Donald Trump has had more than his fair share of challenges from judges during his second term.
The president's first term saw nearly five dozen injunctions against it, but the situation faced by his current administration has been far worse.
Now, Trump is not only facing challenges from liberal judges, but some conservative judges, including one put on the bench by former President Ronald Reagan, are going against him as well.
In virtually every previous modern-day administration, there were fewer than two dozen nationwide injunctions issued.
Trump has not been shy about pushing the envelope with his executive orders, so he has seen far more of them.
The administration has used the situation to push the narrative of the activist judge, but in reality, Trump really is testing the boundaries of presidential powers. And if I am being honest, a lot of his orders were unconstitutional when they were written, such as his birthright citizenship order, so they were going to be challenged in the courts regardless.
What has shocked me, however, is that even after the U.S. Supreme Court tried to limit the use of nationwide injunctions, lower courts have defied the order, and nationwide injunctions have continued apace, as has the lecturing tone of many jurists toward the administration.
William Young is a Ronald Reagan-nominated judge, and since Trump considers himself the present-day incarnation of Reagan, you would think he would get less resistance from this particular jurist, but the complete opposite appears true.
Young has ruled in several cases against Trump, and his decisions usually include a lecture about the president's failings.
For example, it was Young who ruled that Trump could not block funding for the National Institutes of Health.
In his opinion, Young wrote, “This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out, and I do so.”
Young, who has been verbally slapped by the Supreme Court for some of his rulings, has continued to be a thorn in Trump’s side, as if he now has the auto-reject button out anytime he sees the president's name in a lawsuit.
The latest ruling from Young centered on the administration's push to revoke visas from pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses.
Young has accused the administration of “bullying” the demonstrators, adding, "Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment.”
For me, it is not that Young is ruling against Trump but rather that he appears to be taking the cases over which he presides far too personally. If you read his opinions, they go well beyond legal doctrine and make attacks that seem way out of line for a jurist. He is the very definition of the sort of activist judge against which the administration has been railing from the outset of this term.
