Could DOGE kill judicial injunctive abuse? (02-20-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] So could DOGE kill off judicial abuses? I don't know if this was the intention or if this is just gravy, but either way, I am here for it. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which despite what apparently a lot of people on the left and in the media, but I repeat myself, believe, they think this is some sort of a new agency.

[00:00:55] It's actually not. It's just a rebrand of an existing thing that was created by Barack Obama. So they're going through, they're finding waste, fraud, abuse, they're putting people on paid leave, they're offering early retirements and stuff. They're just cutting, cut, cut, cut, cut. And to quote Kevin O'Leary.

[00:01:17] And one of the things, though, that this has prompted, aside from the the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the three person press conference outside of the the various government agencies and such. And the weird defense by Democrats and like, I can't believe they hate IRS auditors so much.

[00:01:40] Who are these American people here? Aside from all of that, we could be seeing a dismantling of injunction abuse. Injunctive relief. It no, that's it's not pink eye. It's although it is kind of as annoying and apparently as contagious as of late. But no, this is where people judge shop. Democrats mainly go to a court.

[00:02:11] And try to get a court to stop something from happening across the entire country. And all they have to do is convince one judge at a federal district level. So the AP, who takes whatever Hamas says at face value, the AP still not allowed on Air Force One because they don't they don't want to call it the Gulf of America.

[00:02:35] They will call everybody by pronouns and they will, you know, mess with our language in all sorts of other ways and then direct every newsroom that subscribes to the AP style book to do so as well. So but they will not be dictated to by a Republican when it comes to the Gulf of America. So. They did a story on Doge notching courtroom wins.

[00:03:01] Labor unions, Democrats and federal employees. But I repeat myself, have filed several lawsuits arguing that Doge is running roughshod over privacy protections or usurping power from other branches of government. But judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents haven't always gone along with those arguments, at least so far.

[00:03:24] Most notably, Doge critics are failing to obtain temporary restraining orders or TROs. OK, this is what the lawyers do. We saw this in North Carolina. We've seen it in North Carolina ever since the Republicans won control of the General Assembly. You get these leftist nonprofits.

[00:03:46] That rush to a judge in Durham or Wake County or something, and they get one judge to issue some sort of an injunction filing a temporary restraining order to prevent a law from taking effect across the entire state. Right. And this is what is happening at the national level, too, where you go and you find a forum with a sympathetic judge, with an allied philosophical fellow traveler judge.

[00:04:12] And they issue a restraining order preventing something from occurring across the entire country, even though the rest of the country is not a party to the actual lawsuit. So. The latest is Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee, by the way, and this is a case involving the Office of Personnel Management.

[00:04:40] And the judge there said it's not the job of the federal courts to police the security of the information systems in the executive branch, because the the the fear is that, oh, my gosh, these Doge employees, they're going to have access to this information. And it's that makes it insecure. And, oh, my God, look at all the terrible things that could happen if we let them do their jobs. Right.

[00:05:04] Right. And so the and so the the the the people go and they file the lawsuits and the judges in some cases have said, I'm very concerned as well. But a fear of something that might happen. Is not irreparable harm. And that's why you would allow a TRO. Right. Because it hasn't happened yet.

[00:05:33] Trump has been blocked, at least temporarily, in his efforts to limit birthright citizenship, to freeze congressionally authorized foreign aid and to stop some health care services for transgender youth. There you go. There's another example of the Associated Press. They refer to it as health care services for transgender youth. OK.

[00:05:56] Later in this piece, an exception to Doge's legal victories has been two lawsuits regarding Treasury Department systems, which are used to distribute trillions of dollars in federal money. The databases can include sensitive information like bank accounts and Social Security numbers, and they are traditionally maintained by only nonpartisan career officials. Because obviously, if you work for the federal government, you're obviously nonpartisan. Right.

[00:06:27] A judge in Washington restricted Doge's access to two staff members, while another judge in New York has temporarily blocked Doge altogether. They go on to quote a couple different people, Norm Eisen, of all people. But they then asked John, you why? Oh, oh. And if that name rings a bell, it's because he was the one that came up with the defense of the waterboarding and such during the war on terror. Right.

[00:06:56] He was a Bush guy. He's now a law professor at University of California in Berkeley. And he said an important factor has been the administration's contention that Musk is a presidential advisor without any independent authority. He said there are echoes of another legal battle from the 1990s when Hillary Clinton chaired a health care task force as first lady.

[00:07:25] Remember Hillary care? A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. ruled that the task force did not need to comply with rules on open meetings. So they could hold their meetings in closed session, basically outside the view of the public.

[00:07:46] So a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Hillary Clinton's task force holding secret meetings. OK, because it's just a task force. Hello, consequences of my own actions. Yes, we meet again. So you got the ruling you wanted for that. And now. That's precedent.

[00:08:13] And now you're trying to argue the opposite because it's Elon Musk, who actually is not holding the private meetings, actually posting all of this stuff onto social media. A major victory for Trump and Musk came in Boston, where U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. allowed the administration to implement its deferred resignation program. Commonly described as a buyout, the program allows workers to quit while still getting paid until September 30th.

[00:08:40] It was challenged by a group of labor unions who called anybody who took the deal a scab. Remember that? But O'Toole, by the way, it was a Clinton appointee. The judge also decided, Randolph Moss, that judge, decided not to block Musk's team from viewing education department data. More on that in a bit.

[00:09:05] But he pointed out that Doge employees had testified in court papers they would follow laws around information sharing. So they've said we're going to follow all the laws on that. District Judge John Bates, a W. Bush appointee, did not stand in the way of Doge's involvement at the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Although Bates said he had concerns about the privacy issues raised, he found the evidence did not justify a court block. OK.

[00:09:33] The lawyers say the Doge team is not running rampant, accessing any data system they desire, and they have gotten security training and they have signed nondisclosure agreements. OK. So that sets the table, right? You got all the lawsuits trying to get these temporary restraining orders. And if it seems confusing, that's because it is. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too.

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[00:10:52] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. All right. So I mentioned a couple of cases, these requests for injunctive relief or temporary restraining orders against various things that Doge and the Trump administration has been trying to do up in Massachusetts. Massachusetts, or should I call it Hamasachusetts? I'm not sure.

[00:11:16] They have blocked a judge up there, blocked the Trump administration's rate change to NIH grants, National Institutes for Health, National Institute for Health. The grants. And this is nuts. Elon Musk responded to this calling it deeply wrong. He said a judge blocked dropping the overhead charged on, which is like administrative and all that, like non-program related costs.

[00:11:43] So when you apply for a grant with the NIH, you're allowed to get the overhead as a percentage of the total grant. You can get like 60 percent of that grant to go to just overhead, not the actual research.

[00:12:05] So obviously, this is why these, you know, UNC, Duke University, right, this is why they hire grant writers. Because if you can just keep the flow of grants coming, you can pay for all these other facilities and personnel and whatever the overhead is. You just keep offloading those costs and paying for it with federal taxpayer dollars.

[00:12:29] And what the Doge guys, or as I've seen, who was this that sent the email, Dennis, suggests we call them the Musketeers, the Doge Musketeers, if you will. But they're just saying, no, 60 percent overhead is nuts. It should be tops 15, 15 percent.

[00:12:48] Look, if you're donating money to a charity, you don't, you shouldn't donate money to a charity if more than 15 percent is going to their overhead, to their administrative costs. Every dollar I give to a charitable organization, I want the most amount of money. In fact, I usually want it to be around 90 cents of every dollar to go to the program, not to overhead, not to administrative.

[00:13:17] So that's another example. And then a federal judge, yes, or sorry, Tuesday, declined to block Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency from accessing government data or firing federal employees. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, or Chutkan? Chutkan?

[00:13:43] Anyway, she declined to grant the plaintiff's request for a temporary restraining order, saying that their failure to demonstrate evidence of irreparable harm caused by Doge's access. That's the reason. She's like, yeah, you can call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.

[00:14:10] In these circumstances, though, it has to be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. She says it cannot issue a TRO, temporary restraining order, especially one as wide ranging as plaintiff's request, without clear evidence of imminent irreparable harm to these plaintiffs.

[00:14:31] The decision is a blow to the coalition of 14 Democrat state attorneys general who sued to temporarily restrict Doge's access to federal data about government employees.

[00:14:45] Those states argued that the leadership role held by Musk represents an unlawful delegation of executive power and threatened what they described as widespread disruption to employees working across various federal agencies and government contractors. Disruption is not illegal.

[00:15:06] Disruption is illegal.

[00:15:37] This is according to the piece at Fox News. The Musk led agency was created via executive order earlier this year. Its status as a temporary organization within the White House gives Doge and its employees 18 months to carry out its goals of optimizing the federal government, streamlining its operations and doing it all at a lower cost. Keep in mind, this is not the creation of a new entity. It is the renaming of an existing one that Obama created.

[00:16:05] Again, you guys on the left were the ones that created all of this infrastructure. Now you're mad that somebody is using it to undermine your policy preferences and ideological goals. That's really what's going on. Here's a great idea. Yep. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain? And Cabins of Asheville is your connection.

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[00:17:22] And they have pet-friendly accommodations. Call or text 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. So, Doge has this wide-ranging mission.

[00:17:39] And according to Fox News, combined with its lack of specifics, it sparked fresh concerns from outside observers who have questioned how exactly the group plans to deliver on its ambitious optimization goals in such a short amount of time. And I'm wondering if those people think that, well, they probably have no experience in the private sector as a business owner, right? Because you can actually do this stuff very quickly. Trust me, I've had it done to me.

[00:18:09] It happens very quickly. But Musk and his allies have wasted little time racing to do just that. They've spent the last past month racing to deliver on what they see as one of Trump's biggest campaign trail pledges, reducing bloated federal budgets, aggressively slashing government waste, and firing or putting on ice large swaths of federal employees. And that brings me to Mr. Wonderful, a.k.a. Kevin O'Leary, he of the Shark Tank fame.

[00:18:38] He was on CNN. And he is loving what he is seeing. I think the issue is they're not whacking enough. There's this concept in private equity when you get a bankrupt company and you go in there, you cut 20 percent more than your initial read. And then you find like a pool of mercury, the organization gels back together again, always cut deeper, harder when there's fat and waste. The FAA, it's not the people.

[00:19:07] The code is cobalt. It's from the 60s. It needs CapEx put into it for the technology to be upgraded to make it safer. Fat like a chicken. All of these agencies are like big fat chickens dripping over barbecues of fat. This is the best barbecue I've ever seen, but I don't think it's happening fast enough. They're not cutting enough. Keep slashing. Keep hacking while you have a 24-month mandate before the midterms.

[00:19:35] Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Cut, more, more cutting. Believe me, it's going to work out just great. Everybody should be happy about this. Even people with the nuclear codes? Cut them too? Cut everything. Because if you don't see what they're doing and they can't show you that they're adding value, you whack. You whack. Right. No, not you, Jeffrey Toobin. Not you. All right.

[00:20:00] So this brings me now to the larger issue here, which is the judicial abuses that we have seen. Okay. And all of this whacking and cutting and filing of the lawsuit, seeking temporary restraining orders, this might actually force the U.S. Supreme Court to do something about this injunctive relief abuse. Right.

[00:20:23] This lawfare tactic that the left has been using and now increasingly the right as well of going to a judge, getting a temporary restraining order, and stopping some sort of government action that you don't like. It's like a venue for policy disagreement. And that's not what the courts are supposed to be used for.

[00:20:47] They're supposed to be there to clear out the federal district courts are supposed to clear out a lot of the less important cases so not everything goes all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would not have time to hear all the cases from all across the country. They are mechanisms for the U.S. Supreme Court to distribute the workload.

[00:21:12] But Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court justices, and also Clarence Thomas, in a case from like five years ago, they were talking about this process. Gorsuch said, he says, Despite the fluid state of some things, we now have an injunction to rule over all of them. They were ruling on some injunction. The one before us in which a single judge in New York enjoined the government from applying a new definition to anybody

[00:21:41] without regard to geography or participation in this lawsuit or any other lawsuit. This is one lawsuit. And it's affecting the entire country. And nobody else is a plaintiff to this case. It's just this one plaintiff here. The Second Circuit declined to stay, issue a stay, for this particular injunction. And now, after so many trips up and down and all around the judicial map, the government brings its well-rehearsed arguments before us.

[00:22:08] The real problem here, he says, is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. What is he saying? This is a warning shot that you district court level judges, you are outside your lanes.

[00:22:30] When a district court orders the government not to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise to its jurisdiction in the first place. But if a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take or not take some specific action with respect to people who are strangers to the suit,

[00:22:55] well, then it's hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies. Injunctions like these thus raise serious questions about the scope of courts' equitable powers under Article 3. This is actually the constitutional crisis here, lefties.

[00:23:28] It has become increasingly apparent, he goes on to say, that the court must, this court, the Supreme Court, has to at some point confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. He says, this case illustrates the routine issuance of universal injunctions and that this is unworkable. It sows chaos for the litigants, for the government, for the courts,

[00:23:55] and everybody affected by the conflicting decisions that get made first at the district level, then at appeals court level, then it goes back to the district, and then that gets a ruling, and then that gets appealed, and then it goes to the appeals court, and then that gets appealed or sent back. It's just back and forth and up and down, and everybody's in a state of chaos in the meantime. And he's like, you're supposed to be looking at these individual cases in a methodical way,

[00:24:22] developing your arguments and your evidence, and the cases are supposed to be limited to the people participating in the cases. But now, he says, you have both sides forced to rush from one preliminary injunction hearing to another, leaping from one emergency stay application to the next, each with potentially nationwide stakes,

[00:24:49] and all based on expedited briefings and little opportunity for the adversarial testing of the evidence. This is not normal. He says that this is not normal. Universal injunctions have little basis in traditional equitable practice, and they hardly seem an innovation we should rush to embrace. He's like, we shouldn't be doing this.

[00:25:15] By their nature, this kind of a sweeping universal injunction forces judges into making rushed decisions, high-stakes decisions, while having low information. There's a trifecta of dumbassery. What are we doing? He didn't say that. I'm saying that. He would not put that in the opinion. The rise of nationwide injunctions may be just a sign of our impatient times, he says.

[00:25:45] But he said there are costs. There are right now more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges in 94 judicial districts and subject to review in 12 regional courts of appeal. Because plaintiffs generally are not bound by adverse decisions against them in cases to which they are not a party. There is nearly a boundless opportunity to shop for a friendly forum to secure a win nationwide. Right?

[00:26:14] That's the feature. It's not a bug. That's the reason why the tactic exists. That's why the left has done this. Is so they can forum shop. They can find a lawyer with a wardrobe change that agrees with them, that they know is, quote, you know, on their side, and then they go to that judge and they get one judge in one venue that they know will agree with them to issue an injunction that affects the entire country.

[00:26:43] And it slows down whatever the Republicans are trying to do. It's lawfare. And it's been called out in the past by Supreme Court judges. And maybe the flurry of suits we're seeing from regarding Doge might make a change now that might lead to some sort of a change. We can hope. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room.

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[00:28:09] I got a message on the Twitter machine from Eric. It's a Pete tweet. He says, Correct. We had a voter ID law that took almost, I think, maybe even longer than a decade to implement.

[00:28:38] After dozens of other states enacted voter ID laws that were way more stringent than ours. And the left just kept suing. They just kept suing. And it got to a point where it's like, you guys really just don't want any kind of election security, do you? I'm okay with election security. I just want anybody to be able to vote, really. And let's not even ask them their names.

[00:29:10] You never hear Democrats talking about election security to this point. You never hear them talk about it. It's always about access, access, access. We want more people voting. We want everybody to vote. It's going to get to a point where it's like we're going to have left-wing nonprofits going to people's homes and getting them to vote. That's, I think, where they want to go with all of it. We're going to make it so easy to vote that you don't even have to vote yourself. You just have somebody else cast your ballot for you.

[00:29:39] And then everybody's participating. Yay! No fraud there. Back to this opinion that was written by Gorsuch. This was, again, from 2020. In a case unrelated to any of the Doge stuff. But he's firing a warning shot. Oh, sorry. Trigger warning.

[00:30:00] He's firing a warning shot to the left and to this lawfare tactic and these judges at the lower levels in the federal district system that are doing these sweeping injunctions, granting temporary restraining orders against laws. And the orders then lock down things across the entire country. We saw this also with the, quote, Muslim ban, which wasn't a ban on Muslims. Right?

[00:30:27] This was the travel ban saying we're not going to take people from these countries that hate us. Right? And then you get one judge someplace in San Francisco that's like, you can't do that! And then nobody can do it. And then the whole federal government has to stop because one judge someplace made a ruling and has it apply to everybody. And the lawyers know this and so they forum shop. They judge shop. They go around and look for a judge that they think will be, they know who they are.

[00:30:57] That's why, like, so many of these cases in North Carolina with the voter ID stuff went through a judge out of Greensboro. I forget his name. But they would go in front of him all the time because they knew that he was an ally. Gorsuch says the risk of winning conflicting nationwide injunctions is real and the stakes are asymmetric.

[00:31:20] If a single successful challenge is enough to stop a rule across the entire country, the government's hope of implementing any new policy could face the long odds of a straight sweep, parlaying a 94-0 win in the district courts into a 12-0 victory in the Court of Appeal.

[00:31:41] A single loss and the policy goes on ice, maybe for good or for some indeterminate period of time until another court jumps in to grant another stay. And then all of that can repeat ad infinitum until either one side gives up or the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear the case. What in this gamesmanship and chaos can we be proud of?

[00:32:12] I concur in the court's decision in this case, but I hope, too, that we might, at an appropriate juncture, take up some of the underlying constitutional questions raised by the rise of nationwide injunctions. Gorsuch is already there. Gorsuch already wants to do something. Clarence Thomas wants to do something.

[00:32:38] He has spoken about this in other opinions in the past as well. So you already have this sentiment on the U.S. Supreme Court. They recognize the problem. They recognize the chaos that is created by this kind of lawfare tactic. And hopefully you get enough of these cases that get brought and you're going to start testing all of these different injunctions

[00:33:06] and it might open up this question sort of at a larger level of what can the U.S. Supreme Court do? How can they direct the lower courts to quit their B.S.? Right? Stop it. To stop doing this stuff. I don't know. I'm not a Supreme Court expert. I don't know how they would go about doing it. But fingers crossed. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:33:37] I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.