It is an emergency to get rid of the few thousand transgender people serving in the military, according to the Trump administration in a request to the Supreme Court to bypass the usual process of legal appeals and simply strike down lower court injunctions against Trump’s transgender ban.
“It is with great reluctance that we seek such emergency relief in this court,” wrote Solicitor General Noel Francisco in asking the Supreme Court to stay three lower court injunctions. “Unfortunately this case is part of a growing trend in which federal district courts, at the behest of particular plaintiffs, have issued nationwide injunctions, typically on a preliminary basis, against major policy initiatives.” It’s not with all that much reluctance, though, since attempting to bypass the lower courts and jump straight to the Trump-packed Supreme Court is a strategy the Trump Justice Department has repeatedly employed lately.
”In less than two years, federal courts have issued 25 [such injunctions], blocking a wide range of significant policies involving national security, national defense, immigration and domestic issues,” Francisco complained. In this case, we’re talking about a policy that Donald Trump announced on Twitter and then got his Defense Department to retroactively create a justification for, despite a 2016 RAND Corp. study finding that transgender people serving openly in the military would have a “minimal impact” on either readiness or healthcare costs. It’s not exactly a mystery why the courts would have some questions about policies made by an impulsive tweet.