Judge Royce C Lamberth, Another Battleground
Judge Royce C. Lamberth added to a 23 year history of confounding presidents of both political parties from the bench of the politically sensitive court.
The derailment of the high-profile Obama initiative underscores the well-respected Lamberth’s typical independence, as well as his willingness to rebuke the government and its lawyers when in his eyes they overstep – whatever the risk of reversal, both to supporters and detractors.
- “He’s a judge who can’t be pigeonholed. . . . He can please and disappoint people on all sides of the spectrum,” said Kenneth Wainstein,
- “There’s a saying that everything’s bigger in Texas, and this chief judge lives up to that adage,” US Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr, “Nothing associated with this judge is a rubber stamp. . . . Chief Lamberth is both a consummate lawyer and jurist,”
- In the 1980s, he was one of several young government lawyers who sued then-Mayor Marion Barry and the District government over conditions at the D.C. jail. His court continues to monitor many city agencies, and friends say he bristles over the treatment of disabled and foster children and other vulnerable citizens,
- He handled several high-profile cases under President Bill Clinton, to the consternation of many of his aides, one of whom called Lamberth a “loose cannon,”
- Larry Klayman, former chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative activist and a Clinton antagonist who accused his administration of improperly accessing FBI files in a case that Lamberth finally dismissed after more than a decade, has called the judge “an iconoclast who has a healthy skepticism of government power, and . . . is sensitive to the needs of the common man, a trait sometimes lacking in conservatives,”
- Lamberth also proved nettlesome to President George W. Bush. As head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 1995 to 2002, he signed a May 2002 opinion that stated that the government misled the court that approves spying on terrorism suspects in the US more than 75 times,
- Lamberth’s most public misstep came in a landmark case brought by Native Americans over the Interior Department’s century-long failure to account for hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties and rents owed to Indian landowners. He held 2 secretaries of the Interior – from the Clinton and Bush administration – in contempt of court and ordered sanctions against a half-dozen agency lawyers for improper conduct in the case. “Our ‘modern’ Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is a dinosaur – the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago,” Lamberth wrote. He was ultimately removed by an appeals court, however, which concluded that the public could question his objectivity. Still, some of his colleagues privately sided with his frustration with what he saw as government stonewalling and incompetence,
- Thick-skinned and savvy, “he’s as fair a judge as you’re going to get,” said G. Allen Dale, a prominent D.C. defense lawyer. (HWM and Washington Post)
My belief, NEVER under-estimate a true JURIST with firm centrist beliefs and legal standing! By expanding the opportunities for federal funding of research; President Obama violated that 1996 law. He tried to basically say that that law didn’t count any more, and … even … the president can’t unilaterally overturn an act of Congress, and that’s why the judge suspended the Obama executive order.
