Another judge looking for an anti-Trump medal

On January 20, 2017, the executive power peacefully transitioned from President Obama to President Trump. 

At least one judge in San Francisco didn’t get the memo. 

Yesterday, Judge William Alsup ordered the Trump administration to keep its predecessor’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in place.  

This remarkable 49-page order has all the aesthetics of a judicial decision but is, at heart, an amateur act of punditry.  Judge Alsup paints the picture of a divided White House, wherein “the [c]hief [e]xecutive publicly favors the very program [his administration] has ended.” 

Citing a “presidential tweet,” the court suggests that DACA’s recision “was contrived to give the administration a bargaining chip to demand funding for a border wall in exchange for reviving DACA.”  These talking points could have been plagiarized from the MSNBC chyron. 

Such rhetoric in a judicial decision would have been unthinkable barely a year ago.  But now it passes for the new normal. 

Once again, the judiciary has attempted to shackle President Trump from making his own judgments about how to exercise his own power. 

The Supreme Court has reversed Judge Alsup’s outlandish rulings on DACA before. 

And it will do so again.

Obama’s memorandum reversing the policy comes the day after the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  The landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision held that a woman’s right [sic] to an abortion fell within the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment. 

The ruling gave a woman autonomy over her pregnancy during the first trimester. 

The memorandum reverses the “Mexico City policy,” initiated by President Reagan in 1984, canceled by President Clinton and reinstated by President George W. Bush in 2001.

The policy, referred to by critics as “the global gag rule,” was initially announced at a population conference in Mexico City.