During his first administration, federal district court judges—that is, people whom the American people did not elect—used preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders, to grind the Trump administration’s domestic policies to a halt. They’re doing the same thing in his second administration, but Trump has a new plan, and it’s a darn good one. He’s relying on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to insist that courts must comply with the requirement that a court may issue a preliminary or temporary injunction only if the plaintiff provides security first.

On Tuesday, Trump issued a memorandum entitled “Ensuring the Enforcement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c),” and directed it to “the heads of executive departments and agencies.” The order opens by describing the way activists, using donated and government-granted funds, have been obtaining sweeping injunctions from carefully selected district court judges (that is, those seated in forums friendly to Democrats). With the judges’ help, the activists have been ” functionally inserting themselves into the executive policy making process and therefore undermining the democratic process.”

Image by Grok.

Not only are these practices interfering in the executive branch’s work, but they’re also expensive, because taxpayers ultimately foot the bill, while the DOJ is forced to expend “substantial resources to fighting frivolous suits instead of defending public safety.”

Trump explains that one of the things a well-functioning court does is deter frivolous litigation, and one of the ways it does this is through Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c):

One key mechanism is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c) (Rule 65(c)), which mandates that a party seeking a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order (injunction) provide security in an amount that the court considers proper to cover potential costs and damages to the enjoined or restrained party if the injunction is wrongly issued.

What’s important to note (this is me, not Trump), is the language of subsection (c) does not make this security optional. Instead, it’s mandatory, although the government never seems to have bothered pushing for security before:

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. The United States, its officers, and its agencies are not required to give security. (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, while the court has discretion about whether a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order is appropriate, once it makes that determination, it must require that the plaintiff provide security.

Trump states that, moving forward, the government’s new policy is that it will “demand that parties seeking injunctions against the Federal Government must cover the costs and damages incurred if the Government is ultimately found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.” He instructs the heads of executive departments and agencies to ensure that they make this request to the courts every time.

Moreover, in addition to explaining to the court that Rule 65(c) is mandatory and explaining why the amount of security it seeks is reasonable and appropriate, department and agency heads must give the court one other piece of useful information:

[F]ailure of the party that moved for preliminary relief to comply with Rule 65(c) results in denial or dissolution of the requested injunctive relief.

We can anticipate that the judges who have been substituting their values, facts, and decision-making for that of the duly-elected president will circumvent this requirement by demanding only symbolic amounts of security (a few hundred dollars) or by finding that the matter at issue cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. However, given the mandate in Rule 65(c), they’re going to have an awfully hard time explaining their position to the Supreme Court.

Trump is taking the first step to reining in a completely out-of-control judiciary. Charlton Allen has provided a detailed analysis of just one judge’s rogue behavior.  There are more examples here of judges arrogating to themselves the powers of both the legislative and the executive.

This is the real constitutional crisis in America. Everything Trump is doing is within the scope of his defined authority as the manager of the federal government. Those judges who dislike his policies and are removing that authority from his hands have set up a conflict that can have only three outcomes: (1) They back down voluntarily; (2) the Supreme Court forces them to back down; or (3) the Supreme Court allows them this authority, rendering the constitutional executive irrelevant, as the courts will have taken over.

UPDATE: And as if on cue, a Clinton judge in California (which has long been the most overturned federal jurisdiction in America), orders Trump to rehire every fired probationary employee. It's highly questionable, though, whether the legislature has -- as the court suggests it does -- the constitutional authority at all to dictate how the president manages federal employees.