What do you call an official who claims the final say over the limits of his own power — and everyone else’s? Someone who can slap a “yes” on anything the elected branches do, or a “no” on anything they attempt, and treat his decree as the last word? That kind of power would have shocked America’s founders. In practice, it can exceed anything King George III exercised over the American colonies. Yet we keep granting it to federal judges by treating their overreach as binding even when Congress has said otherwise.

The founders worried most about the branches that wield force and money. The president commands the sword. Congress holds the purse. Both stand for election. Judges do not. Life tenure exists to protect judges while they decide cases, not to hand them an independent mandate to run the country. Judges possess no army and control no appropriations. Their influence depends on the political branches giving lawful effect to their rulings.

No individual right exists to use the courts as a substitute legislature to remain in the country. Judges cannot confer amnesty by injunction.

Those lawful bounds are not mysterious. Congress established the lower federal courts, and Congress defines their jurisdiction. Even the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction is subject to congressional regulation. Article III, Section 2 makes it subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Justice Clarence Thomas put it plainly in Patchak v. Zinke: “When Congress strips federal courts of jurisdiction, it exercises a valid legislative power no less than when it lays taxes, coins money, declares war, or invokes any other power that the Constitution grants it.”

Immigration offers the clearest test case because it sits at the heart of sovereignty. Over no issue do the political branches hold more constitutional authority than determining which foreigners may enter and remain.

As Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in Galvan v. Press (1954), policies on entry and removal are “peculiarly concerned with the political conduct of government,” and Congress’ exclusive control over them has become “about as firmly imbedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government.”

Congress, then, holds plenary authority over immigration policy and sweeping authority over federal court jurisdiction — especially the lower courts. Yet now, every loser district judge routinely grants standing to illegal aliens to challenge detention and removal, even when Congress has restricted review.

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Take Temporary Protected Status. The Ninth Circuit ordered the Trump administration to continue TPS for Venezuelans, despite the Supreme Court staying the original injunction. Another district judge issued a similar mandate for Haitians — 16 years after Haitians received that “temporary” status under President Obama. What often goes unsaid: Congress barred judicial review over TPS determinations. Federal law states, without qualification: “No court shall have jurisdiction to review any determination” of DHS “in granting or withdrawing TPS.” Other provisions restrict review of many deportation-related challenges — limits judges often treat as suggestions.

Over the past year, judges who view themselves as latter-day Martin Luther Kings have used legal fog to hear cases Congress barred, even after signals from the Supreme Court. That brings the Trump administration to its decision point.

Administration officials argue — correctly — that courts lack authority to issue certain orders. But judges have neither force nor will beyond what the executive supplies. The executive’s job includes enforcing the jurisdictional limits Congress enacted. A court that lacks jurisdiction cannot establish it by decree.

If this judicial coup runs to its logical end, any district judge becomes the final arbiter of any political question: grant standing to any plaintiff, announce standing rules that override statutes, take jurisdiction Congress withheld, then command the elected branches to act. That is not the Supreme Court’s role, let alone a trial judge’s.

It also outstrips anything King George could do at the founding. He needed Parliament for matters like citizenship. We are now told a judge can dictate immigration policy regardless of the law.

Waiting on the Supreme Court to clean up the mess is a fool’s errand. District judges return with a slightly modified case and restart the process. During Trump’s first term, an immigration lawyer summed up the strategy: “May a thousand litigation flowers bloom.”

The numbers tell the story. In Minnesota alone, federal court sees an average of one habeas petition filed every hour. A judge even ordered a previously deported alien brought back. These petitions do not claim Immigration and Customs Enforcement mistakenly detained U.S. citizens. They aim to use courts to stall enforcement in bulk.

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Finality binds parties in cases; it does not bind the political branches into permanent policy submission. Lincoln drew that distinction in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Courts may decide individual cases. But if courts try to turn those decisions into national political rules, elected officials should not treat them as binding “political rules” that forbid any measure that does not “concur” with a judicial decision.

Lincoln practiced that view as president. His attorney general, Edward Bates, explained the judiciary’s proper scope: Judicial power is ample for justice “among individual parties,” but “powerless to impose rules of action and of judgment upon the other departments.”

Applied to immigration, the point is simple: No individual right exists to use the courts as a substitute legislature to remain in the country. Judges cannot confer amnesty by injunction. Congress has not passed a legislative amnesty in four decades for a reason: It requires majorities in both houses and the president’s signature, and the politicians who vote for it must face the voters. Yet the current judicial pattern grants amnesty through procedure — without hearings, without votes, and without accountability. Life tenure was designed for the opposite purpose.

No shortcut exists. The political branches must stop treating lawless judicial opinions as if they carry the force of law — especially when those opinions ignore statutes, exceed jurisdiction, and attempt to seize control of core sovereign functions.