PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Cruz scorches Sotomayor over court critique, turns tables on her dissent.

“I read it a little bit like an arsonist complaining about the noise from the fire trucks,” Cruz said of Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Wolf v. Cook County, which dealt with regulations placing restrictions on non-citizens applying for visas to enter the U.S.

A lower court had issued a nationwide injunction against the administration, blocking the regulations, although the Cook County case only dealt with an Illinois injunction. Sotomayor used her to dissent to rail against the administration for its repeated tactic of applying for emergency stays so injunctions could be put on hold.

“It is hard to say what is more troubling,” Sotomayor wrote, “that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it,” she wrote.

But Cruz turned the issue around, stating that the Trump administration would not have to take such measures if judges were not granting an unusual number of nationwide injunctions.

“If you look to the facts of what’s happening with nationwide injunctions, I think it will explain why the Department of Justice has had to ask the Supreme Court to intervene over and over again,” Cruz said.

Indeed.