This has been quite a two week stretch for the President. He’s essentially won the battle over impeachment, owned Iran, and now he’s getting another win for his border wall.
As I wrote back in October, that made no sense at all.
First, how does El Paso County and an activist group (who are the plaintiffs here) have standing to challenge federal agencies using federal funds on federal land? The simple answer is that there’s no legal reason they have standing. Yet, this judge decided they did based on the laughable notion that El Paso County would suffer “damage to their reputation.” By such a standard, anyone could have standing in any lawsuit against the federal government. It’s just ludicrous.
In short, it was a tortured decision that the judge massaged to meet his personal political goals, not to actually follow the law.
Now, it seems the appeals court agrees with my assessment.
A divided federal appeals court has lifted a lower court’s order blocking $3.6 billion in military construction funds that President Donald Trump planned to use to finance an expanded and improved border wall.The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a brief order on Wednesday granting the Trump administration’s request to stay the injunction that U.S. District Court Judge David Briones, based in El Paso, Texas, issued last month…The 5th Circuit panel’s majority did not provide a detailed explanation for its action, but noted that last July the Supreme Court stayed a similar injunction issued by a federal judge in Oakland, Calif.
Their reasoning was actually quite simple. They cited that the Supreme Court had already shot this Texas’ judges logic down and that he had ignored precedent. Therefore, the Trump administration got their wish of a stay of his decision.
In this decision by the appeals court, they also scoffed at the idea that El Paso County and some immigration activist group would have standing to challenge the distribution of federal funds. That should have been common sense from the beginning, but the original, partisan judge was clearly not acting within any semblance of logic.
Hopefully, this is the end of the stupidity dealing with Trump’s emergency declaration and the use of these military funds. There have now been multiple appeals courts and the Supreme court give it the green light. If another low-level district judge seeks to block it, they should be sanctioned. This has gotten ridiculous at this point.
But please Justice Roberts, do tell me how more about how there aren’t Obama judges or Clinton judges making decisions based on politics.