Reagan Judges Are Unrestrained Critics of Trump’s Legal Moves

Judges appointed by President Ronald Reagan are emerging as vocal critics of the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent court orders or challenge the law in unprecedented ways, backed by decades of experience and plenty of practice being blunt in other cases.

The judges—all in their 80s and located in Washington, Boston, Seattle, and Charlottesville, Va.—have made notable remarks from the bench or in written rulings.

Some jurists are more guarded, speaking about the power of the courts and imploring the administration to respect them.

Others see little reason to trust the administration at this stage.

“The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies—all of it,” Senior US District Judge William G. Young said in a Sept. 30 order. “The President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act.”

The Reagan judges’ written orders and bench rulings have been all the more striking due to the reverence the former Republican president still enjoys in the party, a respect currently embodied by the 40th president’s portrait hanging prominently in the Oval Office. This judicial pushback also evidences an evolution of conservative ideology in the decades since Reagan’s presidency.

Thomas Scott, a former Reagan-appointed federal judge in Miami, said his generation of judges are institutionalists who won’t stand for parties trying to subvert an order.

“They’re going to come down very hard,” Scott said. “You’re playing games with the court and it’s not going to be successful.”

John D. Tinder, a fellow former Reagan appointee who sat on the Chicago-based US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said these judges are simply speaking out the way that any other judge would against non-compliance.

But he said the Reagan appointees’ long tenures on the bench “might make them less patient, and they might be more likely to call something for what it is rather than beat around the bush.”

‘Concerning Disrespect’

The remarks by the Reagan appointees date back to the early days of the second Trump administration.

At a Feb. 6 hearing in Seattle, Senior US District Judge John C. Coughenour said he placed great value on the rule of law as he ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” he said. “The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.”

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit struck a more amenable tone in an April 16 opinion. He said he hadn’t given up on the executive branch following the rule of law, but urged the administration to respect the courts.

“The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph,” said Wilkinson, who’s based out of Virginia.

Judge Royce Lamberth

Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In Washington, Senior US District Judge Royce Lamberth has pushed for compliance with his decisions. He did so most recently in a Sept. 29 opinion, in which he dedicated a page to the administration’s “concerning disrespect” toward his orders over the attempted shuttering of Voice of America.

Young in Boston arguably drew the most attention with his 161-page opinion against the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech by non-citizens.

“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” Young said. “Is he correct?”

Long Tenures

One reality for many Reagan appointees to the federal bench is that the political winds have shifted during their decades of service, making their institutional conservatism a relic of the Republican Party’s history, experts said.

Legal experts say Reagan appointed judges who he believed possessed the same conservative ideologies as he did. Reagan accepted that the post-World War II regulatory state wasn’t going anywhere, but he sought judicial nominees with “thoughtful, principled conservatism” who would be a check on its expansion, said Yale Law School professor Bruce Ackerman.

But “there couldn’t be more of a conflict,” Ackerman said, between that vision and the current administration’s attempts to consolidate power in the executive branch.

The blunt opinions and sermonizing from the bench present some risks, according to Maya Sen, a Harvard professor who has written about ideology in the federal judiciary. The writings, she said, could provide ammunition to some in the administration who would push the government to defy court rulings entirely.

‘“You’re poking the bear, but it could be counterproductive in the way the administration could unleash significant backlash,” Sen said. “They’re willing to do things that have been largely seen to be outside of the rule of law and defying lower courts would be consistent with that.”

The White House pushed back following some of the judges’ opinions. After Young’s ruling last week, a White House official shared a list of other cases in which Young has been reversed or chided by a higher court.

Charles Geyh, a judicial ethics expert with Indiana University, said in the past, he may have debated whether it was proper for a judge to write the way Young did in his opinion. But he said he was unlikely to do that now, as the rule of law is in a “precarious position.”

“They are in some ways the only voices that are being heard above the din of the administration,” Geyh said.

Outspoken Judges

For many of these judges, being vocal isn’t new.

In 2006, a federal appeals court in Washington removed Lamberth from overseeing long-running litigation involving the Interior Department over indigenous peoples’ oil and gas royalties. The DC Circuit pointed to Lamberth in an opinion describing the federal agency as “a dinosaur—the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.”

Young has been outspoken in high profile cases throughout his career, including his overseeing of the case against al-Qaeda “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in the early 2000s.

His moves to promptly hold bench trials on Trump administration policies, as similar challenges have flooded the Boston courthouse, put him in the center of the debate over the administration’s use of executive power.

Young in June addressed how the constitutional protections afforded to federal judges has bolstered his ability to speak clearly about claims of discrimination by the administration’s slashing of grants supporting research they deemed tied to unfavored DEI initiatives.

“I’ve asked myself, what if I didn’t have those protections? What if my job was on the line, my profession, all the career to which I have devoted whatever poor skill I have, would I have stood up against all of this?” Young said following closing arguments in a trial over cuts at the National Institutes of Health.

Young concluded that he’s “unutterably sad” that he doesn’t have an answer to that question.

“Is it true of our society as a whole, have we fallen so low?” he said. “Have we no shame?”