Judges unleash ‘political weapon’ against Trump

When President Obama announced his expanded deportation amnesty in 2014, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sought out the federal district court in Brownsville to file a groundbreaking lawsuit arguing that the president had violated the Constitution.

The choice of Brownsville was no accident. Legal analysts said the small courthouse had just two judges, one appointed by President Clinton and the other by President George W. Bush. It was a 50-50 chance.

The Bush pick, Judge Andrew S. Hanen, got the case and eventually issued a nationwide injunction halting Mr. Obama’s program across the country.

Nationwide injunctions from district courts had happened before, but Judge Hanen’s decision seemed to unleash the floodgates, opening up an era of judges in courtrooms across the country issuing huge rulings blocking major parts of a president’s agenda.

Under Mr. Obama, rulings blocked the Labor Department’s overtime pay rule, the Education Department’s transgender bathroom policy, and health care rules regarding “gender identity” discrimination.

Fast-forward to President Trump. In just his first year, district judges issued nationwide injunctions on his travel ban, refugee policy, phaseout of the Obama-era DACA amnesty, efforts to speed up deportations of Iraqis, stripping of federal grants from sanctuary cities, attempts to change Obamacare’s contraceptive coverage and moves to reinstate a ban on transgender troops.

“It wasn’t a major political weapon for stopping a president’s program until late in the Obama administration, and that’s when state Republican attorneys general started using it, so it’s only been in the last three years that it’s become a major judicial weapon against presidential programs,” said Samuel Bray, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies the issue.

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