Lawyers from both sides of the aisle decry Trump attacks on judges at California conference
'Lawyers have to stand up to this, stand up for judicial independence," said Paul Clement, who has argued for conservative causes and was the Justice Department's solicitor general under President George W. Bush.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley who has argued cases in the Supreme Court in favor of racial diversity and other liberal causes, cited Republican calls to impeach judges who have ruled against President Donald Trump.
'Being a judge now is more important than it's ever been in American history,' Chemerinsky told the audience of hundreds of lawyers and judges at the court's conference in Monterey. 'This is a time when we need judicial courage. We need the lawyers to be courageous too.'
And in a reference to Trump's apparent disregard of judges' orders to stop sending immigrants, some of them with legal status, to prisons in Latin America, Chemerinsky said, 'If any president can violate court orders, can lock any of us up, the word for that is dictatorship.'
Clement, as a Justice Department lawyer, argued before the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully, to try to overturn President Barack Obama's national health insurance law, the Affordable Care Act, and in defense of a law banning federal benefits for same-sex married couples. As a private attorney, he was on the winning side of last year's ruling allowing judges to decide the meaning of contested federal regulations, overturning a 1984 decision that required courts to accept an agency's interpretation when the meaning of a law was unclear.
'I'm a big believer in executive power,' Clement told the conference. But 'if you have an administration that is trying to push the limits … you're in a period of extraordinary tension.'
He criticized Trump's Justice Department for prosecuting a federal judge in Wisconsin who directed an undocumented immigrant to the back door of her courtroom when federal immigration agents were looking for him, and for recent statements by Attorney General Pam Bondi denouncing 'unelected' federal judges who have frustrated the administration's program.
It's time to 'turn down the volume,' Clement said.
They spoke three days after the latest Republican proposal to break up the 9th Circuit, the nation's largest federal appeals court.
The court hears appeals of federal cases from California, eight other Western states and the territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Its rulings are binding on federal judges in all of those states, including conservative dominions such as Idaho and Montana, and it has a 16-13 majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents.
The legislation by two Idaho Republicans, Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, would leave California, Hawaii and Guam in the 9th Circuit and create a new 12th Circuit court for the other states. It is the 60th such bill introduced since 1985, and would appear to have little chance of overcoming a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
The measure, Risch said in a statement, 'would split and modernize the 9th Circuit, allowing for more manageable caseloads and justice that aligns with the values of Idaho.'
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