“Our democracy cannot very well function if individual judges issue extraordinary relief to every plaintiff who clamors to object to executive action,” U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil said in her ruling on Monday. “It is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later.”
Those are the words many observers of the ongoing judicial coup have wanted to hear from a federal judge since the first wave of injunctions from tyrannical district court judges started coming down early in the Trump administration’s tenure, blocking the president elected by the American people to do what they elected him to do.
They finally came from Vyskocil, a Trump appointee serving in New York, when she dismissed a case from teachers unions attempting to get the court to “commandeer,” as she put it, $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Trump administration canceled the funding because of the school’s inability to handle pro-Palestine protests and violence on its campus.
“With no apparent sense of irony, lawyers for an organization called ‘Protect Democracy’ insist that a district court judge should order the Executive Branch immediately to restore the flow of taxpayer dollars to an elite university, which funding Defendants represent is inconsistent with the priorities of the duly elected President of the United States,” Vyskocil added.
The case to get the Trump administration to restore $400 million in funding cuts to Columbia came from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a labor union for university faculty and affiliate of the other plaintiff, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which is the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union and is headed by Randi Weingarten.
While initially seeking to restore $400 million, the unions then moved to force the payment of over $5 billion in grants and contracts.
AAUP and AFT attempted to make vague and tenuous connections to how their organizations were affected by the cuts after federal “agencies informed Columbia that it was inconsistent with Executive Branch priorities and no longer convenient to give hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to an institution that, in the agencies’ assessments, had displayed ‘a disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students’ and had ‘otherwise fail[ed] to serve the best interests of the United States’ in its uses of Americans’ money,” the judge wrote.
Vyskocil dismissed the case because the unions had no standing to sue, and Columbia University is “conspicuously absent” from the case as a plaintiff. Nevertheless, the unions filed a complaint written as though they were pandering to a friendly left-wing judge who would slap an injunction on the Trump administration, as so many other judges have done in recent months.
“The first several paragraphs of the Complaint are devoted to sensational rhetoric about the ‘transcendent value’ of academic freedom, and ‘the Trump administration’s’ effort to ‘control the thought’ of ‘faculty and students’ (though Plaintiffs do not purport to represent any students) by placing a ‘gun to the head’ of non-party Columbia University,” Vyskocil wrote.
She then went through the litany of bizarre counts against the Trump administration from the unions that did not describe any more than a tenuous relationship to the funding cuts at best. The unions even argued that the fact that they chose to spend money to oppose potential (yes, potential, not real) action from the Trump administration meant they had standing.
An organization “cannot spend its way into standing simply by expending money to gather information and advocate against the defendant’s action,” the judge wrote, quoting the Supreme Court.
Teachers unions, and universities for that matter, apparently believe they are entitled to federal funding and that any cut is a constitutional impossibility representing some kind of free speech violation. But as Vyskocil soberly pointed out in her second appeal to the fact that elections have consequences, the cuts are often made simply because the president — and the people who elected him — have priorities that differ from those of the unions and universities.
“Plaintiffs apparently fail to grasp that one possible inference from this state of affairs is that funding cuts were made and maintained not to punish speech but because, for example, it is not consistent with the priorities of the NIH under the current, democratically-elected President, to continue to fund Columbia’s research into the impact of climate change on the mental health of women in East Africa. … Declining to fund such research is not a First Amendment injury,” she wrote.
It does not appear that the unions will “grasp” that possibility, as both have stated they plan to appeal the decision, with AAUP stating that “The Trump administration’s threats and coercion at Columbia University are part of an authoritarian agenda that extends far beyond Columbia,” adding, “We will continue to fight back.”