Trump’s Battles with the 9th Circuit Escalate as Judicial Independence is Tested
A deepening conflict between the Trump management and the U.S.9th Circuit Court of Appeals, even after the appointment of conservative judges, is raising concerns about the limits of presidential power and the independence of the judiciary.
President Trump’s long-running feud with the 9th circuit Court of Appeals has entered a new phase, marked by increasingly direct attacks on judges – including his own appointees – as the administration seeks to deploy the National Guard to police American streets. The escalating tension centers on legal challenges to the administration’s authority and the extent to which courts should defer to the president’s judgment, particularly regarding national security and law enforcement.
The conflict reached a boiling point after U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland, Oregon, temporarily blocked the deployment of federalized troops. “I appointed the judge and he goes like that – I wasn’t served well,” Trump reportedly told reporters Sunday, sharply criticizing Immergut. He went on to say, “To have a judge like that, that judge ought to be ashamed of himself,” despite Immergut being a woman.
This outburst is part of a pattern of the president railing against judges who rule against him,previously labeling them as “monsters,”
The dispute extends beyond the courts,with California Governor Gavin Newsom publicly rebuking the National Governors Association for its silence on the administration’s actions. In a letter to his fellow governors, Newsom accused the association of abandoning its bipartisan principles by failing to defend the constitutional authority of governors. He specifically cited the administration’s decision to deploy Texas National Guard troops to Illinois and Oregon without those states’ consent as a risky precedent, calling for a “denounce this infringement of state sovereignty.” Newsom threatened to withdraw California’s membership if the association fails to act.
The 9th Circuit’s June decision has become a key reference point for states seeking to limit what Oregon officials have described as a “nationwide campaign to assimilate the military into civilian law enforcement.” while the decision acknowledges a degree of deference to the president on factual issues, Somin noted that “when what the president does is totally divorced from reality, that limit is breached.”
Judge immergut appeared to agree, stating in her ruling that the circumstances in Portland this fall differed substantially from those in Los Angeles earlier in the year. She observed that recent protests outside Portland’s ICE headquarters have been largely peaceful, characterized by “lawn chairs and low energy,” contrasting with earlier instances of violence. “violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here, and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using nonmilitary federal law enforcement,” Immergut wrote. She emphasized that deference to the president is not a license to “ignore the facts on the ground.”
However, legal experts acknowledge the difficulty in determining where the appellate court will ultimately draw the line regarding presidential fact-finding. “How much deference is owed to the president? That’s something we’re all talking about,” said John C. Dehn, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The question of whether courts can even review the president’s judgment is a point of contention, even among the president’s conservative judicial nominees and Justice Department attorneys.
So far, the administration has based its authority to deploy troops on an obscure subsection of the U.S. Code, a legal interpretation that Dehn and others have characterized as “semantic and divorced from its legal context.” They argue the administration is engaging in “linguistic manipulation of these statutes,” rather than good-faith statutory interpretation. Immergut echoed this sentiment, citing Supreme Court precedent that emphasizes the importance of interpreting statutes as a whole.
For some conservative legal scholars, the willingness of Trump appointees to challenge repeated deployments could signal a limit to presidential authority – or a dangerous escalation in the administration’s attacks on dissenting jurists. “it’s obvious the administration is trying to do this on a bigger scale,” Somin said. “Ideally we would not rely on litigation alone to deal with it.”
