Two days ago, the Department of Justice filed suit in the U.S. district court in Maryland against—the court itself. DOJ’s complaint in United States v. Judge George Russell et al. names the chief judge of the Maryland district, Russell, as well as every other judge of that court (fifteen in all, counting the chief), the clerk of the court, and, for good measure, the district court itself. The complaint avers that the district court is operating under “unlawful, anti-democratic Orders,” promulgated by the chief judge, that “require the court clerk to automatically enter an injunction against removing, or changing the legal status of, any alien detained in Maryland who files a habeas petition.”

DOJ’s complaint appears to be unprecedented, and there is probably very good reason for that. It is hard to see how the administration’s case can get out of the starting blocks. On one hand, the complaint makes some very plausible arguments that the district court’s standing orders regarding (temporary) protection of alien habeas petitioners are an abuse of the court’s equitable powers. I have no settled view myself of the propriety of this arrangement put in place by the court’s chief judge, though it is worth pointing out that this is a recent development, and arose in the district where Kilmar Abrego Garcia was, as the Trump DOJ admitted, mistakenly removed to El Salvador. Clearly the Trump administration has suffered a trust deficit in the Maryland district.

On the other hand—and this is the problem prompting me to write this comment—I am at a loss to see how DOJ’s complaint either invokes or generates an authentic case or controversy, as Article III of the Constitution requires for the exercise of judicial power. The judges themselves are the defendants in the Department’s complaint. There is a well-settled doctrine that, in connection with their official duties (and they are each sued here in their “official capacity”), federal judges enjoy immunity from civil liability. The Justice Department here seeks an injunction to defeat the court’s standing orders, not some form of damages or penalty to be incurred by the judges themselves, so perhaps such immunity is irrelevant.

But the district court itself, and not just its fifteen judges individually and officially, is both the defendant in DOJ’s complaint and the venue in which a decision is sought. This makes no sense whatever. The New York Times reports, though this is not in the text of the complaint, that the Department has requested that all the district’s judges recuse themselves, and that the Fourth Circuit appoint a judge from outside the district to preside over the litigation. That may solve the “no man may be judge in his own case” problem, but it still doesn’t tackle the case-or-controversy requirement. Neither the district court nor its judges have any stake in the application of its standing orders on aliens’ habeas petitions—and the United States has no stake in the abstract question of the orders’ propriety. Only in a concrete case, involving one or more aliens who seek the court’s protection against their removal, could the government have an actual interest in defeating the court’s allegedly “unlawful” orders. Until such an opportunity presents itself, a complaint such as this fails to state a cognizable cause of action in the district court.

A friend suggests that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ is less interested in the success of litigation such as this than in its “performative” potential with the MAGA base of the Republican Party, on social media and elsewhere. If that is so, the Trump administration has a sure winner here for its outrage mobs, because it has filed a sure loser of a lawsuit.