In 2014, President Obama issued an “executive order” extending “temporary” protection against deportation to nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants. Texas and 25 other states filed suit seeking to invalidate and bar Obama’s action on the grounds that it is not an executive order but is in fact a wrongful attempt to usurp the function of the legislative branch of our government. Finding that the states will likely prevail at trial, the federal district court judge overseeing the lawsuit issued a preliminary injunction ordering the administration not to implement the so called executive order pending the ultimate trial and decision in the case this coming December.
Obama publicly called the judge a political hack appointee and said the preliminary injunction would be promptly appealed and overturned by the federal circuit court of appeal. The court of appeal upheld the preliminary injunction. More political hack appointees, I guess.
Obama did not hold any more press conferences, but he did further appeal the validity of the preliminary injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the appeal. It recently did so and an ultimate decision on the status of the preliminary injunction is expected in July.
All of this rancor and fuss about the preliminary injunction strikes me as a colossal waste of public resources given that the ultimate trial in the matter will take place just a few months from now, in December. All this over a few months? Wouldn’t a responsible administration have just voluntarily stood down for the few additional months? That probably would have been the case if Obama was spending his own money on all of these interim appeals. However, he’s spending your and my money.
In the meanwhile, the federal judge who issued the preliminary injunction recently ordered hundreds of Justice Department lawyers to undergo formal ethics training, accusing them of “deceptive” behavior in knowingly violating the preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Andrew Henen said that government lawyers had unlawfully ignored the preliminary injunction and issued deportation deferrals to as many as 100,000 people, and concealing the facts from him. “It was hard to imagine . . . a more calculated plan of unethical conduct,” said Henen.
Personally, I don’t find it hard to imagine at all. Like father, like sons and daughters.
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