Trump said, referring to Immergut, who is a woman.
The president has long railed against judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters,” “unstable,” and “radicals” at various points in the past.
Trump also sniped at conservative jurists, including U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, whom he called “disgraceful” after the court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.
But this weekend’s spat marked a shift in his willingness to pursue his own appointees – a turn experts say his picks for the appeal bench could get much sharper as he tests his penchant for putting boots on the ground in major cities across the US
“The fact that a fairly conservative judge rules the way he does is an indication that some conservative judges will govern similarly,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.
The 9th Circuit gave the administration an early victory in the unity fight this spring, finding that courts must give the president “great deference” to rule that the facts of the ground military intervention did not.
This decision will be reviewed by a larger appeals panel and may ultimately be reversed. The circuit is now also set to review a September decision blocking federalized troops in California from assisting civilian law enforcement and a temporary restraining order that blocked Immergut’s weekend deployment.
Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit’s June decision served as guidance for states seeking to limit what Oregon called a “nationwide campaign to assimilate the military into civilian law enforcement.”
“This decision is binding and requires a significant degree of respect on factual issues,” Somin said. “[But] This boundary is violated when what the President is doing is completely divorced from reality. ”
Immergut agreed in his decision, saying conditions in Portland this fall are significantly different than in L.A. in the spring. While some earlier protests turned violent, the latest pickets outside Portland’s ICE headquarters featured lawn chairs and low energy, he wrote.
“Violence elsewhere Can’t support unity deployments Hereand concerns about assumption future behavior one To present Failure to enforce laws using non-military federal law enforcement,” he said.
“The president is definitely calling it a ‘major delay,’” Immergut continued. “But a ‘major level of delay’ is not the equivalent of ignoring the facts on the ground. … The President’s determination was unbearable on the facts alone.”
But where exactly the appeals court can draw the line on presidential fact-finding is difficult, experts say.
“How much respect is the President? That’s something we’re all talking about,” said John C. Dehn, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.
Whether courts can review the president’s decision is an issue that separates even some of the president’s most conservative judicial picks from current Justice Department lawyers.
Trump has so far relied on an esoteric subsection of the US code for his authority to send troops on immigration raids and control crowds of protesters.
Dehn et al have characterized the code as being read semantically and divorced from its legal context.
“They look at words in a space and argue for the broadest meaning they can think of,” Dehn said. “The administration is not engaging in good faith legal interpretation – they are engaging in linguistic manipulation of these statues.”
Immegur agreed, quoting Supreme Court precedent: “[i]Interpretation of a word or phrase depends on reading the entire legal text. ”
For some conservative legal scholars, the willingness of Trump appointees to return to repeated deployments could signal a limit or a dangerous new escalation in the administration’s attacks on lawyers who challenge them.
“It’s clear that the administration is trying to do this on a larger scale,” Somin said. “Ideally, we won’t rely solely on litigation to deal with this.”
