Harley-Loving 83-Year-Old Judge Is Trump’s Latest Antagonist

A cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s bid to reshape the US immigration system has run into an early roadblock: an octogenarian federal judge in Seattle.

In just 24 hours, John Coughenour, a US district judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, has emerged as a celebrity among opponents of the new president’s agenda. The 83-year-old jurist, who stopped riding his Harley-Davidson just a few years ago at the urging of his wife, has long been known for directing tough questions at lawyers arguing cases in his courtroom.

Coughenour’s probing, no-nonsense style was on full display Thursday in one of the highest-profile cases of his four decades on the bench. He did little to hide that he was highly skeptical of the Trump executive order limiting birthright citizenship, as he weighed a bid from Washington state to block the administration’s plans.

John C. Coughenour

Photographer: Rene Macura/AP Photo

A Justice Department lawyer defending Trump’s order barely spoke for 20 seconds in Coughenour’s courtroom before the judge cut him off. “In your opinion, is this executive order constitutional?” he asked the DOJ’s Brett Shumate.

Shumate said he could defend the constitutionality of the order, but the judge let the Justice Department lawyer speak for just three more minutes before interrupting him again. “I’d like to go back to your opinion about the constitutionality,” Coughenour said.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades,” he added, casting the challenge to Trump’s order as one of the clearest cases he’d ever seen. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

The swift and direct rebuke during the hearing caught some off guard. But the judge’s tone was less surprising for those who have litigated other cases before him. Granting the restraining order puts Coughenour in the company of other federal judges who repeatedly slapped back some of Trump’s most aggressive immigration moves during his first administration.

He directed the lawyers to return to his courtroom for another hearing on Feb. 6.

A court spokesperson said the judge declined to comment for this story.

‘Shell of a Curmudgeon’

In addition to tough questions from the bench, Coughenour, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1981, is known for his work ethic, according to Sam Chapin, a former litigator who externed with the judge in the early 1990s and later taught a class with him at the University of Washington School of Law.

Chapin says Coughenour was a relatively young, widely admired trial lawyer, when the Reagan administration asked Washington’s Republican senator, Slade Gorton, for three recommendations to fill a federal judge position. Gorton recommended Coughenour, and when Reagan’s staff asked for two other names, Gorton wrote back, “Coughenour, Coughenour, Coughenour.”

“He’s completely ethical and he’s very tough,” Chapin said. “In my 30-year career, I don’t think there’s another judge either on the state bench or the federal bench that has ever made lawyers as nervous to go into court.”

Chapin said law students usually started out the semester very intimidated by the judge, but they were quickly charmed by his rigorous, but good-natured banter. “He’s a softie but with the exterior shell of a curmudgeon,” he said.

Coughenour was born in Pittsburg, Kansas in 1941 and received his law degree from the University of Iowa. He was admitted to the Iowa and Washington state bars in 1966 and was a litigator with the now defunct Bogle & Gates in Seattle before his nomination to the federal bench.

First Rebuke

Coughenour is the first judge to hand Trump a legal setback, picking up where the federal judiciary left off serving as a regular foil during his first term, including on immigration. Judges last time ruled against Trump on issues including family separations at the border, legal protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children and the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

The 14-day restraining order is a placeholder while Coughenour weighs whether to sign a longer-term injunction blocking the administration from enforcing the birthright citizenship limits. Other judges are poised to act soon, with hearings scheduled in the next few weeks in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire in cases brought by immigration advocates and civil rights organizations.

At the heart of the case before Coughenour is the 14th Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the US and is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Trump’s executive order argues that the children of people who are in the US illegally or on a temporary visa do not fall under that category. Shumate on Thursday recognized that such individuals are subject to US laws, but he said those who are undocumented are still “subject to a foreign power.”

Temporary restraining orders typically can’t be appealed, but injunctions can, so the upcoming rulings from Coughenour and other judges could set in motion more rounds of litigation before higher courts, including up to the US Supreme Court. The case before Coughenour was brought by four Democratic state attorneys general, led by Washington’s Nick Brown. Another coalition of blue-state officials has a pending case in Massachusetts, but a hearing date hasn’t been scheduled yet.

Before this week, the case that earned Coughenour the most national attention was his sentencing of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian man convicted of attempting to bomb the Los Angeles airport on Jan. 1, 2000, known as the “millennium bomber.”

Citing his cooperation with US investigations of al-Qaeda, Coughenour initially sentenced him to 22 years — far less than the 65 years set by federal guidelines. An appeals court found that punishment to be insufficient, and Coughenour settled on a 37-year sentence.

Harley Rides

A 2016 profile of the judge in The Atlantic focused on his fight for more judicial discretion in sentencing after a series of reforms in the 1970s sought to make the process more formulaic. The article described how for years he would ride his Harley Davidson motorcycle to the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon, to speak with the people he had sentenced.

Over the years, Coughenour has frequently come out as a fierce defender of judicial independence. He has traveled to Russia to help nudge that country’s judiciary away from its autocratic past. Chapin says he’s also traveled as a visiting judge, including to Guam.

Writing in 2003, Coughenour expressed concern as he spoke with Russian jurists about “eroding public confidence” in US institutions in the name of national security. He described mandatory minimum sentencing as part of a troubling trend in the US that risked elevating the state above individual rights.

Coughenour’s longstanding focus on institutional integrity and the US judicial system also emerged in Thursday’s hearing. He expressed concern not just the over the merits of Trump’s executive order, but also about the Justice Department’s defense of it.

During Thursday’s hearing, Coughenour questioned how any attorney could defend an order that so “blatantly” violated the 14th amendment.

“Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?” he asked. “It just boggles my mind.”

--With assistance from Zoe Tillman.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Anna Edgerton in Washington at aedgerton@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Ben Bain at bbain2@bloomberg.net

Sara Forden

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