Trump Has Ignited a Civil War Between the Federal Courts

The reprimand has always prompted Judge William Young, who presided over the NIH case, to make public apologies to the judges “if they think that all that this court has been made in contempt for a previous action by the Supreme Court of the United States”, during a judicial session earlier this week. Young, who became a federal judge the same year as Gorsuch obtained his graduate diploma, explained that he “can do nothing more than saying as honestly as possible: I certainly did not have if intention, and which is foreign in all respects to the nature of the way in which I have led as a legal agent.” Nothing in his legendary career suggests the opposite.

Kavanaugh, for his part, also offered a recent public contrition. “It is possible that we have messed up, very possible, we are human,” he said a judicial conference this week. “But it is also possible, and often the case, it is the product of nine of us, or at least five of us, trying to reach a consensus or a compromise on a particular question which could be difficult. I am fully aware that this can lead to a lack of clarity in law and can lead to some confusion, sometimes.”

These are fair points. They also strongly advise the current approach of the judges of the Shadow file in general. The Supreme Court is not obliged to process each request in terms of suspension of the Trump administration as an emergency worthy of its immediate intervention, and it should not use these movements as a vehicle either to create significant and disturbing changes in a precedent for a long time. Judges are more than capable of rewriting previous ones on the Merits file. As long as the court continues to wreak havoc for jurisprudential with its emergency decisions, it should not be surprised if the lower courts are struggling to interpret them coherent. Like more than a few other misfortunes in modern American life, all this is a monster of the own creation of the Supreme Court.