monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Ruling

“A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.,” President Trump tweeted.

French authorities are indeed investigating the incident as possible terrorism. But other than the critical wounding of the assailant, there were no injuries, except a slight cut to the scalp of a soldier.

Trump’s reaction to the Egyptian attacker who had shouted “God is great” in Arabic also stood in stark contrast to his public silence on the killing of six Muslim worshipers five days earlier at a mosque in Quebec City.

No one was afraid. It is just that there was no reason to close Guantanamo.

Lawmakers, mindful of polls showing wide public opposition to bringing detainees to the United States, have expressed concerns about the safety of their constituents, and some have said that any location housing detainees, even the most secure prisons, would become a potential target for a terrorist attack.

2016: a choice between Donald Trump and Goldman Sachs.

Trump signs order to begin rolling back Wall Street regulations

The State Department says that 60,000 visas have been revoked because of Trump’s sort-of-Muslim-ban, while a lawyer for the government said at a hearing that it was 100,000. Either way, it’s a few more than the 109 people Sean Spicer kept saying were inconvenienced.

It is not unusual for district courts to issue nationwide injunctions blocking executive actions, and the federal government must obey such injunctions even when other district courts have declined to issue injunctions in similar cases.

Nationwide Injunctions and the Lower Federal Courts

Given confusion in recent days as to the propriety of lower courts issuing nationwide injunctions, it’s worth reviewing how these injunctions have recently been issued, how they are used, and where they stand legally....

A new paper by Professor Samuel Bray notes that this is a relatively recent phenomena, and one that conflicts with a number of settled doctrines and conceptions about the relationship among courts themselves and between courts, parties, and non-parties.

Lower courts have frequently approved nationwide injunctions in cases that are neither class actions nor filed under the APA, which arguably provides a statutory nationwide effect. The Supreme Court has not expressly approved these practices of the lower courts, however.

... the [Supreme] Court has emphasized that injunctions cannot be expanded beyond the parties on the theory that it is necessary to protect non-parties. Nationwide injunctions in non-class suits are also in tension with Rules 23 and 65 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as noted above.

We can expect debate about this issue to be ongoing as lower courts continue to issue nationwide injunctions that benefit nonparties....We may see this question arise sooner rather than later, depending on how the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia addresses the State of Virginia’s motion to hold the federal government in contempt over its purported refusal to abide by the court’s temporary restraining order forbidding deportation and requiring access to counsel for legal permanent residents detained at Dulles Airport.

No matter how important the question and no matter how important the value of uniformity, a federal court should not award a national injunction. The basis for this principle is traditional equity, in line with the rule that the federal courts must trace their equitable doctrines to that source