Federal district court judges within the DC circuit are assigned cases per a set of rules that essentially randomize court selection, but one particular jurist — Chief Judge James Boasberg — keeps getting assigned very important cases having to do with executive actions taken by President Donald Trump. Readers know that Boasberg has been quite anti-Trump, and so has a group of GOP lawmakers. They now want to know why Boasberg keeps getting Trump cases when it’s statistically impossible for him to wind up with them naturally.
The House last month passed a bill to rein in rogue judges like Boasberg and others. Questions still remain, though, and on Monday, Townhall obtained a letter from Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Chip Roy (R-TX) regarding such concerns. The letter was sent to Angela D. Caesar, the Clerk of the Court for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
As the letter notes early on, President Trump’s second term—just over 100 days in—has already faced more than 30 nationwide injunctions. “Many of these nationwide injunctions have raised concerns that Article III judges are exceeding their constitutional authority by replacing the policy decisions of the duly elected President with their own preferences, eroding public trust in the integrity and fairness of our judicial system,” says the letter.
“Many high-profile cases challenging policy decisions of the Trump Administration have been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (District Court),” the letter continued, referencing a key concern as well as previewing how Congress may look to be doing more. “As Congress considers potential legislative reforms to address the abuse of nationwide injunctions and adjust the national distribution and local assignment of cases challenging Executive Branch policy decisions, we write to request information about the District Court’s assignment of cases.”
Among the cases assigned to Judge Boasberg are those concerning the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) for deportations, as well as matters involving officials’ use of the Signal messaging app. The letter highlights that Boasberg was given these “high-profile” cases less than two weeks apart. He was also assigned cases involving the Department of Government Efficiency and federal funding for programs alleged to violate civil rights laws. While the latter case was ultimately dismissed, it was at the request of the plaintiff.
Again, the DC District Court’s local rules are used to assign cases, but questions still remain. As the rules note: “The Clerk shall create a separate assignment deck in the automated system for each subclassification of civil and criminal cases established by the Court . . . . The decks will be created by the Liaison to the Calendar and Case Management Committee or the Liaison’s backup . . . . The Calendar and Case Management Committee will, from time to time determine and indicate by order the frequency with which each judge’s name shall appear in each designated deck, to effectuate an even distribution of cases among the active judges.”
“Effectively, this process is like ‘drawing from a deck of cards, in which each judge is their own suit, with a number of cards equal to the number of cases they can draw before the case-assignment deck is reshuffled and reloaded,'” the lawmakers’ letter went on to explain, still citing the rules. “Moreover, the likelihood of a case being assigned to a particular judge ‘depends on how many cases the judge has already drawn from the deck and how many more cases the judge is required to draw that cycle.'”
And yet, somehow, the chief judge, an Obama appointee, keeps being ‘assigned’ some of the most important cases involving Trump. Hopefully, the DC Circuit Court clerk can clear this up, but on the surface, Boasberg’s assignment of Trump cases is suspicious in the very least.