By Josh Blackman — January 10, 2018
On January 20, 2017, the executive power peacefully transitioned from President Obama to President Trump. At least one judge in San Francisco didn’t get the memo. Yesterday, Judge William Alsup ordered the Trump administration to keep its predecessor’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in place. This remarkable 49-page order has all the aesthetics of a judicial decision but is, at heart, an amateur act of punditry. Judge Alsup paints the picture of a divided White House, wherein “the Chief Executive publicly favors the very program [his Administration] has ended.” Citing a “presidential tweet,” the court suggests that DACA’s recision “was contrived to give the administration a bargaining chip to demand funding for a border wall in exchange for reviving DACA."
These talking points could have been plagiarized from the MSNBC chyron. Such rhetoric in a judicial decision would have been unthinkable barely a year ago. But now it passes for the new normal. Once again, the judiciary has attempted to shackle President Trump from making his own judgments about how to exercise his own power. The Supreme Court has reversed Judge Alsup’s outlandish rulings on DACA before. And it will do so again.
In 2012, the Obama administration announced an executive action known as DACA. This policy deferred the deportation of the so-called Dreamers — aliens who had entered the United States as minors but were not lawfully present — and granted them work authorization and other federal benefits. Two years later, the president once again turned to the pen and phone to create a similar deferred-action policy for the parents of U.S. citizens. DAPA, as this second program became known, was successfully challenged in court and never went into effect.........
The government has already announced it will appeal this ruling...........the Supreme Court has already signaled its dissatisfaction with Judge Alsup’s rulings. Last fall, Judge Alsup ordered the Trump administration to turn over internal White House documents concerning why DACA was canceled. The government filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to shield the executive-branch documents from judicial scrutiny. Then, the case got weirder. In what the New York Times described as an “unusual move,” Judge Alsup filed his own brief, in which he told the justices that the government leaves the Court with an “incorrect impression.” I was unable to find any Supreme Court rule that permits a federal judge to file a brief in an appeal of his own ruling. Judge Alsup’s strange advocacy did not impress the justices.................To Read More....
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