aggiehawg said:
Not to put too fine a point on this but when the legal tide turns with appellate decisions, just under five months since Trump's inauguration, is lightning fast for our usual system. What would normally take years and years to wind through the system, has been expedited. And a large part of that was the procedural strategy being employed by opponents of the administration. Procedural fig leaves such as using normally non-appealable TROs and using the APA could only last for so long before they fell away.
Short term win in battle but losing the bigger war. That is not dismiss the tremendous work done by S.G. Sauer and his crew because they anticipated those moves and positioned themselves well.
I feel like the DOJ did a great job of goading the judges into doing really, really stupid things. The team was just daring the judges to get out further and further over their skis.
I can't see this SCOTUS touching this decision. I don't have a good feeling of how likely the DC circuit would be to revisit this en banc.
There are 11 Judges in the DC appeals court, you would need 6 to hear en banc. 3 were appointed by Trump, 1 by GW Bush, 4 by Obama, 3 by Biden.
The optimist in me wants to say that hopefully there are 2 responsible judges out of the 7 appointed by Obama and Biden, or at least 2 that don't want to get smacked down by SCOTUS. The realist in me says that isn't bloody likely.
It takes a special kind of brainwashed useful idiot to politically defend government fraud, waste, and abuse.