Federal judges should settle disputes, not turn courtrooms into showdowns with the White House. Yet a fight at a Washington golf course put Judge Ana Reyes in a confrontation with the Justice Department. She demanded that the government attorneys sign a brief already signed by a DOJ official.
They refused.
After nearly seven hours, the judge dropped her demand. Does judicial restraint still have a place on the bench?
The underlying case concerns President Donald Trump’s proposed overhaul of East Potomac Golf Links, a historic public course in the nation’s capital. The National Park Service removed about 430 healthy, noninvasive trees on October 10.
Preservation groups challenged the work, and Reyes ordered a halt to further removal while the legal dispute continued. The administration says the cutting followed a 2019 plan, separate from Trump’s redesign.
A court opinion described a tree-removal plan prepared and approved in five days, with notice arriving late on a holiday Friday. Reyes found the challengers likely to succeed on their claim that the Park Service failed to conduct required environmental review.
Courts can examine agencies, but their authority doesn’t make every courtroom demand appropriate.
The Justice Department sought Reyes’s disqualification on October 16, accusing her of openly hostile treatment of government lawyers and a broader pattern of antagonism toward Trump’s administration. The motion criticized her questioning of an attorney during an earlier hearing and asked that courtroom audio be released.
Reyes denied the motion two days later, citing earlier rulings in which she declined to grant the plaintiffs relief.
Then came October 19. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward signed the government’s response about the status of the proposed redesign. Reyes invoked Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and asked which other DOJ attorneys would sign with him. Woodward objected, and when no attorneys volunteered, she ordered them to come forward and sign. He told them not to answer.
Rule 11 requires a filing to bear the signature of at least one attorney of record. It also binds lawyers who present or later advocate a filing to standards of factual and legal responsibility. Woodward’s signature satisfied the rule’s ordinary signing requirement.
So what required the judge to stage a public roll call of additional government lawyers? Her reversal made that demand harder to make.
The hearing unfolded against another dispute. Trump had publicly announced a redesign and said work would begin, while DOJ lawyers maintained that agency review remained unfinished and no final decision had been made. Reyes was entitled to press for an explanation of that apparent conflict. But pressing for answers and demanding personal endorsements from attorneys who hadn’t signed the brief are different exercises of judicial power.
By the end, Reyes abandoned the demand, saying everyone had better things to do. After orders, objections, and deadlines, the issue simply disappeared. A judge who believed the demand was necessary at the start of proceedings decided it wasn’t necessary at the end. What changed?
The episode renews criticism of Reyes’s conduct in Trump administration litigation. A 2025 judicial-misconduct complaint questioned her treatment of government counsel in a military-policy case; that complaint was dismissed. The new recusal request has likewise been denied. Neither filing establishes misconduct. But the words exchanged in open court, the attempted signature order, and its withdrawal remain subject to public scrutiny.
An independent judiciary matters. So does an executive branch able to defend its decisions without humiliating its lawyers. Judges needn’t agree with Trump, and the administration must obey lawful orders.
But when courtroom conduct begins to resemble the hostility that the DOJ alleges, Americans will question whether Trump can get a fair hearing. A golf course shouldn’t become a proving ground for animosity toward an administration.
Judges wield enormous power, but their first obligation is the law, not winning a confrontation.
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