This article is part of TPM Cafe, the House of TPM for the opinion and the analysis of the news. It was initially published by Balls and Strikes.
On Monday, the Ministry of Justice filed a fault complaint against the chief judge of the American district court James Boasberg for the offense of colleagues said that some judges feared that the Trump administration would violate judicial orders. According to the Doj, his private comments “have eroded public confidence in the judiciary”.
The complaint comes in the heels of The federalist Report on a memorandum summarizing the March 2025 meeting of the judicial conference, the national organization for the development of policies for the federal courts. According to The federalistThe memo indicates that during this event only judges, Boasberg “argued the concerns of its colleagues that the administration will not take into account the decisions of the federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis”. The federalist argued that these comments revealed an inexcusable “anti -top” bias “and a” clear contempt for the presumption of regularity – a presumption which obliges a court to assume that the civil servants have correctly fulfilled their official functions. ”
The Doj then said the same thing. “The federal courts must begin a presumption of regularity – the established doctrine according to which the civil servants have correctly demanded their official functions in the absence of clear evidence otherwise,” said the complaint, signed by Chad Mizelle, who is the chief of staff to the attorney general Pam Bondi. “By predicting non-compliance, judge Boasberg made this presumption on his head, contradicting both the evidence of past compliance and the governor law.”
A recent Washington Post The analysis shows that the Trump administration has challenged about a third of decisions against it. Among the disobedient directives, there is an order that Boasberg issued a few days after the judicial conference, asking the administration to secretly arrest American residents at the El Salvador terrorism confinement center.
Mizelle and The federalist One is a correct thing: the “presumption of regularity” refers to the idea that the courts should assume that civil servants legally pay their functions. But as the Supreme Court said twenty years ago, “the presumption is perhaps less a rule of evidence than a general principle of work”. It is also almost impossible to reconcile with an executive branch which is openly contemptuous towards the law and overflowing with people who find easier to lie than to breathe. Insofar as Trump was always entitled to a presumption of regularity, he lost it. The courts should consider both the president and the invocations by the administration of the presumption with skepticism.
The exact contours of the doctrine are nebulous, and it may not apply here to start. Historically, it was used to fill small gaps in evidence in a given case – for example, in a 2001 case which involved disciplinary measures against a postal service employee, the court presumed that the underlying process of the agency to examine an alleged fault was just. In other words, the presumption requires that the judges assume that the government will always behave perfectly. This does not prevent judges from discussing the interbranched constitutional challenges with their closed -door colleagues.
To justify this new application of the principle to conversations outside the field, the complaint of the doj points to United States c. Chemical foundationA case in 1926 in which the federal government continued to put aside its sale of various patents to a private company. In this case, the Government in part argued that sales were “bought by the president’s fraudulent deception” and other representatives of the government. But the court thought it was sure to presume that the officials knew what they were doing and “acted on the knowledge of the important facts” and refused to invalidate sales.
Basically in Chemical foundationThe court decided that if he heard hoofbeats, he would assume horses and not zebras, unless he was right to do otherwise. The complaint of the DoJ thus tries to transform a principle on refutable inferences in judicial affairs in isolation even of private criticism.
Trump administration has tried to use Chemical foundation To avoid a meticulous examination. On appeal Trump c. HawaiiThe 2018 case concerning Trump’s Muslim ban, the Ministry of Justice complained that it was not appropriate for the lower court to take note of Trump comments during the signature ceremony, during which Trump had read the official title aloud – “protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entrance to the United States” – and then declared: “We all know what this means”.
The challengers of the Muslim ban suggested that this has shown that politics was not really motivated by national security, and the government has opposed. “At the strict minimum, the presumption of regularity which attaches to all the actions of federal civil servants, as well as the respect due to the head of a branch of coordinates, should have seized the fourth circuit of invalidating a presidential proclamation based on a non -charitable interpretation of a disintegration and six words made in the context of a previous directive,” said the back of the MJ.
Then and now, the Trump administration has treated the presumption of regularity as a global authorization slip. With a shift in hand, says Trump, no one can look at his actions too closely, talk about him too hard or judge him at all. Such expansion of the presumption is particularly dangerous at a time far from being “regular” – when the government briefly sends people to be tortured abroad and to continue anyone, to judges and including the judges, who put themselves on his way. The Doj’s complaint pays the lip service at the idea of responsibility for Boasberg, but its real objective is clearly to intimidate the judiciary to submit to the authoritarian domination of Trump.
