President Trump often has a point when he decries partisan rulings from the federal bench. In the case of the president’s $15 billion libel suit against the Times, though, the sledding might not be easy. A judge just struck Mr. Trump’s basic complaint for being “decidedly improper and impermissible” in its imprecision, florid language, and, our word here, hysterical nature. He gave the 47th president 28 days to rewrite the complaint in accord with the rules. 

Going by today’s ruling, it would be hard to accuse Judge Steven Merryday, nominated to the bench by President George H.W. Bush, of political bias. The jurist does, though, appear to be a stickler for the rules of civil procedure — and, it must be said, of common sense insofar as it applies to the legal concept of defamation. “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know),” he says, “a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective.”

Mr. Trump on Monday sued the Times, several of its reporters, and publisher Penguin Random House for statements the president calls “deceptive, malicious, intentional, defamatory, disparaging, distorted, fabricated, false, and misleading.” Yet Judge Merryday notes that in the 85-page complaint, the two legal claims in the case don’t appear until page 80. He reckons that this defies procedural rules calling for “a short and plain statement of the claim.” 

Plus, too, the federal rules state, per Judge Merryday, that “each averment of a pleading shall be simple, concise, and direct.” Mr. Trump’s “complaint stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements,” he adds. He vows that the case “will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner.” He gives Mr. Trump a chance to refile within 28 days a complaint of no more than 40 pages.

If Mr. Trump elects to refile the suit, Judge Merryday’s requirement could lead the president to drop some of the prefatory verbiage in his lawsuit, like the claim that his 2024 win was “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” A spokesman for Mr. Trump said the president “will continue to hold the Fake News accountable through this powerhouse lawsuit,” while adhering to “the judge’s direction on logistics.”

Hmmmmm. Judge Merryday’s ire wasn’t merely confined to the page count of the complaint, but to the vagueness of its claims, as well. He laments that “the reader must endure an allegation” in the suit of “the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass.” Plus a claim that the Times’s “false narrative about ‘The Apprentice’ was just the tip of Defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.”

As the New Yorker used to say — “Block that Metaphor.” Judge Merryday stresses that his “order suggests nothing about the truth” of the claims, since it will be up to a jury to weigh them. Yet he avers that a legal complaint is “an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence,” not to mention “the rehearsal of tendentious arguments.” Nor is a lawsuit, he says, a “megaphone for public relations.”

Lest anyone accuse Judge Merryday of a political tilt, he avers that the procedural rules apply in “every pleading in a federal court,” no matter “the amount in controversy, the identity of the parties,” or “the urgency or importance (real or imagined) of the dispute.” At a time of fretting over the future of the freedom of speech and the press, it’s refreshing to hear such a clear-eyed enunciation of the role of the federal courts in navigating such legal controversies.