{"id":40463,"date":"2025-09-05T08:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=40463"},"modified":"2025-09-07T12:44:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T19:44:57","slug":"federal-judges-are-frustrated-by-defiance-from-the-trump-administration-and-fuzziness-from-the-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/federal-judges-are-frustrated-by-defiance-from-the-trump-administration-and-fuzziness-from-the-supreme-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal judges are frustrated by defiance from the Trump administration and fuzziness from the Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

John E. Jones III<\/a>, Dickinson College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an emergency hearing before Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Aug. 31, 2025, lawyers for a group of unaccompanied migrant children from Guatemala asked her to stop the Trump administration\u2019s deportation of hundreds of them back to Guatemala. Concerned that the Trump administration might not follow her order to stop, the judge emphatically repeated her order that temporarily barred the deportations<\/a>. And then she said something unusual:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am trying to do the best I can to fulfill my obligation as an Article 3 judge \u2026<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Conversation\u2019s senior politics editor, Naomi Schalit, talked with former federal judge John E. Jones III<\/a>, now president of Dickinson College, about the meaning of the term \u201cArticle 3 judge,\u201d why Sooknanan might have used it, and why recent discussions of politics and law in the news have included notably more references to \u201cArticle 1,\u201d \u201cArticle 2\u201d and \u201cArticle 3,\u201d normally terms reserved for discussions of constitutional law.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the \u2018Article 3\u2019 that Judge Sooknanen referred to?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The meaning is not something that a lay person can necessarily intuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s quite clear that the course that the Trump administration has taken<\/a> in the many lawsuits against its policies<\/a> is to say, \u201cWe will obey the Supreme Court of the United States, but we\u2019re going to pick and choose the lower court opinions that we deign to follow.\u201d And of course, Judge Sooknanan\u2019s comment invoking the phrase \u201cArticle 3<\/a>\u201d was meant to say that, the same as a Supreme Court justice, she is a fully vetted and confirmed jurist chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. That\u2019s what\u2019s known as an Article 3 judge, authorized under Article 3 of the Constitution<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, inferentially, what she\u2019s saying is, \u201cI mean what I say, your administration can\u2019t ignore it as you appear to have done with federal Judge James Boasberg<\/a>, whose order you appear to have defied to return immigrants you deported. I\u2019m going to do belt and suspenders and be very clear about this and not give you wiggle room because it is not an option for you to disobey the order of an Article 3 judge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston, which houses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Douglas Sacha\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

OK, you\u2019ve described Article 3. Tell us about articles 1 and 2.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Article 1 of the Constitution creates the United States Congress<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Article 2 creates the presidency and the executive branch<\/a>. It\u2019s somewhat light on details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Article 3, notably, creates the Supreme Court<\/a>, but left it up to Congress to develop and create, as the article says, \u201csuch inferior courts<\/a>.\u201d I don\u2019t love the word inferior; we tend to say \u201clower courts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the caseload at the founding, the Supreme Court handled everything. The Supreme Court justices did what was called \u201criding the circuit.\u201d They acted, in effect, as lower court federal judges, until business and commerce and the law burgeoned. Congress was then compelled to create district court judgeships and circuit court judgeships to relieve the Supreme Court of the burden of being everything to everybody in the federal courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a helpful civics lesson.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I worked with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had a real predilection for civics education<\/a>. One of her comments always resonates for me, that civics is something that has to be learned and relearned because it\u2019s not stamped on our DNA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent NBC story headlined \u2018Some Republicans object to Trump\u2019s move to cancel spending, warning of a shutdown<\/a>,\u2019 Sen. Kevin Cramer from North Dakota said he wants spending decided not by the president but by Congress in a bipartisan appropriations process. \u2018I think that Congress has every right to defend its Article 1 role,\u2019 he said.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Constitutionally and by custom, Congress has the power of the purse<\/a>. The president can propose a budget, but it has to be passed by Congress. And it\u2019s quite clear that, in this Trump administration, Congress is abdicating its Article 1 powers, being compliant and dormant in allowing<\/a> the president to cancel otherwise-allocated funds repeatedly. If Congress would flex its muscles under Article 1, this wouldn\u2019t be happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And back to Article 3 news: There\u2019s been some charged back-and-forth<\/a> between federal judges<\/a> and two<\/a> Supreme Court justices<\/a> over criticism of lower court judges. And 10 federal judges criticized \u2013 anonymously \u2013 the Supreme Court\u2019s handling<\/a> of the Trump cases in the so-called \u2018shadow docket\u2019 because the rulings were so brief they couldn\u2019t take direction from them. Is this all normal?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s rank frustration on the part of lower court judges. The Supreme Court is forcing lower court judges to decipher meaning from Supreme Court decisions as if they\u2019re the Rosetta stone. They are so abbreviated and less than clear that it\u2019s maddening<\/a>. Having toiled in the lower courts, the worst situation you could have is a lack of guidance from higher courts, and then you have to guess. When you have to guess, you make mistakes, and that\u2019s the frustration you see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think there is a duty on the U.S. Supreme Court to not rubber-stamp lower court judges, of course, but also to have some comity with lower court judges who are struggling through this plethora of cases<\/a> that have arisen because of the Trump administration flooding the zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does this conflict over courts and judges mean to the average person?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The integrity of our system of justice and the judicial system is based on the trust that people place in the jurists that populate that branch, the third branch of government. And as Alexander Hamilton said, the judiciary has neither the sword nor the purse<\/a>, so it is the credibility of the judiciary that, at the end of the day, carries weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when the president and highly ranked officials in his administration vilify lower court judges the way they have<\/a>, and if the president says that he can pick and choose<\/a> among lower court opinions, then I think you know, necessarily, his followers may think that they can do the same. That is not helpful to the rule of law and to our democracy. In fact, it tears at the fabric of our system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John E. Jones III<\/a>, President, Dickinson College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John E. Jones III, Dickinson College In an emergency hearing before Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Aug. 31, 2025, lawyers for a group of unaccompanied migrant children from Guatemala asked her to stop the Trump administration\u2019s deportation of hundreds of them back to Guatemala. Concerned that the Trump administration might not follow her order to stop, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":40464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,8025,46,295,10,25,47,296,36,4,15533,38],"tags":[16851,14962,1570,479,16263,885,891,886,860,16852,12661,1602,686,1666],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40498,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40463\/revisions\/40498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}