The Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has been a safe haven for Democrats, with the justices there willing repeatedly to favor plaintiffs who have filed suits against the Trump administration. Margot Cleveland obtained a memo from a federal judicial conference held this past March showing that the DC judges are actively hostile to Donald Trump and want to ensure the Supreme Court shares that hostility. This behavior crashes into the federal canons governing judges, as well as into the reality of Trump’s conduct.
Before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, the DC District Court had already garnered a reputation for hostility to the Trump side of the aisle thanks to Jamaica-born Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. It was she who dealt exceptionally harshly with people arrested for events on January 6, 2021, going so far as to continue to attack people orally even after Donald Trump had pardoned them.
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Since Trump entered office, the DC judges’ rulings resulted in headline after headline for their track record of siding with plaintiffs in actions against the Trump administration:
Those who suspected that the judges might be biased weren’t imagining it. Margot Cleveland writes that, in the second week of March, members of the Judicial Conference had one of their two regular annual meetings, during which the members decide upon official policy for the federal courts. Attending each conference are the Supreme Court Chief Justice (that would be Roberts), the chief judge and one district judge from each of the appellate districts, and the chief judge for the Court of International Trade.
The memo Cleveland obtained is a stunner:
In a memorandum obtained exclusively by The Federalist, a member of the Judicial Conference summarized the March meeting, including a “working breakfast” at which Justice Roberts spoke. According to the memorandum, “District of the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg next raised his colleagues’ concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis.”
“Chief Justice Roberts expressed hope that would not happen and in turn no constitutional crisis would materialize,” according to the memorandum. The summary of the working breakfast added that Chief Justice Roberts noted that “his interactions with the President have been civil and respectful, such as the President thanking him at the state of the union address for administering the oath.”
In other words, D.C. judges have decided that, to echo Joe Biden, “Trump is a bad dude,” and then they decided to impose their bias on the Supreme Court. This is a shocking violation of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges:
Canon 1: A Judge Should Uphold the Integrity and Independence of the Judiciary
An independent and honorable judiciary is indispensable to justice in our society. A judge should maintain and enforce high standards of conduct and should personally observe those standards, so that the integrity and independence of the judiciary may be preserved. The provisions of this Code should be construed and applied to further that objective.
[snip]
Canon 3: A Judge Should Perform the Duties of the Office Fairly, Impartially and Diligently
The duties of judicial office take precedence over all other activities. The judge should perform those duties with respect for others, and should not engage in behavior that is harassing, abusive, prejudiced, or biased. The judge should adhere to the following standards:
(A) Adjudicative Responsibilities.
(1) A judge should be faithful to, and maintain professional competence in, the law and should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.
Roberts, rather than responding that the President had been perfectly nice to him, should have slapped Boasberg around for expressing this kind of opinion about a party appearing before both the district court and the Supreme Court. Moreover, Roberts should have reminded him that the Trump administration had done nothing to merit that kind of defamatory statement. In both his first term and, to date, in this term, President Trump has abided assiduously with court orders. In this regard, he differs from Joe Biden, who openly defied the Supreme Court’s ban on the administration’s ability to cancel student loans.
The irony is that Roberts is excessively protective of the Supreme Court’s reputation. By allowing district court judges to behave as purely partisan actors violating Canon 5 (“A Judge Should Refrain From Political Activity”), he’s done more to harm the federal judiciary’s reputation than any Supreme Court justice in history.