In a brilliant opinion Monday, New York federal district court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil not only denied the preliminary injunction sought by the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, she threw out their lawsuit against the Trump administration entirely.
If the justices on the Supreme Court want to finally act against the unlawful nationwide injunctions and judicial warfare being waged against President Donald Trump, they should use her opinion as a model.
In the case, the radical American Association of University Professors—which is pro-Hamas and only believes in academic freedom for left-wingers—sued the Trump administration over its withholding of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. It also sought to prospectively enjoin the administration from terminating or otherwise pausing another $5 billion in grants and contracts.
The other plaintiff, the American Federation of Teachers, is similarly woke, with its president Randi Weingarten recently resigning from the Democratic National Committee because—believe it or not—she doesn’t think the DNC is radical enough. No, really.
Columbia University did not participate in this lawsuit, a factor the judge obviously considered significant. She pointed out that “conspicuously, Columbia, whose grants and contracts were terminated and whose funding is the subject of the relief Plaintiffs seek, is not a plaintiff.”
In her unsparing opinion, Vyskocil calls a spade a spade, writing, “With no apparent sense of irony, lawyers for an organization called ‘Protect Democracy’ insist that a district court judge should order the Executive Branch immediately to restore the flow of taxpayer dollars to an elite university, which funding Defendants represent is inconsistent with the priorities of the duly elected President of the United States.”
Encapsulating the current glaring problem with rogue district court judges who ignore law and precedent to interfere with presidential authority, Vyskocil commented, “Our democracy cannot very well function if individual judges issue extraordinary relief to every plaintiff who clamors to object to executive action.”
In this particular case, “neither the Executive Branch nor the Legislature ever awarded the grants and contracts at issue to” the association of professors, their union, or any of their members. If any funds “have been wrongfully withheld, such funds may be recovered at the end of a successful lawsuit by the appropriate plaintiff in an appropriate forum.”
These professors and the union do not meet any of those requirements.
Vyskocil dismantles their complaint in a way that should be a profound embarrassment to the lawyers who drafted it.
She writes that the lengthy complaint—385 paragraphs—is “devoted to sensational rhetoric about the ‘transcendent value’ of academic freedom, and ‘the Trump administration’s’ effort to ‘control the thought’ of ‘faculty and students’ (though Plaintiffs do not purport to represent any students) by placing a ‘gun to the head’ of non-party Columbia University.”
The litigants complain that Columbia University “acceded to the Trump administration’s demands,” making a hodgepodge of claims that have little merit and make little sense. These include claims under the “unconditional conditions’ doctrine,” the First Amendment, separation of powers, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, and the Spending Clause.
In her opinion, though, Vyskocil points out something that other federal judges are ignoring: injunctions are “an extraordinary and drastic remedy” that should not be granted “unless the movant, by a clear showing, carried the burden of persuasion.”
Neither the professors nor the union met that burden.
In fact, they didn’t even have standing to assert a claim or file a lawsuit because the party they claim was supposedly injured by the withholding of federal funds wasn’t even a party in the lawsuit. In fact, Columbia is trying to “resolve cooperatively” its dispute with the administration over this funding.
The judge then goes through a lengthy analysis of why the challengers didn’t even come close to having a legitimate lawsuit against the administration.
Vyskocil ends her opinion with this:
Plaintiffs blithely assert that the balance of equities and the public interest ‘strongly favor preliminary relief’ and that ‘no public interest is served by allowing continued violations [of the law].’ However, it is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later. Plaintiffs have not established their standing to litigate this case, let alone any violation of any law.
Too bad so many other judges at the district court level seem to think that they do have the authority to “direct the policies of the Executive Branch.” They are not only acting unlawfully, they are bringing the entire judicial branch into disrepute, imperiling its legitimacy in the eyes of the American public.
