patrick.net

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/unenjoined-thursday-february-12-2025

One down! The New York Times, gritting its teeth, ran the story yesterday, headlined “Trump’s Federal Resignation Program Moves Ahead After Court Win.”

Last Thursday, federal labor unions challenging Trump’s “fork in the road” —a voluntary early retirement plan for federal workers— sought and obtained a temporary restraining order to freeze the Administration’s plan. But yesterday, after a Monday hearing, Massachusetts Judge George O’Toole found the unions lacked standing and the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the claims.

Judge O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, was undoubtedly aware of the case’s vast public interest and the inevitable scrutiny, and wrote a thoughtful and well-reasoned five-page order. I’ll paraphrase. First, Judge O’Toole said, hey, the unions aren’t facing the Fork Directive since they aren’t executive branch employees. So the policy doesn’t harm them. Second, federal employees enjoy elaborate, hideously complicated administrative procedures that must first be fully exhausted before a district court can hear the case.

So the judge dissolved his February 6th temporary injunction. Honk, honk.

At the risk of putting Portland readers to sleep, given our current lawfare climate, let’s try to de-mystify the various kinds of injunctions. Injunctions, as you may have intuited, are just a type of court judgment in which, instead of awarding money, the court orders somebody to do something, or to stop doing something. For instance, down at the county court level, the judge could order you stop shooting your neighbor’s speckled pig with your bb gun and return their casserole dish.

Higher-profile injunctions usually don’t involve literal swine. But they do often involve the government. During covid, I sued various levels of government to “overturn” ordinances and statutes related to different kinds of mandates. The reason I quoted the word “overturn” is because it’s more accurate to say the court orders the government to stop enforcing the ordinance or statute. But saying overturn is simpler, albeit imprecise.

Plaintiffs can get injunctions at three stages. So right away, we have three basic legal types: the temporary injunction, the preliminary injunction, and the permanent injunction. It’s important to understand these three types, because they have very different significance.

Temporary injunctions, like most of the ones issued last weekend, are the most annoying but least threatening type of injunction. They are meant to handle true emergencies. On-call “duty judges” (the unlucky judge holding the pager that day) can even hear emergency cases in the middle of the night.

Vexingly, it is not even required for the adverse party to attend the hearing on the injunction that will bind them. And it’s a lightning-fast proceeding that the judge may even hold on a single phone call.

Because of the rush of emergency events, TIs are the easiest type of injunction to get. Consider the scenario: The judge is sitting in his own bed, having just applied his facial creams and ointments, arguing with his wife over who left the remote control in the living room and so who should go get it. Just when he thinks he’s talked her around, his duty pager beeps. Ugh, he thinks, pulling off his plastic lotion gloves to answer. Now what?

TIs are supposed to be rare and hard to get. But when a fast-talking, persuasive lawyer explains the sky is falling, judge, the poor magistrate starts wondering whether he will get any sleep tonight and thinking about tomorrow’s busy docket. After his wife angrily waves in sign language to take that somewhere else, he reluctantly hauls his phone and pen to the dining room, thinking, in the back of his mind, dammit I could have gotten the stupid remote myself at this rate.

You can see how last week’s TIs could easily come into being. Add to the tiresome scenario above a liberal helping of progressive politics to which the judge is profoundly sympathetic, a heaping tablespoon of Trump derangement, all mixed into the broad discretion judges have to handle true emergencies, and well, it’s baked in that a lot of unnecessary TROs could slip through.

While getting a TI gives a lawyer a brief moment of relief, it also tees up the hard part. The clock starts ticking loudly. One of the safeguards is that, under well-settled law, TIs shouldn’t last more than a few days before expiring. In my practice, ten days seems about average.

Judge O’Toole issued his TI on February 6th— so it only lasted for seven days.

But before the TI runs out, the judge must hold, and the lawyers must put on, a full hearing for a preliminary injunction. Judge O’Toole held his preliminary injunction hearing on February 10th —four days after the TI issued— and as we saw, yesterday he dissolved it, denying further relief.

You have to admit that’s pretty fast, especially for the normally glacial legal system.

In cases against the government, a preliminary injunction, or “PI”, is the gold standard. If you can win that, the government usually gives in, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. The first difference between a PI (preliminary injunction) and a TI (temporary injunction) is the PI’s much higher standard. The PI requires proving the four famous elements we’ve discussed before from time to time.

The two hardest elements to prove, the ones that give lawyers nightmares, are the two “likelihoods”: the likelihoods of success on the merits and of irreparable harm. To win a PI, you must prove that it’s more likely than not you’re going to win the whole case, and that there is no other remedy that could conceivably prevent the looming harm— including after the fact.

Proving that is a lot harder than it looks. For instance, you might think getting fired, say for expressing your First Amendment rights by wearing a neon pink MAGA hat at work, is irreparable harm justifying an injunction. But courts disagree. A year from now, when the case is over, the court could cure any injury by ordering your boss to re-hire you and pay a year’s back salary. Thus, not irreparable.

Since money fixes many problems, it can be devilishly hard to prove the element of irreparable harm. Fortunately, government cases are slightly easier, since violations of constitutional rights are presumptively irreparable. So that’s good.

But even with that help, you still have to prove you’re likely to win, which is the hardest element to prove of all.

Due process requires proving that challenging element must occur promptly, at the dreaded preliminary injunction hearing. I say “dreaded” for two reasons: the stakes and the work. First, the stakes are sky-high. Practically speaking, if you lose the PI hearing, you are bound to lose the case. (I suppose it is possible to recover after a judge finds you’re not likely to win, but that’s a deep, dark hole to dig the case out of.)

Second, the work is insanely demanding. In normal commercial cases, I tell clients it could cost $50K to $100K just to try to get a preliminary injunction. In cases involving novel, complex, or difficult issues, it can be even more expensive and time-consuming.

Why? To prove you’re likely to win, you basically have to put on a miniature trial, with evidence, documents, witnesses, maybe even preceded by rapid-fire depositions and lightning-round paper discovery. Instead of having years to prepare for a trial, you only get a few days to prepare for a PI hearing. Instead of getting weeks to put on a real trial —which is hard enough— in a PI hearing, you might only be given four hours to put on your “mini trial.”

Here’s a decent example. In my very first covid-mask case in May, 2020, the trial judge only gave me an hour for my preliminary injunction hearing. I had to split that hour with the government. In other words, I got only thirty minutes to prove I was likely to win a case in a novel, science-heavy setting amidst the early panic of the pandemic. (Of course, given that awful setup, I lost, but I wound up winning on appeal.)

Preparing to argue a complex constitutional case about mask science, which nobody still understands, in only thirty minutes, required round-the-clock preparation every single day, weekend included, before the hearing.

But if you win a PI against the government, you usually win the case. The government almost always backs down at that point, for two reasons. First, it’s impractical to have an ordinance or statute enjoined for an indeterminate amount of time, hanging out under a cloud of unconstitutionality. Second, having ruled you are likely to win, the court implicitly rules that the government is likely to lose, and the government normally prefers avoiding that risk.

Thus, the preliminary injunction hearing is where the rubber hits the road, where the legal theories are tested and the evidence is evaluated. It is grueling, demanding, and very tough to win—much harder than at the TI stage. For the same reason, PIs are much easier to defend, which is still painful and expensive due to the short time frames. (Last year, for example, we handily defended James O’Keefe from Project Veritas’ effort to get a PI against him to stop him from reporting and fundraising).

It is called a preliminary injunction because it normally expires at the end of the case. Which brings us to the third type.

You hear much less about permanent injunctions. This kind of injunction is a standing order issued by a court that lasts forever or until certain conditions occur. Someone might be ordered, for example, to stay off Facebook until they remove awkward photos of their school board members bending over to pick things up.

Courts normally grant permanent injunctions as part of a final judgment after a full case and a trial. So, theoretically, even if you lost at the preliminary injunction stage at the outset of the case, you could still, in theory, get a permanent injunction at the eventual trial—but the deck is stacked against you.

Permanent injunctions are a more common feature of commercial cases, like when Apple sues some high school student to stop him from making free adapters so people can use their old headphones or something.

To recap: the Temporary Injunction is the easiest to get, but lasts the shortest (only until the PI hearing). The Preliminary Injunction (PI) is the hardest to get, but usually wins the whole case when litigating against the government. The Permanent Injunction is what litigants achieve after winning the entire lawsuit— after a full, normal trial.

Last week we witnessed sympathetic courts issue a bunch of (relatively) easily obtained TIs. Good for them. Now, the plaintiffs must put on their PI cases, and the legal rubber will start hitting the wacky lawsuit road, like it just did yesterday in Judge O’Toole’s decision. Most judges, even partisan ones, will stretch only so far. There will be exceptions, of course, which is what appellate courts are for.

Think about it like this. A lefty, partisan judge who has broad discretion is under a lot of pressure from his peers to issue the temporary injunction, since the judge doesn’t want to be seen as rolling over for the Trump Administration. But crawling out on the preliminary injunction limb includes much more risk of an embarrassing reversal.

The rubber is starting to hit the TRO road.

In typical bureaucratic shadow dancing, the Deep State buries its perfidies and crimes in shit tons of paper records that nobody can reliably pore through in any reasonable period of time. That and the usual smoke screens of impenetrable redactions and 'classified' status. We have seen them unleash their assassin's cults on auditors.

It winds up being a Gordian Knot that might be cut, but as a source of indictable crimes, the criminals will be so far out ahead of the curve into time and space that the whole mess winds up being well nigh useless, particularly when arithmetically added to a corrupt, arthritic, ineffably expensive and excruciatingly slow, retarded legal system.

The wiley Trump and Musk have terrorized the criminals with their pod of yute geniuses who claim to be able to penetrate the sheafs with laptops and algorithms. They are being flushed and spooked en masse. Whether this is a bluff or not remains to be seen, because it is likely Trump had military intel who have been performing audits behind the scenes for years.

Trump would rather try them in the courts of public discourse and alternative medias by exposures and public outrages with Musk as vehicle. Apparently, there is a lot more to come. What have happened so far are the appetizers, or one would hopium.

The 'boy wonders' of the 'big balls ilk' are likely vapor who are mockeries of the bloodline placements of Monarch Satanic executive swedo 'self made' wunderkinder over corporate domains. The big balls are brush beaters to terrorize the complicit political criminals out into the open to hang themselves by their own petards. Brilliant strategy. Mirroring campaigns are occult terrorizers. They exploit our ignorance, we exploit theirs.

Illuminati wars etc. etc.

The count is now up to 75,000, that's a lot of lucky fuckers. But only the first 14 or 20 thousand that took his offer about 3 weeks ago are getting the full buy out. The rest of them has lost about 3 weeks of it already. And the other holdouts are only screwing themselves. Expect lots of tears and whining and crying when those that finally realize Trump will win the fight and fire them and they will get nothing. Those drag this out for another month or two before taking the offer wont get as big of a payout. Remember the payout is only until September, Trump never mentioned month counts. It's already less than 7 months left on it. It started at 8 months of pay. As for those that will hold on until Trump wins and gets fired. Wont get shit.
Also there's the real possibility that all of those that didn't accept the February 6th deadline wont get Jack shit as well.
Yet every day I see the tally rising, even though I haven't heard any mention of the deadline being passed. So we'll see.

Tenpoundbass says

The count is now up to 75,000