A liberal lawyer named Dilan Esper posted this on Twitter:
once again, Florida. Nowhere near the border.
— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) May 12, 2023
Find a pliant judge, overrule the President. we need to change this. https://t.co/DjYVCsMHIu
On Twitter, I pointed out that this was more or less what Jeff Sessions said, much more justifiably, when a Hawaiian Judge named Derrick Kahala Watson blocked President Trump’s plan to stop importing Muslim terrorists in 2017:
“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Mr. Sessions said this week in an interview on “The Mark Levin Show,” a conservative talk radio program.
[Jeff Sessions Dismisses Hawaii as ‘an Island in the Pacific,’ by Charlie Savage, April 20, 2017]
Sessions was right, for a number of reasons (Watson insisted that while a President might do this, this President couldn’t, because racism) although a better headline would be ”Jeff Sessions Dismisses Crazy Ruling By Crackpot Hawaiian Judge.”
We covered this ruling at the time:
See also Democrat-Appointed Kritarchs Block Trump’s Public Charge—For Now by James Fulford on 01/08/2020.
Both the ”travel ban” and ”public charge” rulings were overruled.
The power many judges assume to block things is called a "National Injunction" and it's largely wrong, for both sides. But the entire Trump administration was Judges blocking things he ran on and had the Constitutional power to do https://t.co/QtPXpQ1mGI
— VDARE (@vdare) May 12, 2023
The last was overruled for the same reason Esper thinks the Floridian judge should be stopped—it’s one Judge shutting down the entire Federal government.
I wrote of the ”public charge” decision that
The fact that one judge with one injunction can block the entire Federal government is wrong, and it’s a fairly recent legal development. It’s not just me that thinks that. Notre Dame Law Professor Samuel Bray has written a lot about the ”National Injunction” on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.
However, these ”national injunctions” are very popular with the Left:
The Quiet Grandeur of the Courts https://t.co/E9x3TMwMK8 pic.twitter.com/5V3xAV8Hlr
— Mia Farrow 🧡🏳️🌈 🌻🇺🇸☘️ (@MiaFarrow) February 19, 2017
That’s the New York Times’s February 8, 2017 editorial After Mr. Trump’s Din, the Quiet Grandeur of the Courts. The New York Times simply does not believe in democracy. Trump was elected partly to block Muslim immigration, which is certainly within the powers of the Presidency (Obama did it briefly in 2011, but didn’t get this kind of reaction because people knew he didn’t mean it.) The Times thinks that unelected judges—who are New York Times readers—have a right to stop this.
So my question for Esper, and others like him, is ”If you don’t like rogue judges, where were you between 2016 and 2020?”
