Wanted: Federal Judges Who Don't Want to be President

Another federal court decision has gone against the Trump administration and this one just might take the prize for “Most Convoluted Legal Reasoning” at the Judicial Awards Banquet for Liberal Judges this year.

What happens to these liberals once they get on the federal bench? I have come to the conclusion that all of them want to be president because they keep denying Trump what are clearly powers granted to the chief executive.

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam granted a temporary injunction last month to groups like the Sierra Club and the ACLU to halt construction of a border wall using military funds. You might recall that the president declared a national emergency to deal with the border crisis, including the use of defense department money to build several sections of his wall.

Judge Gilliam, an Obama appointee, wrote in May, “The position that when Congress declines the Executive’s request to appropriate funds, the Executive nonetheless may simply find a way to spend those funds ‘without Congress’ does not square with fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic,” the judge wrote.

In fact, presidents routinely use funds not appropriated by Congress. How was Obama going to pay for making 8 million “DREAMers” legal? Congress was certainly not going to appropriate money for that. The judge is using faulty, politically biased reasoning while piously invoking the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Fast forward a little more than a month and the same judge claimed that since the administration did not make arguments that were any different than before, he saw no need to change his originally flawed reasoning:

The Hill:

The Trump administration had argued that the use of the military funds was lawful under the scope of the national emergency, as the need for the funding was “unforeseen.” And the lawyers claimed that if they are unable to award the federal dollars to contractors by the end of the fiscal year, they may lose the funding.

In his ruling Friday, Gilliam wrote that the administration lawyers “present no new evidence or argument for why the court should depart from its prior decision, and it will not.”

“Because no new factual or legal arguments persuade the court that its analysis in the preliminary injunction order was wrong, [the groups’] likelihood of success on the merits has ripened into actual success,” the ruling reads.

Hilariously, the judge ruled that the Sierra Club and other plaintiffs won’t have any place to play if the wall is built:

The judge also found that the groups suing to block use of military funds for the wall would suffer “irreparable harm” over border wall construction because it “will harm their ability to recreate in and otherwise enjoy public land along the border.”

It’s clear that this is one judge who’s a frustrated politician. Perhaps someone could suggest to Gilliam that he run for office to assuage his hankering to tell the presidents what to do.