FROM WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The Supreme Court has been away from Washington, D.C., for two months, since its final regular decision day, but as its emergency docket has filled up over the summer, the justices are showing growing frustration over lower courts’ orders.
As lower courts issue orders blocking various actions by the Trump administration, more of those cases have come to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket and led to interim action from the justices. While the high court has issued orders that have told lower courts how they should handle similar cases while litigation proceeds, the justices have had to issue several similar orders in the face of lower court intransigence, leading some justices to warn the lower courts not to defy them.
Justice Neil Gorsuch issued the latest warning to lower courts in an order on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket last week, which allowed the Trump administration to terminate $783 million in DEI-related grants from the National Institutes of Health.
“Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote.
Gorsuch said the district court ignored a previous Supreme Court order regarding teacher training grants aand that lower courts have defied Supreme Court orders in similar cases recently.
“So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case squarely controlled by one of its precedents,” Gorsuch wrote. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.”
The Supreme Court tossed another injunction blocking the Trump Administration. Justice Gorsuch delivered this haymaker to lower court judges: “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.” https://t.co/Z0hlgijNQv
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 21, 2025
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