The streak of courtroom wins against President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting disfavored law firms doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon. A clue in the latest ruling Friday came right at the beginning, when U.S. District Judge John Bates started this way:
In our constitutional order, few stars are as fixed as the principle that no official “can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics.” W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). And in our constitutional order, few actors are as central to fixing that star as lawyers.
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.”
Bates’ ruling follows one from his colleague Beryl Howell, who likewise slammed Trump’s order against another one of the targeted firms, Perkins Coie. Howell also began her ruling with a dramatic tribute to the legal profession, beginning her May 2 opinion:
No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
