Next stop: Trump's judges

 

He'll be running to SCOTUS.

“Have we no shame?” Judge William Young asked, in an unmistakeable echo of attorney Jack Welch, who famously punctured Joe McCarthy’s popularity with his simple plea for decency.

[...]

[Trump] declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” and branded “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex” as discriminatory against women and girls.

  Public Notice

Not in their name, asshole.

This is a radical misstatement of the law. No court in the land has ever held that DEI — whatever that means — constitutes racial discrimination, or that allowing trans people to participate in society amounts to gender discrimination. It also defies the medical and scientific consensus about sex, gender, and biology. But no matter! The president redefined reality by executive fiat, and then instructed his minions to carry out a purge consistent with his edict.

[...]The administration immediately moved to kick trans service members out of the military, reorient the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to focus on “DEI-related discrimination at work,” and pulled down websites on everything from baseball icon Jackie Robinson to transgender health care.

But while the government was busy deleting pronouns from civil servants’ signature lines, it also slashed thousands of federal grants because some DOGE bro (or possibly an AI) decided that the recipient was vaguely “woke” — whatever that means. At NIH, more than a $1 billion of funding was cut because of its supposed association with “woke” ideologies.

[...]

A coalition of 16 blue states sued, and the case was joined with a similar one filed by several public health and labor groups. They argued that NIH “adopted a series of directives that blacklist certain topics — e.g., ‘DEI,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘vaccine hesitancy’ — that the Administration disfavors.”

All the impoundment cases, which involve money appropriate by Congress which the Trump administration simply refuses to disburse, recite a now-familiar set of legal claims. And indeed the plaintiffs here, too, argue that the president is violating the Spending Clause and the separation of powers — essentially that he is stealing Congress’s power over the federal budget. They also call the grant terminations “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

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Judge Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1985, called the terminations “arbitrary and capricious.” But he went further than other judges in the many impoundment suits, calling the administration out for its flagrant animus against racial and sexual minorities.

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” he said, according to Politico. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

[...]

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore rather than seriously examine biological realities,” [DOJ lawyer Thomas Ports Jr.] said. ”It is an improvement to eliminate these.”

“Where’s the support for that?” Judge Young shot back. “I see no evidence of that.”

Of course, there is no such evidence of that, which is why the government never presented any. Instead it pointed to Trump’s executive orders, insisting that the president gets to make his own reality. [...] Ports wasn’t even able to define “DEI” when pressed by the court.

“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” the judge hammered on. “The Constitution will not permit that.”

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“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Judge Young fumed. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.”

Just wait, judge.