An Obama Judge Just Defied the Supreme Court on TPS — Andy Ogles Is Moving to Impeach Her
The Supreme Court made it clear. Lower courts cannot issue stays blocking Temporary Protected Status terminations. The ruling wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t ambiguous. It was the highest court in the land telling every district judge in America exactly where the boundary is.
Obama-appointed Judge Allison Burroughs looked at that ruling and issued a stay anyway
— blocking the Trump administration from terminating TPS for Somali nationals despite what SCOTUS had just said. GOP Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee has seen enough. On Monday he is filing articles of impeachment. “SCOTUS made it very clear that lower courts cannot suspend TPS,” Ogles’ spokesman told Townhall. “Yet, an Obama-appointed judge is defying the Court and the Constitution in an attempt to subvert the will of the President. This judicial activist’s obstruction of the people’s will must be stopped.”
He’s right about the defiance
Whether impeachment succeeds is a different question — but the principle behind the move is one that an increasing number of Americans share, and with good reason. The pattern of lower court obstruction of the Trump immigration agenda has reached a point that the word “unprecedented” no longer covers. District judges appointed by Democratic presidents have been issuing nationwide injunctions, stays, and blocks on executive immigration actions at a pace and scope that the founders could not have imagined when they created an independent judiciary. The purpose of judicial independence was to protect the rule of law from political interference — not to allow individual district judges to function as a one-person veto on the policies of an elected administration. What Judge Burroughs did is not judicial independence. It is defiance of a direct ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States. The highest court in the land drew the line. She crossed it anyway. If that isn’t the kind of behavior that warrants Congress using its constitutional oversight tools, then those tools have no meaning.
The impeachment effort faces steep odds
Removing a federal judge requires a two-thirds Senate vote. Getting there requires building a case that goes beyond a single controversial ruling — courts have always had wide latitude on individual decisions, and “I disagree with this ruling” has historically not been sufficient grounds for removal. But “defying an explicit Supreme Court ruling” is a considerably stronger basis than policy disagreement. And the House vote to impeach doesn’t require sixty senators. It requires a simple majority in a Republican-controlled chamber — and the message it sends to every Obama and Biden-appointed district judge currently contemplating a similar move is worth sending regardless of what happens in the Senate. Ogles has been making waves in Congress for months on exactly these issues. Left-wing clean energy PACs have spent nearly $700,000 trying to defeat him. That’s a reliable indicator that he’s doing something right.
File the articles. Force the vote. Make every Democrat go on the record defending a judge who defied the Supreme Court. Meantime, the Trump administration has a ruling from the highest court in the land on this matter. They should ignore this Obama sycophant.
