A day of reckoning for activist judges

 Red State:

Over time, we have learned that when Democrats and the left have nothing left to fight with, they take their issues into court. They shop whatever they would like to force onto the American people around to a left-leaning Democrat-appointed judge to get the outcome they want. They couldn't stop President Donald Trump's return to the White House, so they figure they will stop anything he tries to do through the court system. It literally took an act of Congress to put the brakes on activist judges, and a few of them continue to issue edicts. But now, Supreme Court Justices have had enough and are speaking out.
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On Thursday, in a rare instance of public comment, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch called out lower courts and their judges for repeatedly ignoring Supreme Court rulings. In a ruling that allows the Trump administration to move ahead with cutting millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Gorsuch slapped back at a lower court, writing in an opinion that it was the “third time in a matter of weeks” that the Supreme Court was forced to reverse a lower court ruling on an issue they had already ruled on.

Along with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Gorsuch flexed some Supreme Court muscle, writing, “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them." And it is something that has obviously become problematic enough for Justices to address, yet still keeps happening. In April, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that the Trump administration could continue the termination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-related teacher training grants.

In June, a lower court allowed a lawsuit “involving materially identical grants” from the NIH to proceed, but that court cherry-picked the dissenting justices' opinion and ignored the majority ruling. That judge ultimately blocked the Trump administration's ending of DEI and gender ideology-related grants. Gorsuch wrote of this instance of lower court defiance,

“If nothing else, the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the ‘persuasive authority’ of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion on an equivalent record."

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Gorsuch is right about the scam used by Democrat judges to get around Supreme Court rulings.  I don't recall ever seeing such actions by lower court judges in my legal career.  There should be consequences for judges who ignore the Supreme Court.