The decision this week by Judge Christopher R. Cooper to hand President Trump a legal victory but denounce his wrecking-ball approach to government reform showed, if nothing else, the tensions confronting the federal bench in Washington.
Even as he admitted that the district courts might not always be the place to stop Mr. Trump’s bid, Judge Cooper, in a ruling issued on Thursday, acknowledged that the new administration had been marked so far by “an onslaught of executive actions” leading to “disruption and even chaos.” Chief among them, he wrote, were serial efforts to gut government agencies and slash the federal work force.
Many of these proposals have landed at the feet of Judge Cooper and his fellow jurists in Federal District Court in Washington who have spent the past four years dealing with an exhausting caseload emerging from efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Now, these same judges are grappling with how to handle a different sort of power grab by Mr. Trump, sometimes halting his blizzard of executive actions and sometimes letting them move forward.
“These mixed results should surprise no one,” Judge Cooper said, in what almost seemed to be a tone of somber resignation. “Federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on evenhanded application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”
This frank confession came as he and the 23 other federal judges in Washington have faced a tsunami of emergency petitions in the past few weeks, arising from a complex constellation of concerns and leading to a series of hastily called hearings.
The issues they have dealt with, essentially on the fly, have been mind-bogglingly varied: transgender rights, immigration policy, the status of independent agencies and the inner workings of Elon Musk’s government efficiency body.
“It’s absolutely extraordinary, just on the numbers of issues being raised,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton. “Then again, Washington is the seat of government. It’s where all of this stuff happens.”
While some of the Trump cases are being heard in courts outside Washington — matters are pending in Maryland, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, for example — many of the proceedings are playing out in the capital, where politics is the impassioned local pastime.
That has often meant that the judges handling these matters have faced a torrent of partisan abuse even as they struggle against the clock with complicated questions. They have suffered calls for impeachment from powerful figures like Mr. Musk and have also been subjected to verbal threats online.
Last week, Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, took the seemingly innocuous step of extending an order temporarily barring the U.S. Agency for International Development from involuntarily evacuating its employees from overseas assignments. Shortly after, someone posted a photo of him on social media with a caption reading, “DOMESTIC ENEMY.”
In a similar fashion, just hours after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was assigned a case questioning Mr. Musk’s role as a government employee, an ally of Mr. Trump attacked her online. She was singled out not only for being “an anti-Trump, Democrat, ACTIVIST JUDGE,” but even more troublingly, for having been born outside the United States.
While there have been many such accusations made against the judges in recent weeks, the claims of political bias have often not stood up when compared to their behavior in the courtroom.
Last Friday, for example, Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, tore into the lawyers for several fired inspectors general, threatening them with sanctions. Judge Reyes was upset that the lawyers had come to court asking her to force the Trump administration to give their clients back their jobs on an emergency same-day basis even though they had waited three weeks to make the request.
Four days later, the very same judge chided a Justice Department lawyer for avoiding answering questions about an order by Mr. Trump that sought, among other things, to keep transgender soldiers out of the military. The order, Judge Reyes declared, was marked by “unadulterated animus.”
In the flood of recent activity, it is easy to forget that the very first order by Mr. Trump that profoundly affected the judges in Washington was his grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The declaration, issued on Mr. Trump’s first day back in office, effectively invalidated years of judicial consternation over tough legal questions concerning the appropriateness of certain criminal charges and the challenging process of handing down sentences to individual defendants who moved as part of a mob.
More important, Mr. Trump and his allies have also used the decree to try to rewrite the story of Jan. 6 and accuse those involved in the proceedings stemming from it of being partisan or corrupt.
Some of the judges responded angrily to the clemency decree — especially its introduction, in which Mr. Trump declared that his actions were meant to end “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people” and to initiate “a process of national reconciliation.”
Clearly offended by the president’s words, Judge Beryl A. Howell issued a ruling saying that Mr. Trump’s sweeping reprieves had raised “the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers” and undermined the rule of law.
“No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity,” she wrote.
As the new Trump cases touching on issues of presidential power move forward, the judges may confront another potential threat: that Mr. Trump and his subordinates simply refuse to comply with some of their orders.
One of Washington’s newest federal judges, Amir H. Ali, who was appointed to the bench just two months ago, is already facing that exact scenario.
On Wednesday, lawyers representing a nonprofit group that fights the spread of AIDS asked Judge Ali to hold the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. in contempt. The lawyers claimed that the agencies had willfully violated an injunction by the judge that temporarily barred them from imposing a blanket freeze on nearly all aspects of U.S. foreign aid.
In an order issued on Thursday, Judge Ali acknowledged that his original injunction had given the agencies a measure of autonomy in deciding what funding programs they could stop — so long as there was a legal basis for doing so. But he also reaffirmed that a “blanket suspension” of aid was not allowed and would cause the plaintiffs harm.
In the end, Judge Ali took the cautious route, denying the request for contempt sanctions and simply reminding the Trump administration that it had to comply with his initial order.
The judge — and the rest of his colleagues on the bench — will now have to wait to see what happens next.
