Is our judges learning?

On Friday, I wrote that Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, blasted lower courts for repeatedly ignoring Supreme Court rulings.

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 more than a hundred years.

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).

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals apparently heard the message and overruled the disgusting partisan Judge Chutkan -- who rules that every Democrat is in the right and every Republican and J6er is a terrorist who must be jailed without bail-- and acknowledged controlling Supreme Court rulings that Trump may order grants rescinded.

In a major win for the Trump administration, a D.C. Circuit Court panel lifted an injunction on Tuesday that attempted to block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from terminating "climate" grants to several nongovernmental groups.

In a 2-1 decision, the panel agreed that the EPA can move forward with cutting grants totaling $16 billion to five nonprofit organizations "to promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions." Judges Neomi Rao and Greg Katsas sided with the government, while Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented.

The administration announced its plans to end distribution of the funds in March over what the D.C. Circuit panel described as "concerns about conflicts of interest and lack of oversight." This prompted the intended grant recipients to sue in federal court, which resulted in D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issuing an injunction ordering the administration to continue dispersing the monies.

(Most Americans are likely familiar with Chutkan's egregious conduct in the Biden administration's lawfare against then-candidate Donald Trump and Jan. 6-related cases.)

Writing for the majority in Tuesday's ruling, Rao concluded that Chutkan "abused [her] discretion in issuing the injunction" in the first place. The circuit judge further noted that "while the district court had jurisdiction over the grantees' constitutional claim, that claim is meritless."

"The grantees are not likely to succeed on the merits because their claims are essentially contractual, and therefore jurisdiction lies exclusively in the Court of Federal Claims," Rao wrote. "Moreover, the equities strongly favor the government, which on behalf of the public must ensure the proper oversight and management of this multi-billion-dollar fund. Accordingly, we vacate the injunction."

The article notes that judges are finally starting to comport their rulings with the actual law. Hit the link for more.