Attorney General William Barr has arguably been the most effective official President Donald Trump has nominated since taking office.

He has been very busy making historic arrests and leading efforts to make the country safer — but Democrats are still doing their best to slow him down.

That was especially true this week when an Obama-appointed federal judge sided with four murderers and ruled against the Department of Justice.

Over the summer, Barr authorized the use of the death penalty by the federal government for the first time in almost two decades.

But days before the authorization is set to take place, a federal judge is trying to stop it.

According to the Daily Caller, the Trump administration is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a D.C. judge’s decision to block four federal executions set for Dec. 9.

The four individuals on death row have each been convicted of the murders of children, among other crimes.

Below are brief descriptions of the criminals and what they did:

One of the criminals is Daniel Lewis Lee, who participated in the murder of three people back in 1995, including an 8-year-old girl. The victims were suffocated using plastic bags before being dumped in a swamp.

Alfred Bourgeois, Dustin Lee Honken, and Wesley Ira Purkey are also on death row for murdering young children.

Under the Federal Death Penalty Act, the Bureau of Prisons is required to conduct executions “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state” where the sentence was handed down.

The states in question all legally allow lethal injection for inmates on death row — which is the manner of execution the federal government also employs.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014, doesn’t agree with the Trump administration.

In her ruling, Chutkan advocates for a broader understanding of the term “manner.”

She claims “manner means a mode of procedure or way of acting.”

In her eyes, the “statute’s use of the word ‘manner’ thus includes not just execution method but also execution procedure.”

She’s arguing that because there are minor procedural differences between how the federal government and the states in question operate, the defendant’s death sentences cannot be carried out.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who is arguing the case in court on behalf of the DOJ, couldn’t believe her ruling.

And now, Barr gave him the greenlight to take the case to the Supreme Court to reverse Chutkan’s decision.

“That reading is implausible,” Francisco responded in a brief filed on Monday night.

He went on: “For virtually the entire history of the United States, beginning with the First Congress, federal statutory references to the ‘manner’ of execution have been understood — including by this Court — to refer to the mechanism for inflicting the death penalty, not to every ‘procedural detail’ that might be employed in an execution.”

Francisco went on to note that with Chutkan’s reasoning, individual states could “effectively veto a federal execution simply by making unavailable state officials or resources that are required by state law for the execution.”

This entire situation is straightforward.

Barr reauthorized the use of the death penalty by the federal government so that sick criminals like the four mentioned above can be legally executed for what they did.

But the Obama judge doesn’t see it that way and is ruling against their scheduled executions because they disagree on the definition of “manner.”

That’s how absurd things have gotten.