Posted on 04/08/2025 8:09:53 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
The White House wants to make it much costlier for litigants to challenge its policies. It is proving to be an uphill battle.
President Trump in a March memo ordered government lawyers to request the payment of bonds in lawsuits seeking to temporarily block his policies. The bonds, which could impose a daunting financial burden on many plaintiffs, are part of a campaign to deter what Republicans see as activist litigation and overreach by judges issuing broad injunctions against administration policies.
Federal judges in the past couple of months have largely balked at the requests, ordering minimal bonds or none at all. In one instance, a judge declined a government request to order a $23 million bond.
In a February ruling halting a freeze on some forms of federal funding, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, who declined to order a bond, expressed disbelief at the request.
“In a case where the government is alleged to have unlawfully withheld trillions of dollars of previously committed funds to countless recipients, it would defy logic—and contravene the very basis of this opinion—to hold Plaintiffs hostage for the resulting harm,” wrote AliKhan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden.
The White House memo directed lawyers representing the government to ask for bonds under a decades-old procedural rule that allows courts to issue a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper.”.......
Republicans are frustrated with judges for stymying Trump’s priorities through emergency orders with nationwide reach and say bonds are a tool to rein those in. “Such judicial overreach not only violates the separation of powers, but it also silences the American people,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in a letter last month.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Could the government calculate the loss and sue an unsuccessful litigant for damages?
Tell these “judges” to go eff themselves, and be done with it.
Next step?
DOJ to issue: “Such rulings are “of no effect” until such time a proper bond is levied and paid by the plaintiffs.”
These bonds are actually \required\ by the tort system.
Suppose the government illegally seizes your guns, or suppresses your free speech, or destroys your property, etc etc, and you have to pay the government's legal fees. And remember how the Biden Administration won all those court cases against people challenging their terminations, including from the military, for not taking covid shots.
Alito and Thomas have been looming for a case for a long time to put and end to the nationwide injunctions. Failure of judges to order the mandatory bond in request might be a key to getting to that end
IIRC the rule Trump is trying to use requires putting up a bond IF you’re asking for a TRO in advance of having your case adjudicated. If you take the government to trial and don’t ask court to do anything until the end of the trial no bond is required. So preemptive bankruptcy from filing bonds isn’t required. Not that your own legal fees may put you out a pretty penny if you don’t have a contingency lawyer. The real down side of this is the government can drag the process out a long time so that even a winning case might not be resolved in time to help you. With TRO you can potentially get presumptive relief quickly, but would need to come up with a bond to protect the other side against damage from that presumptive relief if you eventually lose the case.
Rule 65 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure instructs a court to require the posting of security in an amount equal to the damages incurred if a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction turns out to be improperly granted. All the Trump aadministration is doing is demanding that the courts follow their own rules.
The litigants are deep state traitors. The money they use to sue President Trump is likely taxpayer funds; their access to said funds is being reduced with DOGE at the wheel.
The litigants should pay for govt man hours, the price they would have to pay in the real world for judges, clerks, security, facilities, attorneys.
Not quite. What the FRCP 65 actually says is:
The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.
So first, it is discretionary by the court because it is in an amount the court deems "proper". A court could find that requiring a bond in favor of the government is never "proper". Alternatively, even if it did find that a bond in favor of the federal government might be proper, the government would have to prove that bond would be proper in this particular case, and a whole lot of these cases concern issues that don't really involve monetary harm at all.
I've had that issue come up a lot when getting injunctive relief, and it is usually in commercial disputes where the adverse party can demonstrate a dollar value of the harm the injunction is causing. So, if you get an injunction forbidding the sale of a certain item, the bond might be for the amounts of profit expected to be lost during the pendency of the TRO.
I wouldn't expect a lot of judges to grant bonds in most of these cases.
“Loser pays” should be the rule to discourage junk lawsuits.
A court’s finding that there is zero risk of loss or damage from a wrongful injunction provides an additional ground for appeal, particularly where there is an otherwise plausible argument of prejudice...or at least that’s a strategy.
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