Authored by Samantha Flom via RealClearPolitics,
“In America, we don’t do kings.”
That was the message of the leftist protesters who swarmed the streets nationwide on June 14 in opposition to President Donald Trump and his agenda.
“Trump must go now!” they chanted, waving signs that likened the president to a dictator and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to his Gestapo.
Their complaint was alleged despotism. But if Democrats really opposed authoritarianism, they wouldn’t be celebrating its emergence in the courts.
When U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani brazenly overstepped her authority on July 7 to block Congress from stripping Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding through the budget reconciliation bill – a clear usurpation of the legislative branch’s power of the purse – the response from the Left wasn’t outrage but praise.
“Good,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote on X. “Democrats will never stop fighting this backdoor abortion ban from the Republicans.”
Schumer’s apparent admission that Medicaid funds abortions aside, his comments also belie his party’s disingenuous indignation over supposed federal overreach.
That selective outrage was on full display in April amid the arrest of a Wisconsin judge for allegedly escorting Eduardo Flores-Ruiz – an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported – out the back jury door of her courtroom to help him evade federal immigration authorities.
The ICE agents in question had a valid administrative warrant for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest, yet leftists railed against efforts to hold Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan to account for her alleged obstruction.
“By arresting a sitting judge over routine courthouse management, the Trump regime has signaled its eagerness to weaponize federal power against members of the judiciary who do not align with its political agenda,” writer Mitchell Sobieski fumed in a Milwaukee Independent op-ed.
If impeding federal law enforcement now qualifies as “routine courthouse management,” that’s a big problem.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s Democratic Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s complaint was that the Trump administration was “scaring people” by enforcing federal immigration law.
“They’re scaring people in this community; they’re scaring people in immigrant communities all across the United States,” Johnson told the press.
Never mind the law-abiding U.S. citizens who remain scared that their daughters, sisters, or mothers could be the next Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, or Rachel Morin – all victims of murderers in the country illegally.
Apparently their fears are irrelevant.
As for Dugan, her claim that “judicial immunity” precludes her from prosecution for alleged obstruction of justice is as authoritarian as it gets.
Judges are but one facet of the American justice system, and as Democrats once loved reminding us all: “No one is above the law.”
Of course, the left’s disinterest in reining in the judiciary is nothing new. After all, the Democratic Party has long relied on activist judges to impose its will on the American public.
With Roe v. Wade in 1973, leftists leveraged a sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court to force nearly a half-century of unregulated abortion onto a country that was – and still is – deeply divided on the procedure.
In 2015, leftists used the same playbook to mandate same-sex marriage nationwide via Obergefell v. Hodges.
In the age of Trump, however, judicial activism has become an even more flagrant problem.
Last year, then-candidate Trump was frequently forced to split his time between the campaign trail and the courtroom as he fended off contrived criminal indictments and lawsuits, nearly all of which were conveniently presided over by liberal judges.
At the same time, radical judges in Colorado and Illinois – and Maine’s Democratic secretary of state – attempted to strip voters of their right to decide the presidential election by removing Trump’s name from the ballot.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to quash that authoritarian plot. Unfortunately for the justices, it’s a move they’ve had to repeat several times since the president’s inauguration in January.
In a litany of cases challenging Trump’s various policy changes, rogue district court judges have issued sweeping injunctions blocking him from implementing his agenda nationwide in cases without a class certification – a practice that the U.S. Supreme Court has now admonished as “likely” judicial overreach.
Still, lower court judges are finding other ways to overstep their authority.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, for example, appears to have decided that his court, not the nation’s high court, reigns supreme in the land.
Even after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted his nationwide block on third-country deportations in June, Murphy continued to insist that the Trump administration give six defendant illegal immigrants an opportunity to challenge their removal before deporting them to a third-party country.
That move even rankled liberal Justice Elena Kagan, who had initially sided with Murphy.
“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” Kagan wrote, concurring with the majority that the deportations could proceed.
Yet not even the top court is immune to political activism, it seems.
In her dissent from the court’s ruling against blanket injunctions, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the majority’s decision as “profoundly dangerous.” In her view, containing temporary judicial relief to those requesting it somehow grants the president “unchecked, arbitrary power” and “undermines our constitutional system.”
Jackson’s words were acrimonious enough that Justice Amy Coney Barrett included a stinging rebuke in the court’s ruling.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”
An imperial judiciary, indeed.
No, there are no kings in the United States – just a bunch of black-robed activists who seem to have forgotten the difference between “Your Honor” and “Your Majesty.”
