Jurisprudence
June 12, 20265:07 PM
The judge in question with the thing he refuses to allow regulation for.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and Getty Images Plus.
The nation’s most conservative appeals court keeps getting beaten up at the Supreme Court, but its judges adamantly refuse to take the hint. On Thursday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared federal horse racing regulations to be unconstitutional, ignoring not one but two pointed signals from SCOTUS that the law is perfectly valid. Its decision arrived just hours after the Supreme Court’s sixth reversal of the 5th Circuit so far this term, with several more likely to come—a humiliating record for the appeals court. This trend shows no sign of stopping: If anything, the 5th Circuit’s MAGA judges seem proud of their reversal rate, eager to dig in and dare the justices to stop them. Now the lower court is forcing SCOTUS to clean up yet another mess of their own making by rescuing an important regulatory scheme that the 5th Circuit remains strangely committed to destroying.
