It didn't get much attention, but the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco actually surprised with its ruling, siding with the Trump administration in its bid to withhold discretionary funding from cities that refuse to assist ICE as sanctuary cities.

A federal appeals court ruled in favor of President Trump's administration in a case involving federal dollars being withheld from cities based in part on their "sanctuary city" status.

The 2-1 opinion from a panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge, who sided the city of Los Angeles in its lawsuit over Community Oriented Policing Services grants, which are determined by a point system that takes into account whether the city applying is a sanctuary city.

The Trump administration found Los Angeles did not qualify for the grant because it failed to receive enough points under 2017 rules put in place by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which gave cities extra points for cooperating with the federal immigration officials with illegal immigrants who have been detained in city jails.

This isn't just any illegal immigrants we are talking about - these are illegals who are in jail for committing additional crimes beyond breaking and entering into the U.S.

It would seem like a no-brainer for cities to help the feds get rid of illegals who are so bad they've proven to be predators on the locals, but blue cities have other priorities. The Justice Department was smart to merely make it a matter of points added for cooperation with established law, but that didn't stop the lawsuits. And it helped that of the three judges making the ruling, two were Bush appointees and one was a Clinton appointee.

This unexpected refusal from the courts has got to be a shock to the cities and activists that brought the lawsuits. After all, hasn't the Trump administration lost on most every issue? Isn't it a no-brainer that judges, even Bush judges, are going to be nevertrumps or else disguised leftists? Hasn't it been a piece of cake for them to gum up the entire executive branch on anything it might want to do through the court system?

No UN-recommended census question on citizenship, no ending of the arbitrary Obama DACA executive order (which had been rejected in Congress), no measly $6 billion for a border wall to stop a border surge of more than a million expected illegal invaders, no ability to even change one's legal team. The leftist courts up until now have always found merit on the thwart-Trump side, saying yes to any activist request, including the really stupid one from the Sierra Club, with the Supreme Court ruling that yes, the Sierra Club has a right to enjoy its scenery so President Trump can't use military funds to defend the country from an actual invasion.

It's gotten so bad they've been saying yes to any activist request.

It's gone too far. And the message to be drawn from this is that judges matter. There's no such thing as a non-partisan judge, as the increasingly disingenuous Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts had been trying to feed us. So many absurd rulings have come down in the wake of Trump's bid to enforce the border that it can only be chalked up to partisanship. So judges matter. Just as they did in the 2016 election, where many Asian-Americans and other voters atypically voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton. The current ongoing idiocy and this one little ruling of sanity from the 9th circuit appeals court (a high one) matters just as much as it did in 2016.

Image credit: WClarke, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0