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Column: GOP thinks the court orders they used against Biden should be outlawed — because they now target Trump
The old political adage that “where you stand depends upon where you sit” has been getting aired out in Washington.
Republicans and conservatives used to celebrate judges’ issuance of nationwide court injunctions to block Biden policies or progressive government programs.
Now that nationwide court injunctions are being used to block Trump policies, however, onetime fans of the practice have decided that it’s unconstitutional and illegal and needs to be outlawed.
National injunctions are equal opportunity offenders.
— Law professors Nicholas Bagley and Samuel Bray
“When a single district court judge halts a law or policy across the entire country,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote his colleagues on Monday, “it can undermine the federal policymaking process and erode the ability of popularly elected officials to serve their constituents.”
That’s not untrue. But I couldn’t find evidence that Jordan ever made this point before Trump came into office. I asked his committee staff to identify any such reference, but haven’t heard back.
The issue of nationwide injunctions — in which federal judges apply their rulings beyond the specific plaintiffs who have brought suits in their courthouses — dovetails with another widely decried abuse of the judicial process. That’s “judge-shopping,” through which litigants connive to bring their cases before judges they assume will rule in their favor, typically by filing lawsuits in judicial divisions staffed by only a single judge whose predilections are known.
The combination of these schemes allowed conservative judges in remote federal courthouses to block major policy initiatives by President Biden, such as his efforts to enact student debt relief.
Judges also took aim at longer-standing progressive programs, as when Judge Reed O’Connor of Fort Worth, a George W. Bush appointee, declared the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in 2018. The Supreme Court decisively slapped O’Connor down with a 7-2 ruling upholding the ACA’s constitutionality in 2021.
Ignoring the Supreme Court’s signal, O’Connor subsequently ruled that the ACA’s provision for no-cost preventive services was also unconstitutional. Parts of that ruling were overturned by an appeals court, but parts are now before the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this year.
Then there’s federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, who last year overturned the Food and Drug Administration’s long-standing approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. The Supreme Court unanimously threw out that case in June.
During the Biden administration, a serial abuser of the judge-shopping process was Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton.
According to a 2023 analysis by Steve Vladeck of Georgetown law school, in the first two years of Biden’s term, Texas filed 29 challenges to Biden initiatives. Not a single case was filed in Austin, where the attorney general’s office is but where a lawsuit had only a 50-50 chance of drawing a Republican judge. Nor were any cases filed in the big cities of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio or El Paso.
Instead, they were filed in the court’s single-judge Victoria, Midland and Galveston divisions, where the state had a 100% chance of drawing a judge appointed by Trump; in Amarillo, where the chance was 95%; and Lubbock, where it was 67%.
Republicans and conservatives raised no fuss about judge-shopping and nationwide injunctions when they targeted Biden or Obama policies.
But now they’re screaming bloody murder about “rogue judges,” suggesting the judges are exceeding their authority simply because they have ruled against Trump and applied their rulings nationwide. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), for example, has introduced what he calls the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would bar nationwide injunctions.
It’s true that “national injunctions are equal opportunity offenders,” as Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan and Samuel Bray of Notre Dame wrote in 2018. “Before courts entered national injunctions against the Trump administration, they used them to thwart the Obama administration’s rule for overtime pay and its signature immigration policy, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.”
They were referring to injunctions issued against President Trump during his first term, but the pace has quickened during the current term.
That’s not necessarily because judges have become more roguish, but because Trump has given them more to ponder. In his first 65 days in office, Vladeck reported in a recent post, Trump issued 100 executive orders, besting the record set by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first hundred days, when he issued 99. Biden issued only 37 executive orders in his first 65 days, and Trump only 17 in the same span during his first term.
Those orders and other Trump actions have triggered more than 67 lawsuits seeking preliminary injunctions or temporary restraining orders, Vladeck calculated; federal judges have granted some relief in 46 of those cases.
There are some important differences from the litigation style of Biden’s partisan opponents, however. For one thing, Trump’s challengers haven’t engaged in judge-shopping. With one short-lived exception, none of the 67 cases was filed in a single-judge division.
The majority of cases in Vladeck’s database were filed in courts where the chance of drawing a specific judge was less than 15%. The cases were filed in 14 different courts, with a plurality (31 of the 67) filed in the Washington, D.C., judicial district — not a surprise, since that’s the customary venue for lawsuits challenging a government action.
Judge-shopping isn’t illegal, but even conservatives have found it to be sleazy. Last year, the Judicial Council of the United States, a policy guidance body headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., stated that any lawsuit seeking a nationwide or statewide injunction against the government should be randomly assigned to a judge in the federal district where it’s filed.
The guidance, which wasn’t binding, won wide support in the federal judiciary — except in the Northern District of Texas, home to the Amarillo, Fort Worth and Lubbock divisions. There the chief judge said he wouldn’t agree.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, Jordan was asked by the conservative anchor Mark Levin whether Democrats are “forum-shopping” to get cases before judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Jordan assented enthusiastically, grousing: “You have a judge in Timbuktu, California, who can do some order and some injunction” to obstruct Trump.
Jordan’s reference was to U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who on Feb, 28 issued a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to cease the wholesale firing of federal employees at six agencies and return the workers to their jobs.
A couple of things about that. First, I’ve been to the real Timbuktu, which is a desert outpost in Mali. San Francisco is possibly the one city in America least likely to be mistaken for that Timbuktu. San Francisco is a city of more than 800,000 residents, nestled within a metropolitan area of 7.5 million. Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk presides, is a community of about 202,000, within a metro area of 270,000.
As for judge-shopping, Jordan might want to bring his concerns to the Trump administration itself. On March 27, the administration filed a federal lawsuit to terminate collective bargaining agreements reached by eight federal agencies.
The White House filed the case not in northern Virginia, the District of Columbia or any other jurisdiction where large numbers of affected federal workers probably live and work, but in Waco, Texas, a courthouse with a single federal judge, a Trump appointee.
“It’s the height of irony that the only judge-shopping we’re seeing in Trump-related cases is … from Trump,” Vladeck observes.
One might be tempted to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt on their crusade against “rogue” judges, except for a couple of factors. One is their silence about nationwide injunctions when the results meshed with their anti-Biden ideology.
The other is that their objections to nationwide injunctions has been couched within a broader attack on the independent judiciary. Republicans have advocated impeaching judges for rulings against Trump, a stance that drew a rare public pushback from Chief Justice Roberts.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also raised the prospect of shutting down courts that flout Republican initiatives. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” he told reporters last week. “But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”
All that makes their position look less like a principled stand against judicial activism, and more like partisan hypocrisy.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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