Law Dork – “President Donald Trump and shadow-president Elon Musk are losing. When Justice Department lawyers go to court, trying to defend many of Trump and Musk’s actions, DOJ has regularly lost — and often face tense moments in court before being dealt those losses. On Monday, for example, Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, heard arguments over a group of doctors’ lawsuit challenging the removal of webpages and datasets by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of the government-wide censorship purge put into effect following Trump’s January 20 executive order defining “sex” to exclude transgender people. James Harlow, the DOJ lawyer defending the Trump administration’s actions, kept trying to insist this was mere “website maintenance” and couldn’t constitute final agency action — a necessary step in challenging the policy. Bates wasn’t buying it, eventually telling Harlow that “termination” of the sites seemed pretty final to him. Later in Harlow’s argument, it got more heated, with Bates sternly telling the DOJ lawyer not to question him — prompting a quick, and unusual, apology. On Tuesday, Bates issued an order that HHS, CDC, and FDA put back up the websites and datasets cited by the doctors in their briefing by 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. “By removing long relied upon medical resources without explanation, it is likely that the each agency failed to ‘examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made,’” he wrote in his opinion. “Hand in hand with the lack of explanation, it is also likely that the agencies ‘failed to consider’ the ‘important’ issue of the substantial reliance by medical professionals on the removed webpages.“ Trump, through his orders, and Musk, through DOGE, are testing the limits and seeing what they can get away with. A step beyond claiming unearned powers, they are just presuming they have them and seeing if anyone stops them. It is an attempt at lawlessness — or, rather, at them being the law. Part of this has already been a challenge to legislative authority; there undoubtedly are the beginnings of challenges to judicial authority as well. On both fronts, though, I think it is a little more complicated than what you’re hearing. As I said, there has been judicial pushback…”