“Brazenly Partisan” Judge Wynn Withdraws Senior Status Because Trump
During the last four years, much attention has focused on the Fifth Circuit. But during the first Trump Administration, the Fourth Circuit was the locus of the legal resistance. This court issued landmark rulings against Trump on the Emoluments Clauses, the Travel Ban, and many other policies. During that time, one judge in particular caught my attention time and again: Judge James A. Wynn, an Obama nominee in North Carolina. Consistently, and reliably, he ruled against Trump and other conservative litigants. Yet, as an Article III judge, he had least had the patina of neutrality–that he wasn’t on one team or the other, but merely called each case as he saw them. Balls and strikes, as they say.
My colleague Seth Barrett Tillman highlighted a passage from Judge Wynn’s concurrence in the Emoluments Clauses en banc decision:
Without a doubt, a lawsuit brought by the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia against the President of the United States catches attention outside the walls of the courthouse. How then should the Court avoid the appearance of partiality when there are eyes upon it? By applying the law and abstaining from grandiose screeds about partisan motives. Or, put another way—by doing its job. And that is exactly what the excellent majority opinion does.
But to the contrary, our dissenting colleague insinuates that “something other than law [is] afoot” here. First dissent at 308–09 (Wilkinson, J.).
With Judge Wynn, was something “other than law afoot”?
In December 2017, I wrote a post about Wynn’s questions during the travel ban en banc oral argument:
During the en banc proceeding in Richmond on Friday, which I attended, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. asked Department of Justice lawyer Hashim Mooppan about the relevance of the president’s inflammatory tweets to the Establishment Clause analysis. (The exchange begins at 24:20.) “What do we do with that,” he asked referring to the tweets. “Do we just ignore reality and look at the legality to determine how to handle this case?” T
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