The worst federal court decisions may not have come from the Supreme Court. If you are concerned about contempt for precedent, partisan hackery and judicial hubris, take a look at what district court judges have been doing.
And let’s not forget the unsupportable ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of Florida putting her finger on the scale to try to block the Justice Department from reviewing secret documents hoarded by former president Donald Trump. Cannon never had jurisdiction to hear the case (her ruling was overturned on appeal), invented a new category of protection for a former president and utterly ignored national security interests.
But not to be outdone, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty in Louisiana, in a case involving government contacts with social media companies, “effectively issued a prior restraint on large swaths of speech, cutting short an essential dialogue between the government and social media companies about online speech and potentially lethal misinformation,” explained Leah Litman and Laurence H. Tribe in Just Security. (Buying into the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Biden administration trying to quash views on social media now comes not just from MAGA lawmakers but from MAGA judges.)
“Compounding that error,” Litman and Tribe wrote, “the district court crafted its injunction to apply to myriad high-ranking officials in the Biden administration, raising grave separation of powers concerns. And equally troubling is how the court’s order, which prevents the government from even speaking with tech companies about their content moderation policies, deals a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.” Tossing away standing, failing to find a smidgen of evidence of “coercion” and issuing a ludicrously overbroad injunction are not minor errors. They represent a leap into the legal abyss.