Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
The Supreme Court gives President Donald Trump treats on the regular, with perhaps the most important being his blanket immunity from prosecution, emboldening him to dismantle democracy and turn the government into his own personal grift machine.
But now the Supreme Court conservatives are poised to bestow yet another gift upon the president, and this one is nearly as precious.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts
On Monday, the court announced that it will hear a case brought by Rebecca Slaughter, the Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission who Trump fired without cause. But that’s not because it plans on helping Slaughter.
There’s already a 90-year-old precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which a unanimous court said that the president can only remove an FTC commissioner for misconduct or neglect of their duties.
The lower courts, apparently still being foolish enough to believe in precedent, dutifully followed that precedent, ruling that Slaughter was improperly removed. But Chief Justice John Roberts swooped in earlier this month to grant an emergency stay, allowing the firing of Slaughter.
Now, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have granted certiorari before judgment, meaning that they’ll hear Slaughter’s case right away rather than wait for full and final decisions from lower courts. At the same time, they allowed Trump to immediately discharge Slaughter without cause.
Those same justices already let Trump fire every Democratic appointee of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and remove the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. But they’ve done this all on the shadow docket, unwilling to admit that they’re handing complete control of the executive branch to a petulant madman.
It’s no exaggeration to say that overruling Humphrey’s Executor spells the end of agency independence. Trump will have the ability to remove any agency head or commissioner for any reason. The entire executive branch, the entire structure of agencies, will be subject to his whim.
And the court’s conservatives have done nothing to reassure the country that they won’t just keep helping Trump become a king.
Mean judge keeps making Trump give California its money back
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the National Institutes of Health had to unfreeze $518 million it was illegally withholding from the University of California, Los Angeles. NIH claimed it was a punishment for antisemitism and allowing transgender students to participate in sports. Yeah, right.
In her ruling, the judge explained that these funds were improperly terminated because they did not have a “grant-specific explanation.”
In other words, terminating grant funding for reasons unrelated to that grant isn’t allowed. That same injunction also requires the Defense and Transportation Departments to release withheld funds to other schools in the University of California system.
The same judge also restored $90 million in National Science Foundation funds to UCLA in August. No word on what the Trump administration’s next move will be in its attempt to extort $1 billion from UCLA, but you know they’re not going to stop trying.
Ed Martin walks back his hilarious overreach
Ed Martin, the former interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., and now a jack-of-all-trades thug at the Department of Justice, had to clean up after right-wing radio host Alex Jones Wednesday.
Right-wing radio host Alex Jones
On Sept. 15, Martin wrote a threatening letter to the attorney for FBI agent William Aldenberg, who was a plaintiff in one of the defamation suits against Jones over his insistence that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.
Somehow, Martin felt that this was the role of his Weaponization Working Group, which only makes sense if you buy Jones’ theory that somehow these cases were actually lawfare waged by deep-state Democrat FBI puppet masters.
But the letter was supposed to be secret! Martin even said so in the threatening letter!
Still, Jones had to go and show it off, so Martin had to walk it back the next day, with a brief “sorry, no one is under investigation, please disregard” note.
It looks a lot like Martin walked it back not because he got in hot water at the DOJ but because Jones was dumb enough to put it on blast instead of letting Martin work in the shadows.
Woke judge forces Trump administration to let wind farm happen
On Monday, Judge Royce Lamberth granted Revolution Wind Farm’s request for a preliminary injunction lifting the Trump administration’s block on an offshore wind farm that it was building in New England.
Despite the project being nearly 80% complete and slated to power 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, it fell victim to Trump’s unhinged hatred of wind power. But, of course, that’s not the excuse the administration used to stop construction. No, they ginned up some unspecified “national security concerns.”
But Lamberth wasn’t having it.
Expect to hear howls of rage about wokeness from the administration, but Royce Lamberth is an 82-year-old Reagan appointee, so it’s pretty tough to make that stick. Turns out even some conservative jurists don’t buy Trump’s contention that he can do what he wants whenever he wants.
Turns out the personal will of the president isn’t actually law
Back in March, the Trump administration told states that, in order to receive emergency and disaster funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they had to agree to enforce federal immigration law.
A whole bunch of blue states sued, saying that the change in conditions violated administrative law by being arbitrary and capricious. There’s also a Spending Clause issue here, since the federal government can’t coerce states into doing its bidding by tying it to grant conditions, nor can the grant conditions be unrelated to the purpose of the program.
And guess what’s not at all related to disaster preparedness funding? Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The administration tried to tell Judge William Smith that he had no right to review their efforts to undermine blue states this way. They even trotted out the argument that this move couldn’t possibly be arbitrary and capricious or violate the law because the president ordered it.
But none of that worked.
Smith ruled that tying disaster funds to immigration enforcement was unconstitutional and ordered the funds released, in part because disaster funds can’t be meaningfully recovered post-emergency.
Surely Trump will find another corrupt way.
