Court rejects Trump suit against Maryland US judges

What happened

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed President Donald Trump's controversial lawsuit against all 15 U.S. district judges in Maryland, calling the White House's legal maneuver "potentially calamitous" and its broader "concerted effort" to "smear and impugn" federal judges "both unprecedented and unfortunate." Judge Thomas Cullen said the administration's lawsuit was legally defective and the wrong tool to challenge the Maryland district's standing order to pause all contested deportations for two business days.

Who said what

In his 39-page ruling, Cullen, a Trump appointee, said the executive branch had no authority to sue the judges and its "novel" attempt to do so threatened a "constitutional free-for-all" that could upset the balance of powers between the co-equal branches of government. The Justice Department filed its "remarkable" suit in June after growing "increasingly frustrated by rulings blocking Trump's agenda," The Associated Press said, and after "repeatedly accusing federal judges of improperly impeding his powers," especially on immigration.

Many legal experts had predicted the lawsuit "would be thrown out," Politico said, but Cullen's "decision to use the ruling to challenge Trump officials' vitriol against the judiciary" was "more surprising." Cullen "went out of his way to describe the complaint as extremely unusual," pointing to "his own role in the case as a prime example," The New York Times said. He was pulled into the suit from his courthouse in Virginia after the entire Maryland federal bench was "forced to recuse themselves" as parties to the suit.

What next?

The White House isn't "without any recourse" in its effort to litigate its "grievance with the judges," Cullen wrote, and if it "truly believes" that their "standing orders violate the law, it should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal." The Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing that it would do so.

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