I was out of town for a couple of weeks. What happened in my absence?

Judge Ana Reyes went off the rails

I have talked about the terrible rogue judges in Minneapolis, Boston, and Washington, D.C., but in recent weeks a foreign-born Biden appointee, the first Latina and openly-LBGTQ judge on the federal bench in D.C., the Uruguay native Ana Reyes, has made a strong case that she is the worst federal judge in the country. Appointed in 2023, she has already been reversed by the Supreme Court in an important immigration case (Haiti TPS), and previously faced a Justice Department judicial-misconduct complaint over her handling of litigation challenging Trump’s restrictions on transgender individuals serving in the military (Talbott v. Trump)! (The complaint was later dismissed, with the circuit’s chief judge concluding that a recusal motion was the proper avenue for challenging Reyes’ conduct.)

What did she do this time? Start with a stupid lawsuit by busybodies lacking standing who sued to prevent President Trump from updating and improving a run-down public golf course on federal property in D.C., the East Potomac Golf Links. The frivolous lawsuit—a political stunt–was brought by lawfare maestros Abbe Lowell and Norm Eisen, with the help of white shoe law firms such as Covington & Burling, on behalf of a DC environmental group and two random golfers.  The Supreme Court previously found the challenge to the East Wing ballroom of the White House lacked standing, so the whole golf course lawsuit should have been dead in the water from the get-go. But Judge Reyes ordered the Trump administration not to proceed without her permission—without issuing an injunction that would be appealable. This is like Judge Boasberg’s order that planes transporting deportees out of the country turn around and return to the U.S. A non-appealable contempt trap worthy of Kafka.

When the National Park Service recently removed some overgrown trees from the 106-year-old course (which was designed not to have any trees) as part of routine maintenance, Judge Reyes freaked out. She summoned DOJ attorneys to her court on a federal holiday, Columbus Day, where she yelled at them, abused them, and ordered them to  get the NPS or Department of Interior official who ordered the tree removal to appear in her court (or on the phone) to testify under oath. On a federal holiday! As recounted in a motion to recuse Reyes filed by DOJ senior attorney Stanley Woodward, she ordered that Frank Lands, the Deputy Director of the National Park Service, testify under oath while he was driving in his car on Columbus Day, to explain why trees were removed from an overgrown, poorly-maintained public golf course—a non-urgent matter if there ever was one. The motion stated that “Mr. Lands was forced to testify under oath, under the penalty of perjury, and without having any opportunity whatsoever to reasonably prepare or consult with counsel—all from his vehicle, on a federal holiday.”

Reyes then ordered other high-level Trump administration officials to appear in her courtroom to testify—sua sponte—without specifying the topics to be addressed. This is what prompted Woodward’s motion to recuse, filed on October 16. The motion, which cataloged Reyes’ egregious conduct, personal attacks, insults, screaming at DOJ lawyers, and tyrannical behavior in the courtroom, infuriated Reyes. She denied the motion, which was signed by Woodward as Associate Attorney General, but ordered the DOJ attorneys to appear in her courtroom anyway.

During a seven-hour diatribe, Reyes demanded that the DOJ staff attorneys, who had not signed the motion, to indicate on the record whether they agreed with it and would be willing to sign it. Woodward directed them not to do so, which further enraged Reyes. She then ordered that the motion be re-filed, with all the DOJ attorneys of record signing it. This is high-handed judicial arrogance bordering on lunacy. Like Captain Queeg in the Caine Mutiny, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, or the deranged general in Dr. Strangelove. This order would almost certainly have resulted in a rebuke from the D.C. Circuit.

Either she realized on her own that she had gone berserk with TDS, or someone tipped her off. In either event, as Fox News reported:

Judge Ana Reyes ended the nearly seven-hour hearing by backing away from her initial demand that Justice Department attorneys arguing the case put their names alongside Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr.’s Sunday filing. Reyes had invoked Rule 11, which requires attorneys to stand behind the factual basis of court filings and can subject them to sanctions for violations.

“Late breaking news,” Reyes said. “I’m going to withdraw request that DOJ refile yesterday’s brief with identification of who signed it. we’ve all got better things to spend our time on.”

As a result, Reyes is not recused, will continue to browbeat the DOJ attorneys in the case, and she will delay appellate review as long as possible in order to torment the Trump administration. On Truth Social, President Trump called Reyes a “crazed lunatic.”

This woman belongs in a strait jacket, not wearing black robes with life tenure. Joe Biden has loaded the federal courts, and especially the district courts, with radical activists who make lawless rulings and seek to undermine our constitutional processes. Reyes exemplifies a judge who should be recused, reversed, disciplined, and impeached. She is totally unfit to serve as a judge—along with a bunch of others.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin is apparently a part of the “color revolution”

Another lunatic leftist in the news is former CIA operative (and protégé of John Brennan) Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat posing as a moderate who was elected in 2024. (Of course, we now know that there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat; they are all radicals.) Slotkin was speaking to a student group at the University of Chicago’s nonpartisan Institute of Politics, whose mission is to inspire and encourage young people to become engaged in civic affairs and public service.

During her videotaped remarks, which went viral, Slotkin said that if Democrats win control of Congress in the midterms, they should target Trump administration staffers for investigations, lawsuits, and even criminal prosecutions. Trump himself is off limits due to presidential immunity. In an astonishing admission that Democrats seek to inflict lawfare on their political opponents, Slotkin was recorded saying the silent part out loud:

The people around Donald Trump…have no immunity the way the President does.… So you go after the people who do his bidding. I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the President, but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that. I want that deterrence message sent. (Emphasis added.)

For several days, her comments dominated commentary on X and other social media. The backlash was enormous—and vicious. As the WSJ pointed out, Slotkin

essentially promis[ed] a scorched-earth lawfare campaign that goes after all and sundry, including what she calls “people who enabled” Mr. Trump. Apparently she means even 20-something minions who might think a job in politics or government is worth trying. This is where the multiple prosecutions that Democrats unleashed against Mr. Trump in the Biden years are taking us…. And now Ms. Slotkin is vowing more of the same. Down this road lies more bitterness and political dysfunction.

Miranda Devine provided some context in the New York Post:

Slotkin, who fancies herself as a future president, used that same term “signature cases” in a chilling speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in September when she named Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as the Trump officials she would target for political prosecutions that would see them jailed for 20 years.

Slotkin, a member of the “Seditious Six” who prepared and circulated a video encouraging active duty military personnel to disobey orders they disagree with, now faces denunciations from Senate colleagues, calls for her resignation, and ethics complaints being filed. The Senate should censure her, but won’t. Glenn Reynolds said that “You can call those tactics Bolshevik, or maybe fascist, but what they definitely are is un-American….Slotkin represents the kind of thinking that is bringing America closer to civil disorder, if not outright civil war.”

Republicans should be grateful that Slotkin, during the midterm election period, confirmed that Democrats, if elected, will try to put conservatives in prison. This is a vile, jack-booted intimidation campaign that only a fascist would pursue. Slotkin’s comments are shocking and despicable. Democrats must never gain control in America or the republic is finished. Make sure that you vote!

Interesting developments in the lower federal courts

Jerry Smith on fire

You may recall the name Jerry Smith, a very smart, very conservative judge whom President Reagan appointed to the Fifth Circuit. He is still going strong at age 79. The last time I talked about him, he had written an impassioned, indignant dissent to a three-judge panel decision that overturned Texas’s reapportionment as a racial gerrymander. Smith disagreed, and the Supreme Court concluded that he was correct.

This time, he was the author of a Fifth Circuit decision that reversed a district court ruling that invalidated a Mississippi law banning educational institutions from mandating DEI programs and diversity trainings in a variety of contexts. The lazy district judge had taken a number of procedural shortcuts and—worse—has apparently used AI to draft his opinion, which included cites to non-existent cases. Smith’s opinion thundered:

The proceedings in the district court were a botch job, to say the least. Judge Henry Wingate issued a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) enjoining enforcement of H.B. 1193 that contained several factual assertions nowhere to be found in the record, or indeed, in any proceeding of the case. Those included mention of plaintiffs and defendants not in the complaint, supposed “declarations” from non-existent or never-present individuals, false quotations purporting to be taken from the text of H.B. 1193, and several erroneous claims that the law had already led to the demise of apparently fictitious programs. After this came to light, Judge Wingate replaced the TRO without explaining.

The coup de grace was that the district court was not only reversed, but the case was ordered reassigned upon remand, with these scathing words:

This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications. Upon discovering some of these falsehoods, Judge Wingate dug in his heels and claimed that the hallucinated claims had no bearing on its reasoning; he offered no explanation as to why he included such apparently irrelevant material in the original TRO or why the TRO nevertheless was justified in its absence.

Moreover, the district court got the law wrong. The TRO and preliminary injunction order rested on impoverished legal analysis that barely paid lip-service to the precedents of the Supreme Court or this court, seeming at times purposely to misconstrue the law by manipulating the words of statutes and cases, without regard to their texts’ meaning as a whole. The district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda.

Because of the extraordinarily grave errors by the district court, we vacate and remand for assignment to a different district judge.

Ouch! Judge Wingate needs to retire.

En banc Fifth Circuit on bond for illegal aliens pending deportation

The Fifth Circuit, covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, is one of the nation’s most conservative courts of appeal. In a critically-important immigration case (because habeas jurisdiction for illegal aliens is limited to where they are physically located, and many are housed in Texas), Rodriguez v. Vergara, the court ruled 11-6 that illegal aliens caught in the interior can be detained without bond for the duration of their removal proceedings. Meaning no release on bond.  No more “catch and release.” No more habeas writs being granted by liberal district judges.

Judge James Ho, appointed by President Trump, concurred, stating that

A nation ceases to be a nation if it can’t protect its borders. Congress has chosen to police our borders by detaining illegal aliens found in our country pending their removal proceedings. See 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A).

According to our dissenting colleagues, however, illegal aliens have not only a de facto constitutional right to remain in our country unlawfully, but an incentive to make this their home. That’s because, to quote the principal dissent, once an alien has “acquired a domicil or residence” in America, it no longer matters that they are breaking the law to be here—their detention becomes an offense to “‘liberty’ . . . at its core,” and an affront to freedom “at its most basic,” namely, “freedom from physical restraint.”

Judge Andrew Oldham, also a Trump appointee, wrote a scholarly concurring opinion on habeas corpus. IMO both Ho and Oldham are auditioning for the Supreme Court.

The six dissenting judges consist of five Democrat appointees and a GWB appointee.

Cases to watch in the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s 2026-27 term has started. Some cases have been argued, and hearing has been granted to some other cases. A couple of interesting ones stand out:

Procedure required for removal/deportation of illegal aliens

The Supreme Court decided that it would hear as a fully briefed case the issue involving the removal to third countries of illegal aliens to willing third countries when the alien’s home country will not accept them back. In the Supreme Court the case is styled Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D.

Bill Shipley (shipwreckedcrew) explains:

Removal to a third country was expressly provided for by Congress in the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA). But prior to the Biden Administration the U.S. never had tens of millions of newly arrived illegal immigrants for whom obstruction of the removal process was a tactic for bringing it all to a near standstill. One method for obstructing the removal process and bogging down the immigration courts has been the tactic of aliens seeking “Withholding of Removal” and/or seeking asylum from an immigration judge that prevents returning the alien to his home country. Since third country removal was a rarely used alternative, the resulting outcome over several Presidential administrations has been to allow these aliens to remain in the United States with little or no actual effort being made to find a country willing to accept them. Having “Withholding of Removal” became, in effect, quasi-lawful status to remain in the United States….

All indications — and I mean all — point towards a SCOTUS decision that takes Judge Murphy and the First Circuit to the woodshed on this issue. Six Justices have signaled multiple times over 16 months that the procedures being used by the Trump DHS for third country removals are legally and constitutionally sufficient as they have allowed the removals to continue notwithstanding Judge Murphy’s repeated efforts to create procedural barriers where Congress elected to not do so….

As the situation currently stands, Judge Murphy is likely to earn the noted distinction of being stayed or reversed four times in one case by the Supreme  Court. That’s quite an accomplishment for a Judge with less than two years on the bench.

SCOTUS to review home distilling ban

Shades of Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich (2005)!

The Fifth Circuit (per Judge Edith Jones) held that Congress lacks constitutional authority to prohibit the home distilling of alcohol for personal consumption. Federal law has been in place since 1868. Home brewing of beer is ok. Making wine at home is ok. But home distilling of consumable spirits is illegal. Because distilling alcohol is taxed, the issue will not be Commerce Clause authority, but whether the statutory prohibition on at-home distillation of spirits is a “necessary and proper” exercise of Congress’s power to “tax.”

The Sixth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in 2026. Who is right? We will soon find out!