I’m starting to actually feel nostalgic for the era when judicial lawfare was at least grounded in some pretense of legality or actual references to constitutional principles and laws, as opposed to Obama and Biden judges declaring that they can overrule the president on any issue because
- The APA
- Their personal preference
I would say these are banana republic rulings, but we left the banana republics a few thousand miles back. It’s not even a new low, it’s a new normal in which federal judges casually declare that the previous administration’s illegal abuses are the law because ‘social justice’ and cannot be undone because under the Administrative Procedures Act anything the judge doesn’t like is automatically ‘arbitrary and capricious’.
In the latest such ruling, Obama Judge Indira Talwani declared that the hundreds of thousands of invading illegal aliens brought here by the Biden administration under ‘parole’ have to remain here because it’s in the public interest for the U.S. to be invaded.
“This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families,” Tawlani argued.
Setting aside the notion that being invaded and having the invaders operating here is in the public interest, the Constitution (which did not even contemplate the position Tawlani usurps and occupies) did not assign the role of determining the public interest to judges, any judges, but to elected officials.
A judge unilaterally blocking the actions of an elected official because she claims she knows the public interest better is not following the law, but staging a coup.
Tawlani declares that the clearly laid out position of the Trump administration, enacting a policy it ran on, is “arbitrary and capricious”. It’s not. The only thing capricious here is her conviction that she ought to have more power than the president.