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While courtrooms and mathematicians might need people to demonstrate 1 + 1 = 2, actual humans -- including judges acting of their own volition -- can notice that a) the DoJ has a long history of leaking private information like a sieve after collecting it from right-wing-aligned orgs, b) no small number of SAF's members would face social and career ramifications were their membership publicized, and c) plaintiffs presented alternatives over two weeks before the judge submitted this final judgement.
I'm sure the court can Well Asckshutally how that's not quite the explicit standard from NAACP. I'm also hoping that the 'winners' in a court case not need be faced with the question of whether the final judgement is so unconstitutional it's covered all four corners under a decades-old foundational court case, or 'just' unreasonable and harmful to the 'winners' and likely unconstitutional.
The government did not make a request. The judge ordered that the full list be delivered, in three weeks, as a final judgment binding on the parties in this case. As you so wittingly pointed out, punishable by contempt for noncompliance. If you ignore what's voluntary and what's actually mandated by court order, the court orders look fine, but you've made this mistake multiple times in this conversation, and it's fooling no one else.
I'm not claiming it's incompetence -- I specifically say "regardless of Summerhayes' relative level of competence"! -- but it's clearly a problem, and more a problem for never even questioning whether the people he's targeting would want to comply, and if the search for neutral institutions just means we get a random selection between this and "the Second Amendment does not exist in this courtroom", all it's presented is a good argument against neutral institutions.
Behold, a federal courthouse operating at peak efficiency under normal constraints. I'm not claiming these guys are just sitting on their backside and eating bonbons the whole day long, and I'm sure there's other priorities. And I'm also pretty sure that they're not putting in 9/9/6 weeks. This just wasn't a priority.
That's an unintentionally funny joke. The courtroom's activities on September 19th were a sentencing hearing for a prohibited person case (drugs, coincidentally, albeit somehow still more sympathetic than Hemani), a revocation of supervised release, and then the one case that actually involved the judge in question here, a drug-related warrant case. The first two just plainly aren't about vindicating rights; they're about enforcing the law. An important role, but a different one.
Ah, but if the court had delayed Sam, perhaps I or someone else would be moaning about that... well, no, probably not. Apologies for linking to an AI summary, but I'm not paying for this case, and there's a reason no one else is either; it's hilariously overdetermined even by the morbid standards of Fourth Amendment questions. And, bluntly, I don't think that's the actual tradeoff.
There's a more serious defense that the courts can't do that sort of prioritization. And it died with Snope. They can and do and have. This just isn't a priority; this just doesn't take precedence when countless other matters have. That's absolutely my point, and more damning's that it isn't limited to this one hobby horse.
No. My problem is that I could buy either a court system actually obsessed with legal formalism, or one that considers the rights of individuals heavy on the scale regardless of the political allegiance of those rights. We have neither. We've had neither for a long time. I've spelled out that we've had neither for a long time.
By, of course, the extremely well-grounded and long-standing principles of where that tots haven't been rebuilt post-hoc to support progressive goals and ignore conservative ones, you mean?
No, they didn't ask for emergency relief here for the same reason they didn't request a temporary restraining order, even though that'd be the only way for any of their plaintiffs to ever actually personally benefit: because the courts would suddenly find novel and strict adherence to very specific precedent, while other judges in other contexts would find such things irrelevant compared to the terrified hallucinations of an immigration lawyer.
Considered, found in contradiction with the (available, since you don't bother actually arguing it) evidence, and even were it true, still runs into the central problem that we've still seen courts bend over backwards to defend fringe positions that were broadly unpopular, by federal judges that pretended to know a lot about the law as long as it got them what they wanted. All it's done is demonstrate nothing but will to power games winning.
More broadly, your complete inability to name any case where this should fall the other direction makes clear exactly how principled this position isn't. We're over a decade past a President completely refusing to defend a federal law because he thought it unconstitutional; there's no shortage of such gun laws today, no few of which have far less political or popular support. We do not see that happen today, no matter how bullshit or outright incoherent the law, nor do we see the administration assigning Guiliani to defend the laws badly on purpose. It's not a tactic that they use because it won't work, and they've found that out once already.
There were only three plaintiffs when this case started, and the court for some godsforsaken reason isn't willing to include someone who already declared his name publicly after the case started and before it concluded, and was the only reason the plaintiffs still had standing, and would not have been covered by the previous final judgement even had SAF been willing to hand over their membership records.
I think there's a fifty-fifty chance the judge doesn't file an final judgement by the end of day after the conference, a twenty percent chance that they just end up scheduling another briefing (todo: whenever people's rights matter again), and whatever he does eventually give is a pointless pro forma that just delays the plaintiffs appeal and issuance of mandate, applying to a single-digit number of people or no one. 30% confidence it doesn't even include Broussard.
((Also, I was asking for your predictions in one of the trans military ban case. The one I linked where the courts already issued a pre-CASA injunction, where the court never did in this case, and where oral arguments have repeatedly shown judges trying to argue for the most expansive judgement possible post-CASA. By legal formalism, that's just the seven plaintiffs in that case; there's not even association standing. Do you want to bet whether that will change, and whether the join date on that organization will be set in January of this year? For the inevitable declaratory judgement?))
Strange how they'd be willing to leave money on the table, if it were so certain. Oh well, good thing we don't have recent cases where the federal courts issued broad rules that the feds would have to follow to soothe the nerves of randos making broad and unsupported claims of bad actions or suspected bad actions!
No, we usually don't. Outside of weird cases like ordinals, 2 is defined as "1 + 1".
We do need people to demonstrate that 2 + 2 = 4, though (as 4 is defined as "3 + 1"), and that 1 > 0 (I literally had to prove that for a homework assignment).
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To be clear, this isn't The Most Central Example of the problems. Unfortunately, time is an arrow, the door is ajar, talking about problems seldom coincides with maxima happening. If I absolutely had to point to a case that screamed out for preliminary injunction, I'd probably point to the Illinois ban-sans-definition, since it's a new law so all the 'maintain status quo' stuff was self-evident bunk and SCOTUS didn't care even as lower courts announced that the bans didn't even implicate 2A rights. Maybe sprinkle in some of CCW permit/renewal cases which are basically distilled "important and recurring issues which, by virtue of their relatively brief existence, would be rendered otherwise nonreviewable" and often also include state actors ignoring their own law, and never seem to matter.
But part of my point is to show that it's not some rare nutpicks, or just for cases so controversial as to get to SCOTUS, or only one particularly extreme or unusual policies, or only in particularly left-leaning jurisdictions and you could just move to a red state. On its own, this case wouldn't be that bad; maybe, eventually, someday, if a mandate ever issues and an FFL isn't terrified of the ATF playing silly buggers in three years, a 20-year-old will be able to legally buy a new handgun. But when no one can pull a counterexample from some vastly overexpansive ruling from one of Trump's many ideologically-driven and unprofessional nutjobs larger than Freedom Week, and no one can show a bigger or more by-the-book victory, and I can keep giving example after example after example over fifteen years of jurisprudence, it's a much more relevant pattern.
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