Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump's recent setbacks are not limited to his efforts to repeal the First Amendment by presidential fiat. He's also losing plenty of battles on other fronts. He promised his followers so much winning they would get tired of it. We're not sure what his position is on so much losing.
First up, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin (Joe Biden appointee) had already issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the Trump administration from withholding $500 million in research funds from UCLA. Yesterday, she issued her final ruling, and said the withholding of the money was likely "arbitrary and capricious" and a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. So, the money definitely has to be sent to UCLA, per previous federal commitments.
Presumably, the administration will appeal. However, there is something that doesn't add up here, and we have not been able to uncover the missing piece of the puzzle. For the administration to restore the $500 million in funding voluntarily, it demanded $1 billion from UCLA, plus a bunch of other concessions, mostly having to do with admitting more white people to the school. Why in the world would anyone pay $1 billion (plus bow to a bunch of procedural blackmail) to get... far less than $1 billion in research funds restored?
There's a second part of the equation which may, or may not, resolve this dilemma. As we have noted before, UCLA is under the governance of the UC Board of Regents. It's actually the Regents (which include Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-CA, as an ex officio member) who would have to approve any settlement with Trump. And the difference here is that when Harvard yields, or does not yield, to Trump, it is only making a decision for Harvard. Same thing for Columbia, or Brown, or Penn, or Duke, or most of the other schools the administration has targeted. But with UCLA, the decision-makers are ALSO the decision makers for several other schools that get large amounts of research funding, most obviously Berkeley, UCSD and UCSF. When Harvard gives in, it's hoping that Trump won't be back for another shakedown. But if the Regents give in on UCLA, it's practically an engraved invitation for Trump to come back in a month and hit another UC, and another, and another. Put another way, there has been a suggestion that, say, all the Ivies should form a consortium and pool their financial and other legal resources. Well, the UCs are already a consortium of that sort, which makes any one UC a particularly risky target for Trump.
Now, the semi-mystery we outline above could be resolved if it were the case that, behind the scenes, the Trump
administration is promising (for what that's worth) that if it gets what it wants from UCLA, it won't go after any other
UCs. In that case, the protection money settlement paid out by the Los Angeles campus would ostensibly protect
the multiple billions in federal research funds that have been doled out to the UC campuses collectively. But we've not
heard anything that suggests this is the case, nor have we even heard anything that suggests the Trump administration
understands how the governance of the UCs is very different from that of the Ivies.
Moving on to the other big loss of the day for the administration, Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Royce Lamberth (appointed to the bench by St. Ronnie of Reagan) granted a preliminary injunction to Danish offshore wind developer Ørsted, saying that the company is likely to prevail on the merits of its case, and therefore that it can go back to work building the nearly complete Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island. It is the Judge's view that "the president is butt-hurt that someone built some wind turbines next to his golf course" is not justification for ignoring federal law regarding the issuance of stop-work orders. Ørsted, for its part, said it would make sure to work with the administration to make sure its concerns are met (Translation: "We'll pucker up and kiss some orange hindquarters, if that is what we have to do"). The Trump administration has not said whether it will appeal, or will just cut its losses and drop the matter.
Trump did get one win yesterday. The Supreme Court, using the shadow docket (naturally), and in defiance of a precedent set in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, voted 6-3 to allow Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to move forward for now. The Justices also said they would hear the actual case, and render a final ruling, on an expedited basis. The Supremes continue to be very, very deferential to Trump in their emergency-docket decisions; we will see if that continues when they have to make an actual decision, with precedent-setting (and, potentially, precedent-destroying) consequences. (Z)