A Dallas lawyer has come up with a unique way that courts could stop President Donald Trump’s whirlwind of executive action.
David Coale wrote in Salon Saturday that judges buried under multiple court orders challenging a flood of legally dubious executive actions could take a tactic usually reserved for extreme time wasters.
It would, he said, deal with Trump’s suggestion that, whichever way courts rule, his administration could just ignore them — and the judiciary would effectively be powerless to enforce it.
Coale gives the example of a “jailhouse lawyer” — such as a prisoner serving a life sentence in prison who fights his sentence by filing a multitude of frivolous lawsuits.
Judges, Coale argues, can cut through the time-wasting by ruling the filer is a “vexatious litigant” — and dismissing their claims out of hand.
The same could be done to the president's administration, Coale claimed.
“What if the judiciary treated the federal government itself as a vexatious litigant?” he asked.
“Imagine courts refusing to hear broad categories of cases where the United States is a party until the executive branch obeys court orders. The agencies and departments that make up the federal government rely heavily on the courts to enforce contracts, prosecute criminal cases, and otherwise resolve a sprawling range of disputes about the operation of government.
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“A refusal to entertain some — or most — cases from an Administration that disrespects judicial authority would be a drastic but forceful step — and far more effective than imposing fines that will likely not be paid.”
The action, he said, would be like judges declaring they were on strike when it came to government business before them.
"The functional equivalent of a “judicial strike” is a radical idea without precedent,” he wrote.
“But so is an administration openly contemplating the defiance of court orders. … If court orders can be ignored without meaningful consequence, then courts will be losing cases anyway — and the most impactful ones, where the Constitution’s limits on executive power are at issue.”
