There are two things you can say about the West Coast: the coastline is beautiful, and some judge in San Francisco is working 24-7 to earn an anti-Trump medal.
We learned this week that a judge in San Francisco is challenging President Trump’s DACA decision. You can read the judge’s opinion, but it can be summed up in these simple words from Josh Blackman:
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.
Yes, he will be reversed, but the judge got his medal, and likely a few contributions if he wants to pursue some political ambitions down the road.
After looking at this bizarre opinion, we must conclude that Judge Alsup does not believe that a current president can reverse his predecessor’s executive orders. (Again, it bears repeating that President Trump was invalidating not a law passed by Congress, but rather an executive order!)
It left me wondering about prior presidents who have reversed their predecessors’ actions.
For example, let’s recall the Mexico City abortion policy going back to President Reagan. It was signed and reversed across several presidencies, as we see in this story:
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.
Someone should ask Judge Alsup about his thinking and selective concern for the law. Or maybe we should go to Judge Alsup the next time a Democrat reverses his predecessor’s executive order.
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