More government theater. It reminds me of a case I was involved in about 30 years ago.
I was a staffer for a municipal public housing authority, with about 3500 units to take care of. One of our projects was a multi-building high-rise complex with a central boiler house. We had three boilers -- one of which was down at the start of the winter season because it was old and had a busted housing between the fire chamber and the water jacket. We were able to find only one source in the entire country to obtain replacement sections for the boiler, due to its age, and they had to be custom fabricated. The vendor estimated that it would take 6 to 8 weeks to make the sections, which then had to be shipped to us from a couple of states away, and then welded into place.
Some of the residents decided they didn't have enough heat -- even though two boilers were running fine, and the design of the system had been set up from the outset to have two boilers carrying the load and a third as redundant back-up. But ... the tenants brought in the legal aid group, who filed suit in the state housing court. The housing authority brought in as expert witnesses the engineer who designed the repairs, the contractor who had been hired to perform the work, and me -- the contracting officer for the project. We all testified exactly the same -- two boilers provided sufficient capacity, the repairs had been contracted and were being performed as expeditiously as possible, and the replacement parts had to be custom-made and would not be on site for another month to six weeks.
Undeterred by facts or logic, the judge ordered us to have the third boiler repaired and in service within three weeks.
Obviously, we didn't comply. And no sanctions ever fell on our heads. The motions had been gone through: Legal Aid could claim they had won an important victory in court. The court could say that they issued a fair and just decision to secure the (alleged) rights of the tenants. The fact that all the courtroom drama made absolutely no difference wasn't even secondary -- it probably wasn't even tertiary.