Alito Scolds SCOTUS For Rewarding Rogue DC Judge’s Activism

In a decision that left Justice Samuel Alito “stunned,” the U.S. Supreme Court denied President Donald Trump’s administration request to remove an order forcing the government to shell out $2 billion on foreign expenditures it tried to pause.

Shortly after Trump took office, a sole judge in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order designed to hamper the administration’s efforts to cut back the United States Agency for International Development’s abuse of American tax dollars. That same judge grew so “frustrated with the pace at which funds were being disbursed” that he used an unappealable order to force the Trump team to pay $2 billion to various organizations in just 36 hours.

In his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Neil Gorsuch, Alito deemed the case worthy of being thrown out or at least stayed due to lack of jurisdiction. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Democrat-nominated justices in affirming the DC District Court’s overreach and activism.

“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this
Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned,” Alito began.

The administration expressed concern about “what it regarded as a lawless order” because it not only threatened its sovereign immunity but also put the funds in a position where they could not be recovered.

SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts was forced to issue an administrative stay at “the last minute” after the DC Court of Appeals claimed Trump lacked the option to appeal. As Alito noted, that stay was undone the moment the majority of the high bench ruled the way it did.

“As a result, the Government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste — not because the law requires it, but simply because a District Judge so ordered. As the Nation’s highest court, we have a duty to ensure that the power entrusted to federal judges by the Constitution is not abused. Today, the Court fails to carry out that responsibility,” Alito wrote.

The first mistake the lower courts made, Alito said, was labeling what should have been an “appealable preliminary injunction” as a temporary restraining order.

“The order here, which commanded the payment of a vast sum that in all likelihood can never be fully recovered, is in no sense ‘temporary.’ Nor did the order merely ‘restrain’ the Government’s challenged action in order to ‘preserve the status quo,’” he noted.

By “plowing ahead,” Alito said the district judge blatantly ignored “previous suggestion” and rulings made by the high bench.

“The most that can be said is that in the District Court’s denial of the Government’s motion for a stay pending appeal, it cited but did not analyze a handful of cases echoing Bowen’s discussion of the APA’s conscribed waiver of sovereign immunity. One might expect more care from a federal court before it so blithely discards ‘sovereign dignity,’” he scolded.

The judge also failed to explain why “universal relief to nonparties is appropriate here.”

“And this is not the sort of case in which only universal relief is feasible,” Alito wrote.

Another mistake, Alito warned, came when the Supreme Court failed to stay the district court’s order long enough for the Trump administration to petition for a writ of certiorari. It would be in that step that Alito said the federal government could have made its sovereign immunity argument, which he deemed as having “shown a likelihood of success.”

“Sovereign immunity thus appears to bar the sort of compensatory relief that the District Court ordered here,” Alito continued.

According to Alito and his fellow dissenters, the Trump administraton adequately demonstrated its likelihood of suffering irreparable harm under the district judge’s swift order wihtout objection from the respondents or the district court.

“In sum, the factors we consider in deciding whether to issue a stay weigh strongly in favor of granting that relief,” Alito wrote.

The end result, Alito concluded, was “a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris.”

“A federal court has many tools to address a party’s supposed nonfeasance. Self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction is not one of them,” he said.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.