Justice: A federal judge in — where else? — California has ruled that the U.S. can't send temporary refugees back to their countries because, basically, he doesn't like President Trump. In doing so, he's shown why both elections and judicial nominations matter.
Federal Judge Edward M. Chen is a classic President Obama appointee to the bench. A legal leftist from the University of California, Berkeley, his first years in practice were spent as a staff lawyer for the ACLU.
His credentials from then on out remained impeccably progressive, all the way until Obama named him to the federal bench.
This week, Chen ruled that the Trump administration's decision to return 262,000 people back to Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Sudan who were here under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was somehow illegitimate because, in Chen's opinion, Trump is racist.
Chen cited comments by Trump during the 2016 campaign, which included "remarks characterizing Mexican immigrants as drug dealers or users, criminals and rapists." Then there was Trump's referring this year to MS-13 gang members as "animals."