DOJ nominees hedge on whether court orders must always be followed

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DOJ nominees hedge on whether or not court docket orders should at all times be adopted

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 27, 2025, 3:24 pm CST

Two Division of Justice nominees refused to say whether or not court docket orders should at all times be adopted throughout questioning earlier than the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor common nominee, mentioned, “Usually, if there’s a direct court docket order that binds a federal or state official, they need to comply with it,” Regulation.com reviews.

However Sauer additionally mentioned “some historians may assume we’d be higher off” if the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court docket choice Korematsu v. United States had not been adopted. Korematsu upheld an government order calling for the imprisonment of Japanese People throughout World Conflict II.

In any occasion, Sauer mentioned, the concept that President Donald Trump would defy a court docket order is “not a believable state of affairs.”

Sauer is a former Missouri solicitor common who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. He efficiently represented Trump earlier than the Supreme Court docket within the 2020 election-interference case towards him. The July 2024 choice held that presidents have “absolute immunity” from prison prosecution when exercising core constitutional powers.

Different publications with Senate Judiciary Committee protection embrace Bloomberg Regulation, Law360, the Washington Publish and Politico.

Aaron Reitz, nominated to steer the DOJ’s Workplace of Authorized Coverage, instructed senators that it might be “too hypothetical” to touch upon whether or not litigants can defy court docket orders based mostly on an ethical disagreement. Reitz is presently the chief of workers for Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The Washington Publish highlighted two different solutions given by Reitz.

The primary: “There isn’t any laborious and quick rule in all cases by which a litigant should adjust to all or some or varied elements of a judicial choice,” Reitz mentioned. “It’s so fact-, law- and case-specific that one can not communicate usually.”

The second: “My place displays a reasonably mainstream view inside right-of-center jurisprudential circles, which is just to counsel that varied Supreme Court docket or Court docket of Appeals choices are extra restricted in scope than possibly our associates who share a unique jurisprudential view of Supreme Court docket holdings would counsel.”

Through the listening to, Reitz was requested about his publish on X, previously generally known as Twitter, after a federal choose blocked a Texas abortion ban enacted in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reitz wrote that the choose “has made his choice. Now let him implement it.” The social media publish echoed an “apocryphal quote attributed to Andrew Jackson in response to a a lot earlier court docket ruling,” in keeping with the Washington Publish.

In line with Law360, Reitz mentioned the social media publish displays “a conservative view of Article III and the position of courts and their potential to bind events that aren’t litigants to the case earlier than it.”

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