A Tale Of Two Cases -- The Supreme Court Sends Another Message To Lower Court Judges Impeding Trump Policy Changes

CJ Roberts sits this one out, but the real news comes from who got on board with four conservatives.

Yesterday, for the second time, the Supreme Court stepped into a case involving a dispute over policy changes made by the Trump Administration, and blocked by an activist district judge who issued a Temporary Restraining Order requiring that Biden Administration spending priorities continue while the lawsuit is pending.

The earlier case and the new case both involve grant funding that the Trump Administration was seeking to end. The plaintiffs in each case are the entities set to receive the funding and claiming they will suffer harm as a result of the Trump Administration’s change in policy.

In the earlier case, Chief Justice Roberts issued an emergency Administrative Stay halting the TRO issued by a District Judge in Washington D.C. that would have forced the Trump Administration to send approximately $2 billion in foreign aid to every NGO who had a grant or contract with USAID or the Treasury Department at the end of the Biden Administration. In response to earlier resistance by the Trump Administration to his poorly crafted TRO, the judge showed his irritation by giving the Administration only 48 hours to disburse the funding covered by his Order —without specifying those recipients. On February 26, Chief Justice Roberts stayed that Order until the matter could be considered by the entire court. I wrote about the Chief’s intervention here.

At that point in time there were only a handful of challenges to new Trump Administration policies pending in courts across the country, and only a few of those cases had resulted in TROs or Preliminary Injunctions impeding the Administration’s efforts.

But the hopes of conservatives were dashed one week later when the full court voted 5-4 against a Stay on the judge’s TRO while the case was pending — with an important caveat.