Supreme Justice Gorsuch Pushes Back Against Judicial “Anarchy”

The comments from the Supreme Court Justice came last week in the case of National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association. CNN: 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 (CNN).

New York Sun: Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh add: “When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” That is Federal Courts 101, canon to generations of law students. It could be, though, that the surge in the high court’s reliance on the emergency or “shadow” docket — where rulings are handed down without oral arguments and sometimes without fully explicated reasoning — has empowered lower court judges to ignore or evade pronouncements from the high court (New York Sun).