The Judicial Insurrection And It's Consequences

The corruption and graft that has been exposed by DOGE involves so much money and so many people that former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd is predicting that its cessation could produce a short-term recession. He postulates that the housing market has been propped up by illegal aliens and the end of the financial support for illegals will cause housing prices to fall. In addition:

Dowd also see a recession coming as the government downsizes, illegal alien funding gets cut and illegals continue to self-deport.  Dowd says, “Consumer confidence has taken a nosedive recently, and you can see why.  There are 10 million to 15 million illegal immigrants worried about their gravy train coming to an end.  So, they may be holding back on their spending.  There are millions of government employees worried about their jobs.  Then, you have the NGO networks that employ about 6 million people.  So, you have about 20 million to 25 million people that are in the workforce . . . worried about where their money is going to come from, and that can cause consumer spending to slow down.”

The short term pain (assuming it comes about--Argentina seems to be doing very well after its President slashed government grift) will be worth the long term gain. 

    But with that much money to lose, of course the affected elites will fight back; and nowhere is this more apparent than in the flurry of national injunctions filed by leftist judges. Just last week, John Daniel Davidson, writing at The Federalist, observed:

More nationwide injunctions and restraining orders have been issued against Trump in the past month that were issued against the Biden administration in four years. On Wednesday alone, four different federal judges ordered Elon Musk to reinstate USAID workers (something he and DOGE have no authority to do), ordered President Trump to disclose sensitive operational details about the deportation flights of alleged terrorists, ordered the Department of Defense to admit individuals suffering from gender dysphoria to the military, and ordered the Department of Education to issue $600 million in DEI grants to schools.

He continues:

    On one level, what all this amounts to is an attempted takeover of the Executive Branch by the Judicial Branch — a judicial coup d’état. These judges are usurping President Trump’s valid exercise of his Executive Branch powers through sheer judicial fiat — a raw assertion of power by one branch of the federal government against another.

    But on another, deeper level, this is an attempt by the judiciary to prevent the duly elected president from reclaiming control of the Executive Branch from the federal bureaucracy — the deep state, which has long functioned as an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the government. This unconstitutional fourth branch has always been controlled by Democrats and leftist ideologues who, under the guise of being nonpartisan experts neutrally administering the functions of government, have effectively supplanted the political branches. Unfortunately, to large extent the political branches have acquiesced in the usurpation of their authority.

 Rick Moran, writing at PJ Media last week, also pointed out that "[a]s of March 15, at least 46 federal court decisions involving Donald Trump's agenda or Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have at least temporarily paused some of these initiatives," and that more than 160 lawsuits had been filed.  Other pundits have also warned that these activist judges are usurping the role of the executive:

• "The world is noticing: There’s a legit COUP underway in the US led by federal judges…"--Revolver News. 
  
• "Rogue Obama Judge Threatens Trump Over Deporting Venezuelan Gang Members" by Matt Margolis, PJ Media. 
• "Injunction Dysfunction or Tyrant Disruption? Trump-Era Judicial Paralysis Explained" by Ben Weingarten, Real Clear Investigations.
  

     What are the possible outcomes? One possibility is impeachment of obstructionist judges. President Trump has already called for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg who has ordered a stop to the deportation of illegal aliens belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang. In response, Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court took the rare step of publicly rebuking President Trump, writing: "For more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." Roberts is ignoring the fact that an appeal only provides a remedy as to a particular issues in a single case, and there is no guarantee that the judge will obey the instructions of the higher court on remand or otherwise continue to be obstructionist. There is also the issue that this has moved beyond a mere legal matter involve a dispute between an aggrieved party and the government to a political matter.  And political questions require political solutions.

    But impeachment would be hard--requiring a 2/3 vote of the Senate--and perhaps impossible in the current political climate. An alternative suggested by Glenn Reynolds is to expand the courts and fill them with Republican appointees. He notes that "[t]he National Judicial Council just recommended adding 66 District Judges and two Court of Appeals judges to remedy the 'crisis of undermanned federal courts,'" and suggested that perhaps Congress could go beyond this. Reynolds also suggested enacting "the Democrats’ bill from 2021, which would have expanded the Supreme Court from 9 to 13."

    While a temporary fix, this does not address the real problem which are courts involving themselves in political questions, something that became common after the Warren Court. School busing, for instance, was a political question that went beyond normal legal and equitable remedies to order a specific remedy opposed by the majority of citizens and, in fact, turned out to be gross mistake. Similarly, Roe v. Wade made up a previously unrecognized right that overrode the long standing laws of the majority of states. Nevertheless, the reality is that the courts were never intended to be co-equal in power to the executive branch and, certainly, not Congress. (See also here).  

    Another option being explored is to prohibit district judges from issuing injunctions except as to the parties involved in a particular case. "The No Rogue Rulings Act, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would bar district courts from issuing an 'order providing for injunctive relief,' unless it applies only to specific parties who bring a case."

    Unfortunately, these strategies can cut both ways. The Democrats have long pushed for court packing, so if the GOP does it, you can be sure that the Democrats will also do it when they are back in power. And limitations on injunctive relief may cut against conservative causes as well.

    In his piece, "Losing the Mandate of Heaven," Allen Schmidt predicts that the probable consequence of courts standing up for corruption, government waste, and preventing the deportation of dangerous illegal aliens will not be to aggrandize their power and influence, but to weaken or  destroy their political capital. He compares the legal system to a tawdry religion losing its power over the populace as its complicity in advancing leftist causes becomes more apparent (see also this Kunstler piece), and it's entirely a consequence of their ideological capture and overreach.

    The courts have been a vanguard of progressivism since FDR, and even so-called conservative Supreme Courts have pushed the country in a left-wing direction. Diluting their perceived power gave precedence to Trump to attack the mythos of the Judiciary much harder than he might have, and the limp-wristed proclamations of “The Rule of Law” fall on deaf ears, like an incantation that has lost its power. If all these “norms”, “precedents” and “traditions” have been warped to mean you perpetually lose, many have decided it’s time to flip the game board.

    The secular religion is fading, along with the stranglehold on the mind of the populace on what these religious norms even mean. Just like in the Middle Ages when clergymen’s failure to crack down on flagrant simony created an opening for counter-elites to form against the Church to create a schism, the inability of the ruling class to rein in rogue judges has made the entire process suspect. The spell is broken, and another foundational religious faith is being born.

    The relationship between the Judiciary and its Priests, the people, and what could be deemed the Warrior Class in the Executive who seek to conquer and transform the government, has become openly hostile. Bonds to the shared religion of the past has been severed, and we are entering an age where only raw displays of power matter. While the system worked for a while, it’s an inevitability that as the old faith gets corrupted and subsumed, something else will take its place. It’s going to get ugly. This outcome is sad and might have been avoidable a couple decades ago, but now it’s inevitable.