Court Opinion

ID: 9809755
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 21:24:58.902658+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:08:38.421532
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I join Judge M. Smith’s masterful dissent in full. I write only to note the absurdity that we are in the home stretch of the Obama administration and still litigating the validity of policy changes implemented at the start of the George W. Bush administration. How can a President with a mere four or eight years in office hope to accomplish any meaningful policy change- — as the voters have a right to expect when they elect a new President — if he enters the White House tethered by thousands of Lilliputian ropes of administrative procedure? The glacial pace of administrative litigation shifts authority from the political branches to the judiciary and invites the type of judicial policymaking that Judge Smith points out. This is just one of the ways we as a nation have become less a democracy and more an oligarchy governed by a cadre of black-robed mandarins. I seriously doubt this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind and worry about the future of the Republic if the political branches fail to take back the power the Constitution properly assigns to them.