Activist Democratic Party judges have done everything possible to throw monkey wrenches into Trump administration initiatives. In many instances, they have issued orders purporting to block executive actions without even hearing from the administration. I haven’t tried to keep count, but I think most of those orders have been stayed or reversed on appeal.
But Democratic Party judges are not easily deterred. In several cases, they have violated the rule of law by flouting Supreme Court orders and refusing to follow Supreme Court decisions.
Yesterday, the Court held in National Institutes of Health, et al. v. American Public Health Association that the administration was entitled to cancel more than $780 million in grants by the National Institutes of Health that the government considers to be improvident. In concurring, Justice Gorsuch expressed concern about a pattern of district court judges violating the law:
Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them. In Department of Ed. v. California, 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam), this Court granted a stay because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations.
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Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA. As support for its course, the district court invoked the “persuasive authority” of “the dissent[s] in California” and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated. Massachusetts v. Kennedy, ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, ___ (Mass. 2025), App. to Application 232a (App.). That was error. “[U]nless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be.” Hutto v. Davis, 454 U. S. 370, 375 (1982) (per curiam).
The idea of a district court judge relying on the disssenting opinion in a case that is directly on point is ridiculous. Justice Gorsuch notes that this is not the first time this has happened:
For these reasons, I concur in the Court’s decision to stay the district court’s judgments vacating the grant terminations. If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to “compel compliance” with a different “order that this Court ha[d] stayed.” Department of Homeland Security v. D. V. D., 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (KAGAN, J., concurring)(slip op., at 1). Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ “in any pertinent respect” from the one this Court had decided. Boyle, 606 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1). So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case “squarely controlled” by one of its precedents. Ibid. All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect “the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.” Hutto, 454 U. S., at 375.
Democratic Party loyalist judges are mounting a rebellion–one might say, an insurrection–against the rule of law. They are trying to serve their party by impeding the Trump administration even where there is no good faith legal basis for doing so. This is an outrage. It won’t get as much public attention as other bad faith conduct by the Democratic Party, but it should.
