The Trump administration notched another victory this week when U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington granted a motion to dismiss a case brought by five organizations to stop the cancellation of more than 360 grant awards by the Justice Department. However, in reaching this relatively straightforward conclusion, Judge Mehta opted to follow a pattern set by other judges in adding his own personal commentary on the wisdom of the policy change.
Judge Mehta easily found that he lacked jurisdiction over such questions. However, he then vented his own personal views on the policy:
“Defendants’ rescinding of these awards is shameful. It is likely to harm communities and individuals vulnerable to crime and violence. But displeasure and sympathy are not enough in a court of law.”
Actually, neither the court’s displeasure nor sympathy should be part of the decision of a court of law. With all due respect to Judge Mehta, some of us find it shameful that judges are using these opinions to express their political viewpoints.
I previously wrote about this pattern of extrajudicial commentary, particularly among the judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who previously presided over Trump’s election interference case, was criticized for failing to recuse herself from that case after she made highly controversial statements about Trump from the bench. In a sentencing hearing of a Jan. 6 rioter in 2022, Chutkan said that the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution.” She added then, “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” That “one person” was still under investigation at the time and, when Trump was charged, Chutkan refused to let the case go.
Later, Chutkan decided to use the bench to amplify her own views of the pardons and Jan. 6. Like Judge Mehta, she conceded that she could not block the pardons but used the cases to express her personal disagreements with President Trump and his policies. She proclaimed that the pardons could not change the “tragic truth” and “cannot whitewash the blood, feces and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”
Judge Mehta has also been criticized for conflicted rulings in Trump cases and a bizarre (and ultimately abandoned) effort to banish January 6th defendants from the Capitol.
I fail to see how being assigned this case gives a judge license to hold forth on their own views of the merits of these grants or the implications of their suspension. He is tasked with deciding the legal questions in the case, which he did so correctly.