Activist Judges: A Look At Judge John Bates
His rulings and statements are all over the board. Does that make him an activist, a wishy-washy pawn of the deep state, or a good judge?
Judge John Bates is overseeing a few cases involving different Trump administration issues: Doctors For America v OPM and AFL-CIO v Dept of Labor.
Judge Bates was appointed by Dubya in 2001. More information about his past, including his time in the military, is available at the Historical Society of the DC Circuit. He served on the FISA court from 2006-2013 and spent many of those years as the presiding judge. Bates was the judge who got super angry at the NSA for their illegal violations of Americans’ privacy, but then allowed the NSA to keep all that data they had illegally collected on Americans as long as they said they didn’t know the data had been collected illegally. But then, a few years later, when it came out that the FBI had lied to the FISC about Carter Page, he said, “I will note, and note with some force, that I have seen nothing that indicates that the court was misled, that the Department of Justice or the intelligence community made misrepresentations to the court.”
Bates has a history of ruling against the Trump administration. For instance, in a 2018 DACA case, the first Trump administration tried to end DACA, and Judge Bates ruled that not only could they not end DACA, but they had to continue to accept applications. In his ruling, Bates said in a footnote that he was purposefully choosing to use the term “undocumented” instead of “illegals” so he wouldn’t offend anyone.
A year later, Judge Bates also ruled against the Trump administration in a case over whether self-employed people could band together to get discounted health insurance.