Subject: Re: contempt deadline
So if a rogue judge issues a bogus TRO like this one - and it gets vacated - then it's still in force? Yeah, that's not how this works.

It's not still in force - but that doesn't mean that it wasn't wrong to ignore while it was in force.

If you've been wrongly convicted of a crime, you're not allowed to break out of prison. Even if you're sure that you'll prevail on appeal. And if you break out of prison and your original conviction is overturned (a court found that the conviction was "bogus"), you can and should still face criminal penalties for having broken out of prison. Because breaking out of prison is independently a bad act - even if a mistake was made, it is still wrongful for someone to violate the law.

All branches of government are separate and co-equal; despite the left's insistence that Obama judges from wherever can issue nationwide pronouncements on policies they don't like, the country doesn't work that way.

Why doesn't it work that way? An injunction applies to the party being enjoined no matter where that party happens to be. If a corporation that does business all over the country loses a case and is enjoined from, say, violating someone else's copyright, that injunction doesn't just apply in the district it's issued in. If you win an injunction against a person, say enjoining them from disclosing your trade secrets, that injunction applies to them everywhere they are - they can't just go across a state line and be free from the legal consequences of having lost a case.

There's only one federal government. If they lose a case in one part of the country, they've lost. They have to comply with the ruling of the court wherever they are, which (for the federal government) is nationwide.