In Donald Trump's long-running feud with federal judges, the president has found some support in an unlikely place: the nation's highest court.
A growing sense of frustration with some lower courts -- articulated in terms that at times sound similar to Trump's own rhetoric -- has crept into a series of opinions this summer from the Supreme Court's conservative justices as they juggle a flood of emergency cases dealing with Trump's second term.
"Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court's decisions, but they are never free to defy them," Justice Neil Gorsuch admonished in an opinion last week tied to the court's decision to allow Trump to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants.
The rebuke, which was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, flipped the narrative that it is Trump who has pushed legal boundaries with his flurry of executive orders and support for impeaching judges who rule against him. A wave of legal conservatives took to social media to tout Gorsuch's warning.
"This is now the third time in a matter of weeks this court has had to intercede in a case 'squarely controlled' by one of its precedents," wrote Gorsuch, who was Trump's first nominee to the high court. (Kavanaugh was Trump's second.) "When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts."
Other conservatives have been just as harsh this year. Justice Samuel Alito in March accused a federal judge in another case involving a Trump policy as committing an "act of judicial hubris" and "self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction."
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Carrie Severino, president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, cheered Gorsuch's opinion on social media, writing that "yet again" it had "become necessary to remind district judges not to flout orders of the Supreme Court."
But just how judges are supposed to approach the Supreme Court's emergency orders -- particularly when they are opaque or include little explanation -- has been open to debate.
A lot of the fights are over Trump's cancelling of payouts to Democrat shill organizations. The reason the Supreme Court is getting angry is this: Cases about money, claims about whether the government owes someone money or must honor a contract, are to be resolved only in the Federal Claims Courts, which are Article I courts -- courts run by the Executive itself -- and not Article III courts, courts established by Congress to be party of the Judicial Branch.
Left-wing judges serving in Article III courts repeatedly ignore this because they want to take these cases to attack Trump. And the Supreme Court keeps telling them "Cases involving money disputes must be, as they always have been, taken up by the Article I Federal Claims Courts," and the left-wingers in the Article III courts keep pretending that they're very confuse by this 140+ year old arrangement and keep pretending they've found nifty new arguments that allow them to take the cases themselves, and issue emergency injunctions.
And that's the key. If a case goes to the Federal Claims Courts, they go through a normal trial process to determine if money is owed.
But these left-wing DEI judges don't want to go through a trial. They want to issue emergency injunctions on their own authority, right now, without the bother and delay of a fact-finding trial.
So they keep asserting they have jurisdiction, and then issue emergency injunctions demanding Trump pay the lefties off.
And no matter how many times the Supreme Court reminds them that, yes, cash-money claims against the government are in the jurisdiction of the Federal Claims Courts and not you bitter DEI judges appointed by Biden and Obama, they keep crediting left-wing litigants' arguments as overcoming this historic division.
And thus the anger. They haven't just explained this. They've explained it ten times now, and they're angry that they even have to explain it, because this is well-settled law going back to the nation's founding.
Here is some of Gorsuch's rebuke:
Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court's decisions, but they are never free to defy them. In Department of Ed. v. California, 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam), this Court granted a stay because it found the
government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations. California explained that "suits based on 'any express or implied contract with the United States' " do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act. Id., at ___ (slip op., at 2) (quoting 28
U. S. C. 1491(a)(1)).
The Administrative Procedure Act is a law giving people the right to sue for unfair rules and regulations promulgated by Executive-branch personnel. These are pseudolaws, not ever passed by Congress but instead churned out by federal bureaucrats, and because they are constitutionally iffy, citizens have the right to sue if they claim they're unfair or unreasonable.
Lowly (left-wing) district court judges keep claiming that disputes that are obviously about money -- which are in the jurisdiction of the Federal Claims Courts -- might maybe possibly be seen as "unfair rules," so they keep asserting that they have jurisdiction to hear these cases.
And the Supreme Court keeps saying: No, disputes about money are for the Federal Claims Courts, please stop asserting jurisdiction you don't have just so you can stick it to Trump.
And they keep saying: But we wanna.
Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA. As support for its course, the district court invoked the "persuasive authority" of "the dissent[s] in California" and an earlier court of appeals decision Californiarepudiated. Massachusetts v. Kennedy, ___ F. Supp. 3d ___,
___ (Mass. 2025), App. to Application 232a (App.).
In other words: Rather than taking the Supreme Court's opinion as the law, the lowly leftwing district courts are choosing to elevate Ketanji Brown-Jackson's sole dissent in the case into the law they will follow. They're ignoring the Supreme Court's actual rulings and deciding "But we like Ketanji Brown-Jackson's dissent better, so now that's the law."
That was error. "[U]nless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be." Hutto v. Davis, 454 U. S. 370, 375 (1982) (per curiam).
In casting California aside [that is, in ignoring the actual Supreme Court ruling], the district court stressed that the Court there granted only interim relief pending appeal and a writ of certiorari and did not issue a final judgment on the merits. ___ F. Supp. 3d, at ___, App. 229a. True enough. But this Court often addresses requests for interim relief--sometimes pending a writ of certiorari, as in California, and sometimes after a writ of certiorari is granted, as in Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U. S. ___ (2025), and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U. S. ___ (2025).
And either way, when this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.
Of course, decisions regarding interim relief are not necessarily "conclusive as to the merits" because further litigation may follow. Trump v. Boyle, 606 U. S. ___ (2025) (slip op., at 1). But regardless of a decision's procedural posture,
its "reasoning--its ratio decidendi"--carries precedential weight in "future cases." Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. 83,104 (2020) (opinion of G ORSUCH , J.); see also Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U. S. 119, 136 (2019) ("[J]ust as binding as [a]
holding is the reasoning underlying it").
The justices are incensed that they are forced to explain what "precedent" is to a supposedly-qualified (DEI) judge.
And California's reasoning was clear. There, the Court explained that "the APA's limited waiver of immunity does not extend to orders to enforce a contractual obligation to pay money . . . . Instead, the Tucker Act grants the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction over suits based on any express or implied con-
tract with the United States." 604 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 2) (internal quotation marks omitted). That reasoning binds lower courts as a matter of vertical stare decisis.
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If nothing else, the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the "persuasive authority" of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion
on an equivalent record. ___ F. Supp. 3d, at ___, App. 232a.
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For these reasons, I concur in the Court's decision to staythe district court's judgments vacating the grant terminations. If the district court's failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to "compel compliance" with a different "order that this Court ha[d] stayed." Department of Homeland Security v.
D. V. D., 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (KAGAN, J., concurring) (slip op., at 1). Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court's decisions even though the case at hand did not differ "in any pertinent respect" from the one
this Court had decided. Boyle, 606 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1). So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case "squarely controlled" by one of its precedents. Ibid. All these interventions
should have been unnecessary, but together they under-score a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect "the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and
Congress."