It’s the latest ruling striking down one of Trump’s revenge orders against law firms the president doesn’t like.
Fully blocking Trump’s order against the firm Jenner & Block, the George W. Bush appointee noted that the order in this case is one of several targeting firms that “did not bow to the current presidential administration’s political orthodoxy.” The judge said the order went after the firm “because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed.”
Sitting in Washington, D.C., Bates called the order “doubly violative of the Constitution.”
“Most obviously,” he wrote, quoting a recent Supreme Court precedent, “retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work — and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward — violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’”
The judge also highlighted the “more subtle but perhaps more pernicious” issue of “the message the order sends to the lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy.”
He said the order “seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers. It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.”
