Latest news with #judicialactivism
National Post
6 days ago
- General
- National Post
Jamie Sarkonak: Judge accuses officer of 'unconscious' anti-Black racism without direct evidence
Justice Renu Mandhane is one of Ontario's foremost judicial activists, so it should surprise no one that she'll stoop to using racism as a basis to let Black men off the hook for possessing illegal guns. Article content That's what happened at the end of March in the case of Robert Cameron, who had been pulled over and detained for having outstanding drug charges and a suspended license, and whose car, in the process, was discovered to be illegally housing an unlicensed firearm. Article content Article content The episode began when a Brampton police officer, Anand Gandhi, was notified by his cruiser's licence plate scanner flagged a nearby Jeep for a week-long impound due to the owner's active infractions. Given the pending charges, the officer called for backup just in case. He then approached Cameron's Jeep, identified him, handcuffed him, patted him down, and sat him in the back of the police car. Article content Article content 'Officer Gandhi specifically denied treating the accused differently or handcuffing him behind his back because of the way he looked, i.e. because he was a Black man,' wrote the judge. 'The officer maintained that it was his 'common practice' to handcuff and place suspended drivers in the back of his cruiser because it was a 'safe place' to speak with them.' Article content The judge noted that the officer had pulled over a woman earlier that day for driving on a medical suspension, but didn't cuff her or keep her in the police car. Her car, however, was not being impounded, and she wasn't said to have outstanding criminal charges. Article content After other officers arrived, the Jeep was searched for the alleged purpose of taking a pre-tow inventory. Some licence plates were found, which Cameron attributed to his girlfriend, as well as a gun, which was under a cargo mat covered by construction materials. Article content Mandhane didn't outright state that the gun was loaded, but she did note that ammunition was photographed by an officer after the weapon was made 'safe of any ammunition.' Article content The officer then placed Cameron under arrest for gun charges and attempted to help him reach his lawyer, who didn't pick up; 15 or so minutes later, he asked Cameron if 'everything in the vehicle' was his. (This, the Crown admitted, was an infringement of Cameron's Charter right to speak to counsel.) Article content The other alleged rights infringements were less clear-cut. Cameron's lawyer argued that he was unlawfully detained from the outset and that his car was subject to an unreasonable warrantless search, violating his respective Section 9 and 8 Charter rights. There is indeed precedent from the Supreme Court of Canada stating that it's wrong to detain a motorist in a police car without necessity (in that case, the driver didn't have outstanding drug charges) — but it's not enough to get evidence tossed if the officer operates in good faith. The Supreme Court of Canada and the Ontario Court of Appeal have also permitted warrantless inventory searches of cars in the past, but those precedents were not applied here.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won't stop that
It's hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he's so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president's lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration. Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against 'judicial activism', while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a 'judicial coup'. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing 'USA-hating judges'. On Truth Social, he said: 'How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of 'TRUMP'? What other reason could it be?' Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: 'This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?' A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation's laws far beyond their meaning. Take Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump's dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn't give Trump 'unbounded' authority to impose tariffs. After that 28 May ruling, Trump's latest tantrum began. Then, there's his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law's language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There's no war-like invasion here. And then there's Trump's effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn't like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms' heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms' business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn't enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms' lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn't like). Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: 'That's a nice law firm you have. It's a shame if something happens to it. (So you'd be smart to submit to my demands.)' Again, several judges told Trump he's full of it, that the law firms hadn't done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts. There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump's dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants. Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: 'We are living under a judicial tyranny,' while Leavitt carped that judges have 'usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him'. (What mandate? Trump didn't even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump's tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.) What we've heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: 'Trump's attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It's an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.' Trump's attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges' safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump's tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him 'monsters who want our country to go to hell'. With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump). Trump's war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge's request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court's call to 'facilitate' the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen. After the trade court's ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more 'injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years'. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law. Trump and cronies should recognize that there's a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What's more, considering that Trump once tweeted: 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,' he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law. Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Court Order Blocking Trump From Targeting Perkins Coie Is Overreach
Federal District Court Judge Beryl Howells injunction prohibiting the implementation of Donald Trumps executive order restricting the Perkins Coie law firm spoils a righteous core with judicial activism. On March 6, Trump issued an executive order asserting that "the dishonest and dangerous activity of…Perkins Coie has affected this country for decades. Notably, in 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false "dossier" designed to steal an election…. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws…." The order also accused Perkins Coie of racial discrimination, citing its "publicly announced percentage quotas in 2019 for hiring and promotion on the basis of race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws." The order suspended security clearances for the firms lawyers and barred them from federal buildings, prohibited the government from engaging the firm, directed federal contractors to disclose if they use the firms services, and referred the firm to be investigated for violating civil rights laws. The order was one of several similar orders issued, or contemplated, against leading law firms. Howell, an Obama appointee, previously served as chief judge for the District of Columbia, in which capacity she was a strong supporter of Jack Smiths Trump prosecution. Her 120-page opinion excoriated the administration for disregarding the First Amendment and failing to comply with her orders. She criticized the content and formatting of the Justice Departments memoranda, averred that the government had no credible evidence of racial discrimination or other wrongdoing by Perkins Coie, and rejected all of its arguments. Howell is right that the First Amendment and principles of American justice mandate that lawyers be able to deliver candid advice and zealous advocacy to their clients. But, she goes too far by ignoring the compelling case that Perkins Coie conspired with Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS to improperly influence the 2016 election and destabilize the Trump presidency by developing the fraudulent Steele dossier (which falsely accused Trump of being a Russian agent), and then misleading government investigators about its provenance. She began her decision by quoting Shakespeares admonition to "kill all the lawyers" to make it easier to seize power, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that the legal profession "is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy." Howell then held that "using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints…, is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with tolerance, not coercion…. Simply put, government officials cannot... use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression." Access to unvarnished legal advice is sacrosanct, but Howell goes off the rails. She never acknowledges that much of Perkins Coies wrongdoing had nothing to do with its legal advice, but came in its capacity as a political kingpin. She bewilderingly asserts that using the firms admissions of racial discrimination violates its First Amendment rights. Her related attack on the administrations opposition to diversity programs reveals her motives for this bizarre conclusion. She never discusses the constitutional infirmities of requiring a client to hire a lawyer in whom they lack trust. Perkins Coie sought to destroy Trump personally and politically. Its beliefs differ from his. That is more than sufficient reason under Article II and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that the president, who is the executive branch of government, may choose not to work with it. On the other hand, Trump may not target Perkins Coie because its lawyers provide legal services to litigants whose positions are adverse to his administration, bar the firm from federal buildings, or require federal contractors to disclose their law firms. The question of whether the security clearances granted to Perkins Coie lawyers may be limited is a close one, given the firms fraudulent manipulation of Congress and the FBI. The firms defenders are fixated on the fact that the partners who led its fraudulent services have moved on. So what. The firm is organized on a partnership model. Partners still at the firm likely were involved in, and benefited from, the fraud. When progressives applaud as conservative lawyers like John Eastman are indicted and unconstitutionally subjected to disbarment for giving legal advice to President Trump on the 2020 election, it is difficult to sympathize with a law firm that engaged in a conspiracy to steal an election and topple a sitting president. Nonetheless, in a free society, government officials do not use their power to punish lawyers because of their clients or advice, while also recognizing that being a lawyer is not a free pass to commit fraud or override the constitutional powers of the president. Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and a frequent speaker and contributor to media, including The American Mind, National Review, the National Association of Scholars, television, radio, and podcasts.
