Agri-Pulse : USDA’s court system is unconstitutional
We Americans love to have our day in court. We go to court to challenge speeding tickets. We use the accountability of personal injury lawsuits to help ensure that businesses are acting responsibly. We sue the government when we're denied essential rights. We love to watch justice prevail in movies like "My Cousin Vinny" or "A Few Good Men." Even S ...
National Review : Speaker Johnson Proves the Necessity of Reviving the Nondelegation Doctrine
During a press conference earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about Justice Neil Gorsuch's concerns, raised during Supreme Court oral arguments over the legality of the president's tariffs, that Congress had violated the long-dormant "nondelegation doctrine" by delegating too much of its tariff power to the president. Johnso ...
Court rules against horse owner’s constitutional challenge to USDA adjudication structure
A federal district court in North Carolina delivered an adverse ruling against Pacific Legal Foundation's client Joe Manis, who challenged the constitutional structure of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) administrative adjudication process. While the court ruled that USDA's in-house tribunals were constitutionally structured, the decisio ...
Washington Examiner : Does stopping Trump’s tariffs risk nuclear war?
Does adherence to the separation of powers risk nuclear war? The federal government seems to think so. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of International Trade last week struck down President Donald Trump's tariffs as unlawful in companion cases brought by small businesses and 12 states. But the litigation will continue, likely up to the U.S. Sup ...
Did President Trump break the law by firing FTC commissioners?
On Tuesday, March 18, 2025, President Donald Trump summarily fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. This would be an unremarkable occurrence at the start of a new presidential administration, except Congress restricted the president's ability to fire commissioners to instances of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance ...
Bloomberg Law : Courts’ system for issuing preliminary relief is broken
Two federal district courts determined in a single week that the Office of Management and Budget's federal funding freeze had to be put on hold while the claims were resolved. The courts showed no hesitation in wading into a political dispute between Congress and the president. Yet every day, individual US citizens and small businesses are denie ...
Wall Street Journal : DOJ Abuses Its Authority in the Adams Case
In their Feb. 19 op-ed "Precedents for the Eric Adams Case," James Copland and Rafael Mangual detail the Justice Department's decadeslong practice of extracting behavior-altering agreements from defendants in exchange for deferring or declining prosecution. But their examples are exclusively of private citizens or corporations. When the defenda ...
National Review : Progressives Shouldn’t Care About Separation of Powers Only When Trump Is President
The Trump administration is racking up injunctions from federal courts, halting its efforts to shrink the federal government. From the funding freeze to the federal worker buyout, judges have put many of the administration's early executive actions on hold. For example, on February 10, 2025, a federal court found that the Trump administration had ...
Trump administration attempts to bring political accountability to agency adjudication
The firing of federal workers has been a controversial topic since President Donald Trump began his second term in January. That controversy is warranted. The loss of a job is a difficult event for anyone who faces it. But there is a second reason these firings of government workers have caught everyone's attention. Firing employees and officers of ...