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Tag: injunctions

  • Op-Ed: Despite Supreme Court Ruling, Injunctions Still Threaten to Hold America Back

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    Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court wisely constrained the power of individual judges to impose nationwide injunctions that block President Trump’s ability to enact the agenda he promised voters.

    The Court agreed with President Trump and Republican lawmakers who have correctly pointed out that judges in states like New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maryland should not have total power to stop the administration from making policy changes related to everything from immigration policy to health care.

    While Republicans in Congress and the administration have opposed this broad exercise of judicial power on some matters, it’s puzzling that there is continued support, and even proposals to expand, judges’ authority to impose sweeping injunctions in cases related to intellectual property rights, which have enormous economic impact.

    Right now, in fact, Congress is considering the RESTORE Patent Rights Act, a bill that would make it much easier for bad actors to obtain injunctions that prevent American companies from making and selling their products.

    In courtrooms across the country, but especially here in Texas, some of our most innovative companies are defending themselves against bogus patent infringement lawsuits. Investors form shell companies, known as non-practicing entities (NPEs), and use their resources to purchase or acquire broad patents which, in many cases, are of such low-quality they never should have been issued in the first place. NPEs then initiate patent infringement lawsuits against legitimate companies, using litigation to extort eye-popping settlements and verdicts.

    During the first half of 2025, NPEs filed 56 percent of all patent infringement cases nationally and more than 60 percent of those lawsuits are based in the Eastern or Western Districts of Texas, venues that plaintiffs believe give them an advantage due to abnormally fast case timelines.

    The mere threat of an injunction gives NPEs undue leverage over defendants. Blocking the manufacture and sale of entire product lines, if found guilty, is such a dramatic measure that defendants are pressured to settle even if they are sure that they have not infringed on an NPE’s abstract patent. NPEs know this and use it to demand inflated sums.

    In 2006, the Supreme Court’s unanimous eBay decision helped level the playing field by implementing a four-factor test to obtain an injunction. The test maintained the remedy as an option for plaintiffs who manufacture and sell products, but makes it more difficult for shell companies to justify requesting injunctions instead of simply monetary damages.

    The RESTORE Patent Rights Act, which was reintroduced earlier this year, and has drawn support from some Republicans, would overturn eBay and its four-factor test, greasing the wheels of justice for plaintiffs pursuing injunctions as settlement leverage. This means that NPEs, which do not add anything of value to our economy, would have more tools to secure hefty payments from the companies that keep our economy moving. The ultimate outcome would be more litigation waste and inefficiency leading to slower innovation and growth.

    Yet, the problems with intellectual property injunctions are not limited to Congress. In a perplexing move, Department of Justice lawyers recently filed a “Statement of Interest” on behalf of an NPE that sought an injunction against Samsung Electronics, which employs as many as 10,000 Americans.

    This unusual step, choosing to weigh in on behalf of an NPE that wants Samsung to stop producing flash drives – a commonplace technology that many take for granted – runs counter to the President’s stated priorities of growing investments in domestic manufacturing.

    While the administration has been correct about nationwide injunctions halting the policies they wish to implement, the DOJ weighing in on behalf of a shell company suing a technology manufacturer appears to be an oversight. The administration has recognized the problems that can come with centralizing that sort of injunction power in a single judge and they ought to be consistent in their stance. I hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will take a serious look at the impact of the DOJ’s Statement of Interest and bring the agency further in line with the President’s agenda.

    Overturning eBay, which some in Congress and the administration seem intent to do, would not make our economy stronger. It would, instead, increase waste and abuse by giving bad actors more leverage to target productive companies and use our justice system to reap unearned payments.

    The Supreme Court got it right on intellectual property injunctions. Congress and DOJ are not there yet. Republicans should be consistently opposing nationwide injunctions – whether they target the President’s agenda or American innovators.

    Ted Poe served the 2nd Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2005 until 2019. Prior to his time in Congress, Poe was a judge in Harris County, beginning in 1981.

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    Ted Poe

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  • Biden administration defends communications with social media companies in high-stakes court fight | CNN Business

    Biden administration defends communications with social media companies in high-stakes court fight | CNN Business

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    Washington, DC
    CNN
     — 

    The Biden administration on Thursday defended its communications with social media giants in court, arguing those channels must stay open so that the federal government can help protect the public from threats to election security, Covid-19 misinformation and other dangers.

    The closely watched court fight reflects how social media has become an informational battleground for major social issues. It has revealed the messy challenges for social media companies as they try to manage the massive amounts of information on their platforms.

    And it has highlighted warnings by independent researchers, watchdog groups and government officials that malicious actors will continue to try to disrupt the country’s democracy by flooding the internet with bogus and divisive material ahead of the 2024 elections.

    In oral arguments before a New Orleans-based federal appeals court, the US government challenged a July injunction that blocked several federal agencies from discussing certain social media posts and sharing other information with online platforms, amid allegations by state governments that those communications amounted to a form of unconstitutional censorship.

    The appeals court last month temporarily blocked the injunction from taking effect. But the outcome of Thursday’s arguments will determine the ultimate fate of the order, which placed new limits on the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and other federal agencies’ ability to coordinate with tech companies and civil society groups.

    If upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the injunction would suppress a broad range of public-private partnerships and undermine the US government’s mission to protect the public, the Biden administration argued.

    “For example, if there were a natural disaster, and there were untrue statements circulating on social media that were damaging to the public interest, the government would be powerless under the injunction to discourage social media companies from further disseminating those incorrect statements,” said Daniel Tenny, a Justice Department lawyer.

    Now, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit is set to decide how executive agencies may respond to those threats.

    At issue is whether the US government unconstitutionally pressured social media platforms into censoring users’ speech, particularly when the government flagged posts to the platforms that it believed violated the companies’ own terms of service.

    During more than an hour of oral arguments Thursday, the three judges handling the appeal gave little indication of how they would rule in the case, with one judge asking just a couple of questions during the hearing. The other two spent much of the time pressing attorneys for the Biden administration and the plaintiffs in the case on issues concerning the scope of the injunction and whether the states even had the legal right – or standing – to bring the lawsuit.

    Before them is not only the request to reverse the lower court injunction, but also one from the administration to issue a more lasting pause on that injunction while the judges weigh the challenge to it.

    In briefs submitted to the court ahead of Thursday’s hearing, the Biden administration argued that a lower court judge was wrong to have identified the government communications with social media companies as potentially, in his words, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ [sic] history.”

    “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” the administration’s lawyers wrote, adding that the lower court “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce.”

    The administration’s opponents in the case, which include the states of Missouri and Louisiana, have argued that the federal government’s communications with social media companies are a violation of the First Amendment because even “‘encouragement short of compulsion’ can transform private conduct [by social media companies] into government action” that infringes on users’ speech rights.

    “Every one of these federal agencies has insinuated themselves into the content moderation decisions of major social media platforms,” D. John Sauer, an attorney representing the state of Louisiana, told the judges on Thursday. Hypothetically speaking, he added: “The Surgeon General can say, ‘All this speech is terrible, it’s awful.’ …. But what he can’t do is pick up the phone and say, ‘Take it down.’”

    In addition to the states, five individuals are also plaintiffs in the suit. They include three doctors who have been critical of state and federal pandemic-era restrictions, a Louisiana woman who claims she was censored by social media companies for her online criticisms of Covid health measures and a man who runs a far-right website known for pushing conspiracy theories.

    Much of Thursday’s oral arguments hinged on the definition of coercive communication and how courts have analyzed government pressure against private parties in past cases.

    But the states also claimed that there could be a pathway to finding a constitutional violation if the court agreed that social media companies, in heeding the administration’s calls to action, had been effectively turned into agents of the US government.

    In the past month, after District Judge Terry Doughty issued his injunction, current and former US officials, along with outside researchers and academics, have worried that the order could lead to a chilling effect for efforts to protect US elections.

    “There is no serious dispute that foreign adversaries have and continue to attempt to interfere in our elections and that they use social media to do it,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the House Judiciary Committee in July. “President Trump himself in 2018 declared a national emergency to that very effect, and the Senate Intelligence Committee — in a bipartisan, overwhelmingly bipartisan way — not only found the same thing but called for more information-sharing between us and the social media.”

    Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the panel’s chair, remains unconvinced. Earlier this week, he and other Republican lawmakers filed their own brief to the appeals court, accusing the Biden administration of a campaign to stifle speech.

    “On issue after issue, the Biden Administration has distorted the free marketplace of ideas promised by the First Amendment, bringing the weight of federal authority to bear on any speech it dislikes—including memes and jokes,” Jordan and the other lawmakers wrote. “Of course, Big Tech companies often required little coercion to do the Administration’s bidding on some issues. Generally eager to please their ideological allies and overseers in the federal government, these companies and other private entities have repeatedly censored accurate speech on important public issues.”

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  • What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

    What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge may rule later this month on a lawsuit seeking to block the use of medication abortion nationwide, in the biggest abortion-related case since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

    The lawsuit, filed in November by anti-abortion advocates against the US Food and Drug Administration, targets the agency’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion process

    Medication abortion, which now makes up a majority of abortions obtained in the US, has become a particularly acute flashpoint in the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

    US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, has extended the briefing deadline in the case until February 24.

    Reproductive rights advocates say that if Kacsmaryk sides with the plaintiffs, “it would eliminate the most commonly used method of abortion care,” according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

    Here’s what to know about the lawsuit:

    The lawsuit, filed last year by a coalition of anti-abortion national medical associations under the umbrella of the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine” and several doctors, is seeking a number of actions by the court, chief among them a preliminary and permanent injunction ordering the FDA “to withdraw mifepristone and misoprostol as FDA-approved chemical abortion drugs and to withdraw defendants’ actions to deregulate these chemical abortion drugs.”

    “After two decades of engaging the FDA to no avail, plaintiffs now ask this court to do what the FDA was and is legally required to do: protect women and girls by holding unlawful, setting aside, and vacating the FDA’s actions to approve chemical abortion drugs and eviscerate crucial safeguards for those who undergo this dangerous drug regimen,” the complaint reads.

    The FDA responded to the lawsuit last month by asking the judge to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, arguing that issuing one in the matter “would upend the status quo and the reliance interests of patients and doctors who depend on mifepristone, as well as businesses involved with mifepristone distribution.”

    The agency also says a ruling against it would set a dangerous precedent.

    “More generally, if longstanding FDA drug approvals were so easily enjoined, even decades after being issued, pharmaceutical companies would be unable to confidently rely on FDA approval decisions to develop the pharmaceutical-drug infrastructure that Americans depend on to treat a variety of health conditions,” the FDA wrote.

    “A preliminary injunction would interfere with Congress’s decision to entrust FDA with responsibility to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs. In discharging this role, FDA applies its technical expertise to make complex scientific determinations about drugs’ safety and efficacy, and these determinations are entitled to substantial deference.”

    Danco, which makes mifepristone, also made a similar request to the FDA’s in a court filing, stressing that the lawsuit could decimate the company’s business.

    “Danco is a small pharmaceutical company. It sells one drug: Mifeprex,” lawyers for the company wrote in court papers. “Entering the mandatory preliminary injunction plaintiffs seek would force FDA to withdraw approval for Danco’s only product, effectively shuttering Danco’s business.”

    “Congress entrusts decision-making like this with the FDA. And they’re coming in trying to overrule that, saying this medication is unsafe because women bleed. Well, that’s part of having an abortion. It’s also part of having a pregnancy,” said Ryan Brown, an attorney representing Danco in the case. “The bottom line being that they just want to do away with abortion across the board and for any reason.”

    Kacsmaryk was appointed to the court in 2017 by then-President Trump and was confirmed by a 52-46 vote in 2019.

    Since then, he’s helped make Texas a legal graveyard for policies of President Joe Biden’s administration, presiding over 95% of the civil cases brought in Amarillo, Texas.

    In December, Kacsmaryk put on hold the Biden administration’s most recent attempt to end the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program. And he has overseen Texas cases challenging vaccine mandates, the gender identity guidance issued by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the administration’s limits on the use of Covid-19 relief funds for tax cuts.

    Before joining the court, Kacsmaryk served as deputy general counsel at the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit religious liberty legal group, where he worked mainly on “religious liberty litigation in federal courts and amicus briefs in the US Supreme Court,” according to his White House biography.

    The case is being closely watched by a number of interested parties, including Republican and Democratic state attorneys general. On Friday, two different multi-state coalitions filed amicus briefs with the court urging them to act one way or another in the matter.

    A coalition of 22 Democratic attorneys general urged Kacsmaryk to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, writing in court papers that “annulling – or even merely limiting – any of the FDA’s actions relating to medication abortion would result in an even more drastic reduction in abortion access across the entire nation, worsening already dire outcomes, deepening entrenched disparities in access to health care, and placing a potentially unbearable strain on the health care system as a whole.”

    And a coalition of 22 Republican attorneys general asked the court to issue the preliminary injunction, arguing the FDA exceeded its authority when it approved the medication.

    “State laws on chemical abortion thus account for the public interests at issue – and they do so with the benefit of democratic legitimacy (and legal authority). The FDA’s actions can make no such claim. By obstructing the judgments of elected representatives, the agency has undermined the public interest,” they wrote.

    Abortion rights advocates have sounded the alarm on the case, stressing that a ruling by Kacsmaryk in favor of the plaintiffs would affect every corner of the country since the lawsuit is targeting a federal agency.

    “If FDA approval of mifepristone is revoked, 64.5 million women of reproductive age in the US would lose access to medication abortion care, an exponential increase in harm overnight,” NARAL said in a statement on Friday, pointing to internal research.

    “This research reveals the high stakes of this lawsuit, and we can only expect the worst from this Trump-appointed federal judge. Americans want access to abortion, but anti-choice bad actors are dead set on restricting reproductive freedom by any means possible,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, the group’s vice president of communications and research.

    And activists are mobilizing in Texas around the issue, with the Women’s March planning to hold a rally at the federal courthouse in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday.

    “We’ve said it before: the fight for reproductive rights now lies in the states, and legal challenges like these are just the latest example of how our fight is bigger than Roe,” said Rachel Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March.

    On Thursday, Kacsmaryk told the plaintiffs that they had until February 24 to respond to a recent filing by the Danco, writing in an order that following the deadline, “briefing will then be closed on the matter, absent any ‘exceptional or extraordinary circumstances.’”

    On Friday, the plaintiffs in the case submitted one response to the FDA’s filing. But the deadline extension means that after the plaintiffs submit a separate response to Danco, the case is ripe for judgment since all required briefings will have been filed.

    Kacsmaryk can rule at any time after that, though he could also call for a hearing, or ask for additional responses as well.

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  • US government seeks court injunctions against six e-cigarette manufacturers as FDA steps up enforcement | CNN

    US government seeks court injunctions against six e-cigarette manufacturers as FDA steps up enforcement | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The US Department of Justice took legal action against six e-cigarette manufacturers Tuesday, seeking permanent injunctions against the manufacturers on behalf of the US Food and Drug Administration. The flurry of complaints marked the first time the FDA has taken this step against e-cigarette manufacturers to enforce its premarket review requirements for new tobacco products.

    The six manufacturers failed to submit the necessary premarket applications for their e-cigarette products “and have continued to illegally manufacture, sell, and distribute their products, despite previous warning from the FDA that they were in violation of the law,” the FDA said in a statement.

    “Today’s enforcement actions represent a significant step for the FDA in preventing tobacco product manufacturers from violating the law,” said Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “We will not stand by as manufacturers repeatedly break the law, especially after being afforded multiple opportunities to comply.”

    The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires that companies submit applications to the FDA and get them approved before manufacturing, selling or distributing new tobacco products. Companies that had products on the market before this provision took effect still had to submit applications.

    The FDA says it issued nearly 300 warning letters between January 2021 and September 9, 2022, for failure to submit applications, and most of those companies have removed their products from the market. This month, the agency sent a warning letter to the maker of Puff Bar products, which are especially popular among young people, for operating without a marketing authorization order. In June, the agency ordered e-cigarette giant Juul Labs to remove its products from the market, but a court blocked that ban, so those products are still available.

    Advocates have criticized the FDA as too slow to act on a majority of the premarket applications. In May, the agency announced that it would not finish reviewing all the premarket applications from e-cigarette companies until June 2023, nearly two years past its court-ordered deadline to make a decision about those products.

    Erika Sward, assistant vice president for national advocacy for the American Lung Association, said Tuesday’s actions send “a very important message to manufacturers that that they need to follow the law.”

    “This is a monumental first step forward for FDA and DOJ, and we are really encouraged by this action,” she said. “I’m really pleased that this is the kind of step forward. This is what FDA needed to do from the beginning, and we’re very pleased to see this.”

    Sward credited King, who was named director of the Center for Tobacco Products in July, with providing the impetus for the increased actions.

    “We are very hopeful that this indicates that FDA and DOJ will take more of these steps against other recalcitrant manufacturers,” she said. “And we also very much hope the manufacturers get the message that under Dr. King’s leadership, this is a different Center for Tobacco Products.”

    The complaints were brought against manufacturers that the FDA alleges continued to make and distribute nicotine products even after they were warned that they were in violation of the law. According to the court filings, the six manufacturers all received warning letters from the FDA informing them that they were manufacturing tobacco products that lacked the required approval.

    Several of the defendants also participated in teleconferences with the FDA after receiving the warning letters, the government said. Some of the manufacturers allegedly told the agency that they would cease manufacturing and distributing the nicotine products in question, but follow-up inspections showed that the products were still being manufactured and sold, according to the complaints.

    “These cases are an important step in stopping the illegal sale of unauthorized electronic nicotine delivery system products,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, who leads the DOJ’s Civil Division, said in a statement. “The Department of Justice will continue to work closely with FDA to stop the distribution of illegal, unauthorized tobacco products.”

    The six companies named in Tuesday’s court filings are Morin Enterprises Inc., doing business as E-Cig Crib, in Minnesota; Soul Vapor LLC in West Virginia; Super Vape’z LLC in Washington; Vapor Craft LLC in Georgia; Lucky’s Convenience & Tobacco LLC, doing business as Lucky’s Vape & Smoke Shop, in Kansas; and Seditious Vapours LLC, doing business as Butt Out, in Arizona. The companies have not yet responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

    “Mr. King seems delighted to kick in the doors of small businesses but turns a blind eye to the millions of Americans who rely on nicotine vaping to quit cigarettes,” Amanda Wheeler, president of the American Vapor Manufacturers Association, said in a statement. “The ongoing result is countless people being driven back to smoking.”

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