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“How and why do rogue judges get to decide who is fit for service in the military?”
It’s a good question how and why rogue judges get to decide anything via universal injunction — but that’s a topic that could take up an entire law school seminar, so I’ll limit this to what I believe you’re referring to: judges blocking President Trump’s attempt to reinstate the ban on transgender military members.
Last Thursday, the Trump administration officially requested that the Supreme Court allow it to enforce its ban on transgender troops in the military, something that’s been blocked by lower courts. Judge Benjamin Settle, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, ruled that he didn’t feel the administration had demonstrated the ban “is substantially related to achieving unit cohesion, good order or discipline.”
“Although the court gives deference to military decision making, it would be an abdication to ignore the government’s flat failure to address plaintiffs’ uncontroverted evidence that years of open transgender service promoted these objectives,” he wrote.
There is the question, of course, of whether administrations are bound by universal injunctions from lower courts, which can be handy in more trivial matters (copyright concerns, say; you don’t want to have to try an infringement case in every jurisdiction possible) but which are problematic when one judge in one corner of these United States can thwart legitimate policy aims legally executed.
It’s worth noting that, when Joe Biden was in office, Democrats certainly didn’t feel that they were bound by these injunctions. Here’s Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2023, going far enough that even Karoline Leavitt might tell her to tone it down if she were arguing on Trump’s behalf: “Ignore this ruling … You know, I think the interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement. And it is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling.”
Remember @AOC in 2023? This is what she said about judicial rulings after a Texas judge moved to suspend approval of the abortion pill:
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez:
“I think, we’ve been preparing and anticipating for there being these egregious overreaches by members of the judiciary… pic.twitter.com/OnfSD8DPYV
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) April 27, 2025
In the case of Trump, this marks the third time that reinstating a ban on transgender military members has been tied up in the courts.
Doe v. Trump, a 2017 case in which a transgender servicemember challenged the ban on Fifth Amendment grounds, ended with a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who said there was no new evidence and Trump’s tweeting on the issue implied impulsivity, not careful review.
The ban was narrowed to “transgender persons with a history of gender dysphoria.” Then, after being kicked around the courts, the injunction was lifted in 2019, finding that deference to the military served the public interest — but it was mostly for naught, given the fact that Joe Biden reversed the reversal in 2021.
A second key case, Karnoski v. Trump, challenged the revised policy as discriminatory. U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington Judge Marsha Pechman (there’s that district again!) also issued an injunction, ruling that “because transgender people have long been subjected to systemic oppression and forced to live in silence, they are a protected class. Therefore, any attempt to exclude them from military service will be looked at with the highest level of care, and will be subject to the Court’s ‘strict scrutiny.’ This means that before Defendants can implement the Ban, they must show that it was sincerely motivated by compelling interests, rather than by prejudice or stereotype, and that it is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests.”
However, in 2019, the Supreme Court stayed the preliminary injunction while it continued through the courts without ruling on whether it was constitutional … until, yet again, Biden’s reinstatement of transgender service members rendered it moot.
And here we are, back again with the Trump administration — a second one — trying to get this before the Supreme Court to solve it once and for all.
If this is making your head spin, well, I’m not trying to. It illustrates a larger point about the insanity of the universal injunction on major social and political matters. Shop for the correct venue, get the right judge, get a ruling that’s based on politics and not law, and run out the clock until it becomes too much of a resource-drain to pursue: This is, essentially, how the left believes the court system is supposed to work.
They’re already — to use one of the most insufferable, clanging neologisms of the Very Online™ left — “big mad” that two Trump terms and three Supreme Court justices mean that they don’t get to use it as a de facto third legislative body anymore. But they do get to still exercise a kind of filibuster through cases like this and the endless litigation that surrounds them.
In this case, I agree with AOC for once: “Ignore this ruling … You know, I think the interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement.” Until the Supreme Court — or, at least, a more august court higher up in the judicial hierarchy — weighs in, these universal injunctions are being used as calculated distractions, not legitimate applications of justice. They ought to be treated, and dismissed, as such.
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