How much longer will Congress and the executive branch keep bowing to rogue judges?
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston ordered the federal government to continue reimbursing Planned Parenthood under Medicaid. She warned that cutting funding could cause women to “suffer adverse health consequences,” face more unintended pregnancies, and go without treatment for sexually transmitted infections.
The federal judiciary was never intended to wield this kind of unchecked power.
Congress had already voted to end the funding. The law is on the books. It went through the full legislative process and was signed by the president. But Judge Talwani believes her opinion overrides all of that. She not only reinterpreted the law, she ordered the appropriation of funds to a private abortion business.
That crosses a major constitutional line.
Judges don’t have the power of the purse. They can’t spend money. They can’t fund private organizations. Only Congress can do that. Yet that core principle of the separation of powers now seems optional. We are left with a system where unelected judges act as legislators, executives, and arbiters — and no one challenges them.
Too many conservatives hesitate to confront this reality. They’ll cheer when Trump ignores Congress on TikTok but wring their hands when he considers defying an unlawful court ruling. But judicial opinions don’t carry binding force simply because a judge wrote them. Presidents and lawmakers swear the same oath to the Constitution as judges do. They don’t swear loyalty to the judiciary.
If a court orders the government to fund Planned Parenthood in direct defiance of a law passed by Congress, and the executive branch complies, then we no longer have a functioning constitutional system. We have a judiciary with a veto power over the other branches.
This didn’t start with Talwani’s ruling, and it won’t end here. Judges now routinely issue sweeping decisions that affect the entire country, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that supposedly reined in nationwide injunctions. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito warned that lower courts would continue to defy precedent unless checked. They were right.
The time for deference is over. If Trump continues to honor every lawless edict from every federal judge, he only encourages more of the same. He entrenches the notion that judges make law and everyone else must obey.
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Imagine Congress passes and Trump signs a reconciliation bill that strips federal courts of jurisdiction over immigration enforcement or Planned Parenthood funding. Under Judge Talwani’s logic, the courts could simply declare the law unconstitutional and order the executive branch to act against it — up to and including spending money Congress never appropriated. That’s not judicial review. That’s a judge acting like a one-woman super-legislature with a gavel and a god complex. Where does it end?
It never ends. Earlier this month, a judge in California ruled that ICE cannot carry out “roving” immigration enforcement in parts of the state’s Central Valley. The ruling lacked any constitutional basis. The judge simply decided too many illegal immigrants were being arrested and declared the enforcement itself a violation of rights — despite no evidence that a single American citizen had been wrongfully detained.
Rather than overturn the decision, the Ninth Circuit grilled government attorneys about whether ICE had an arrest quota. The implication was clear: Immigration enforcement itself is now suspect.
The federal judiciary was never intended to wield this kind of unchecked power. Congress holds the purse strings. The executive enforces the law. Judges interpret the law in individual cases. That’s the constitutional design.
Abraham Lincoln, in his fifth debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, warned against treating court opinions as absolute. If citizens and lawmakers accept every ruling without question, Lincoln said, they prepare themselves to accept the next decision “without any inquiry.”
That mindset leads to tyranny. Not suddenly, but step by step.
The judiciary was supposed to be the weakest branch. It was designed that way. It has no army. It has no budget. Its legitimacy depends on its restraint. When judges cast that aside, the other branches must respond.
Otherwise, we will find ourselves governed not by the Constitution but by the whims of unelected lawyers with lifetime tenure.
If Trump does not confront the courts, we will be obliged to implement any rule from any judge who shares the same beliefs as Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’d hate to see what the next decision looks like.
Race relations in the United States have unraveled in recent years, not only because of genuine disagreement, but because many Americans now grow up believing the nation is fundamentally unjust — racist to the core, perhaps even irredeemable.
This idea, once fringe, now enjoys institutional backing. Critical race theory and DEI ideology assert that the U.S. was founded on slavery and white supremacy. And they dominate schools, corporations, and government agencies alike.
Don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As a result, America has seen a quiet comeback of sanctioned segregation. Colleges increasingly host race-based graduation ceremonies. Society encourages people to define themselves first by racial identity, not shared citizenship. That should alarm anyone who once marched for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s.
When Americans stop thinking of each other as fellow citizens, the glue that holds the republic together dissolves.
Consider one example of this trend: the push for a separate “independence day” for black Americans.
On June 17, 2021, Joe Biden signed Senate Bill 475 into law, establishing a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The bill commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that slaves in the state had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — two years after it was signed.
Former slaves in Texas celebrated, and in the years that followed, Juneteenth spread across the South. But it never held central importance in the broader civil rights movement.
Juneteenth did not abolish slavery. It merely marked the day slaves in one state learned they had been legally freed. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, applied only to states in rebellion — excluding Union-supporting border states like Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
Some activists now argue that Juneteenth should serve as “Black Independence Day.” That’s a mistake.
This view implies that African Americans have no rightful claim to the Fourth of July or to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But those ideas belong to all Americans — not just the descendants of the signers.
It’s true that many historical figures sought to exclude black Americans from the promise of the Declaration. Chief Justice Roger Taney made that argument explicit in the Dred Scott decision. Confederates like Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun claimed that “all men are created equal” never applied to African Americans.
They were wrong.
Some cite Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — to support the idea that black Americans should reject the founding. But they ignore the full context.
Douglass, speaking two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, condemned the hypocrisy of a country that declared liberty while tolerating bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “A day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
But unlike Taney, Stephens, and Calhoun, Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration. He upheld it.
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Douglass took hope from the principles it proclaimed and called on America to live up to them. He dismissed the Garrisonian claim that the Constitution was pro-slavery. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he said, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”
He believed America’s founding held the moral resources to defeat slavery — and it did.
America’s founders didn’t invent slavery; they merely inherited it. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a global institution, practiced on every continent and defended by every empire. Slavery, including African slavery, was a manifestation of the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Even Africans sold fellow Africans into slavery.
The Declaration of Independence marked a sharp break from that past. It asserted that all human beings possess natural rights — and that no one may rule another without consent.
Thomas Jefferson famously observed that humanity had long been divided into those born "booted and spurred” and those “born with saddles on their backs.” The founders rejected that model. They established a republic based on equality before the law, not the interests of the stronger over the weaker.
They also knew slavery contradicted those ideals. Many believed the institution would die out — an Enlightenment relic destined for extinction. Still, the political compromises they made to preserve the Union allowed slavery to persist, and it took a war to end it.
The Civil War was not a rejection of the founding. It was a fulfillment of it.
As Harry Jaffa wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slaveholders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful ... is that a nation of slaveholders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”
The Declaration of Independence lit the fuse that ultimately destroyed slavery.
So let Americans celebrate Juneteenth — gratefully, joyfully, and historically. Let the holiday recall the biblical jubilee it was meant to evoke.
But don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t segment America’s founding. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As Douglass said: “I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national independence.”
He went on: “No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grander ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves.”
Douglass understood something too many have forgotten: The genius of the American founding lies not in who it excluded but in the promise that, one day, it would include everyone.
Timothy Snyder has built a career trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump is a latter-day Adolf Hitler — a fascist demagogue hell-bent on dismantling America’s institutions to seize power. Last week, the Yale historian and author of the bestselling resistance pamphlet “On Tyranny,” briefly changed course. Now, apparently, Trump is Jefferson Davis.
In a recent Substack post, Snyder claimed Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg amounted to a call for civil war. He argued that the president’s praise for the military and his rejection of the left’s historical revisionism signaled not patriotism but treason — and the rise of a “paramilitary” regime.
Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.
No, seriously. That’s what he thinks.
Trump’s first alleged Confederate offense, Snyder said, was to reinstate the military base’s original name: Fort Bragg. The Biden administration had renamed it Fort Liberty, repudiating General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate ties. Trump reversed the change.
The Biden administration had renamed the base Fort Liberty, citing General Braxton Bragg’s service to the Confederacy. Trump reversed the change. But he didn’t do it to honor a Confederate general. He did it to honor World War II paratrooper Roland L. Bragg, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained.
Snyder wasn’t buying it. He accused the administration of fabricating a “dishonest pretense” that glorifies “oathbreakers and traitors.”
That charge hits close to home.
My grandfather Martin Spohn was a German Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Berlin in 1936. He proudly served in the U.S. Army. He trained with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Bragg before deploying to Normandy. Like thousands of others, he saw the base not as a Confederate monument but as a launchpad for defeating actual fascism.
Restoring the name Fort Bragg doesn’t rewrite history. It honors the Americans who made history — men who trained there to liberate Europe from tyranny.
That’s not fascism. That’s victory over it.
For Snyder, though, Trump’s real crime was calling up the National Guard to restore order in riot-torn Los Angeles. That, he claimed, puts Trump in the same category as Robert E. Lee.
According to Snyder, the president is “preparing American soldiers to see themselves as heroes when they undertake operations inside the United States against unarmed people, including their fellow citizens.”
Let’s set aside the hysteria.
Trump didn’t glorify the Confederacy. He called for law and order in the face of spiraling violence. He pushed back against the left’s crusade to erase American history — not to rewrite it but to preserve its complexity.
He didn’t tell soldiers to defy the Constitution. He reminded them of their oath: to defend the nation, not serve the ideological demands of woke officials.
Snyder’s claims are as reckless as they are false.
He smears anyone who supports border enforcement or takes pride in military service as a threat to democracy. Want secure borders? You’re a fascist. Call out the collapse of Democrat-run cities? You’re a Confederate.
This isn’t analysis. It’s slander masquerading as scholarship.
But this debate isn’t really about Trump. It’s about power.
The left has spent years reshaping the military into a political project — prioritizing diversity seminars over combat readiness, purging dissenters, and enforcing ideological loyalty. When Trump pushes back, it’s not authoritarianism. It’s restoration.
The left wants a military that fights climate change, checks pronouns, and marches for “equity.” Trump wants a military that defends the nation. That’s the real divide.
Over and over, Snyder accuses Trump of “trivializing” the military by invoking its heroism while discussing immigration enforcement. But what trivializes military service more — linking it to national defense or turning soldiers into props for progressive social experiments?
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And Trump isn’t breaking precedent by deploying the National Guard when local leaders fail. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson used federal troops during desegregation. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers. The Guard responded during the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the Black Lives Matter and Antifa upheavals of 2020.
Trump acted within his authority — and fulfilled his duty — to restore order when Democrat-run cities descended into chaos.
Snyder’s rhetoric about “protecting democracy” rings hollow. Trump won the 2024 election decisively. Voters across party lines gave him a clear mandate: Secure the border and remove violent criminals. Pew Research found that 97% of Americans support more vigorous enforcement of immigration laws.
Yet Snyder, who constantly warns of creeping authoritarianism, closed his post by urging fellow academics to join No Kings protests.
Nobody appointed Timothy Snyder king, either.
If he respected democratic institutions, he’d spend less time fearmongering — and more time listening to the Americans, including many in uniform, who are tired of being demonized for loving their country. They’re tired of being called bigots for wanting secure borders. They’re tired of watching history weaponized to silence dissent.
Snyder invokes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to condemn Trump. But it was Lincoln who paraphrased scripture when he said, “A house divided cannot stand.”
Americans united behind Trump in 2024. Snyder’s effort to cast half the country as fascists or Confederates embodies the division Lincoln warned against.
Here’s the truth: Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.
He wants a Union preserved in more than name — a Union defined by secure borders, equal justice, and unapologetic national pride.
If that scares Timothy Snyder, maybe the problem isn’t Trump.
Perhaps, the problem lies in the man staring back at him in the mirror.
Monday night the grill cools, the flag comes down, and you crash on that “half-off” mattress you never planned to buy. By Tuesday morning, America is already scrolling to the next thing. But the moms in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery aren’t scrolling — and neither should we.
Treating Memorial Day like a red, white, and blue props department proves a sad stat from a poll conducted by the National World War II Museum a few years ago: Barely one in five Americans could explain what the holiday is actually for.
We must teach the next generation to remember on purpose. If your kids can quote Marvel but not MacArthur, that’s on us.
So let’s talk about Tuesday morning in America and the 364 days that follow. What does it look like to honor our war dead all year long?
We must price-check freedom — every day. Scripture is always an appropriate place to start. In John 15:13 the Bible teaches us, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This verse is memorialized on headstones form sea to shining sea.
President Reagan reminded the nation at Arlington in 1982 that “freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden.” That burden extends beyond military service. It demands vigilance. It requires raising children who understand why our flag is folded 13 times — not just how many “likes” a TikTok dance racks up.
We must finish the unfinished work. Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg was delivered five months after that battlefield fell silent, long after the trending topic had shifted. He challenged the living “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Our unfinished work today is cultural: defending truth in classrooms, fostering marriages that can withstand deployment, protecting girls’ sports from idealogues who would erase biological reality, and pushing back when elites sneer at patriotism as passe.
We must guard the souls who come home. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ most recent suicide-prevention report still lands with a thud: An average of 17.6 veterans take their own lives each day. We flunk Remembrance 101.
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We cannot claim to honor the fallen if we abandon the brothers- and sisters-in-arms who made it home only to fight invisible wars. That means supporting faith-based counseling (which bureaucrats keep trying to sideline), turning the VA paperwork morass into a mission, helping veterans find meaningful and rewarding post-service careers, and checking on the veteran down the street instead of waiting for Washington to do it.
We must restore the faith they fought for. According to Pew Research, eight in ten Americans now believe religion is losing influence in public life, and roughly half say that’s a bad thing.
The men and women we memorialize took an oath to defend a nation “under God.” When pastors self-censor, when corporate America flies a Pride flag over Old Glory, and when our schools swap the Bible for the 1619 Project, we’re torching the spiritual scaffolding those soldiers died to protect. God bless America.
We must teach the next generation to remember on purpose. If your kids can quote Marvel but not MacArthur (“No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation”), that’s on us. Take them to a war memorial in July, not just on the last Monday in May. Tell them why “Taps” is 24 notes of holy silence. Ask a Gold Star family to dinner and let the conversation run long. The goal isn’t to glorify war; it’s to glorify virtue — courage, duty, sacrifice — so that when the recruiters call, our sons and daughters know what they’re signing up to defend.
We must live gratefully and live out loud. Gratitude is not a Hallmark feeling; it’s a muscle you flex in public. Fly the flag correctly (sunrise to sunset, illuminated at night). Stand for the anthem even when the stadium lump next to you kneels or leaves his hat on. Support companies that still believe in America like Blaze Media and my podcast, “We the People with Gates Garcia.” And pray for our leaders — yes, even the ones making it hard.
We must trade hashtag for habits. Hashtags flicker; habit forges character. Start small: Write a letter to a deployed Marine, sign up for a volunteer shift at the VA hospital, make a family pledge to read one military biography a year; and if you are blessed with means, cut a check to a veterans’ nonprofit organization. Imagine 20 million American households stepping up to do that. The culture would shift faster than Congress could rename the next great American holiday.
The 365-day test: I love a good cookout more than anyone. That’s part of the freedom they bought us. But the measure of our gratitude isn’t how loudly we celebrate on one Monday — it’s how deliberately we lie on all the rest. Reagan’s challenge, Lincoln’s unfinished work, and Christ’s supreme definition of love converge on a single question the fallen silently ask us every dawn: Are you living a life worthy of my sacrifice?
One day a year it’s fine to say, “Happy Memorial Day.” But on those other 364, make sure you live like you’re worth that sacrifice.
The left is the party that spawned critical race theory — the fundamentally flawed ideology that claims our constitutional framers were influenced by the racist norms of their time and therefore all the systems they created are tainted by those biases.
Mark Levin says it’s a shameful lie.
The truth is many of the framers despised slavery, but they had to make a hard deal with the slave states in order to form the United States. Without that union, there would have been no Civil War and no Abraham Lincoln to bring slavery to an end.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the delegates could not agree on the issue of slavery, so they left the issue to their children and grandchildren, Levin explains.
However, the framers knew that “a nation born out of the Declaration of Independence where all men were created equal” could not coexist with slavery.
Thomas Jefferson, who albeit owned slaves, tried to “put a provision in the Declaration of Independence about slavery,” but “it was withdrawn because they were in the middle of what started a revolutionary war for their own survival. ... They had to come together to fight the [British].”
Ultimately, the fight for independence from Britain and national unity took precedence over the issue of slavery until Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the Civil War thankfully put it to an end.
“[Abraham Lincoln] loved the Constitution of the United States, and he loved the Declaration, and he cited them repeatedly, especially the Declaration, as justification for fighting the [Civil] War to the end and abolishing slavery,” says Levin.
He wouldn’t have done that, though, if our founding documents were inherently pro-slavery and pro-white supremacy, as the left suggests they are.
To hear more of Levin’s analysis, including his take on the dangerous idea of nullification, a pre-Civil War movement that would have shattered the Republic, check out the clip above.
To enjoy more of "the Great One" — Mark Levin as you've never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Only by immersing ourselves in the best words of our forbears will we recover something of the culture that made these words possible in the first place.
As the nation approaches its 250th birthday, that pioneer spirit — of striving and thriving, and of merit overcoming obstacles placed in its path — can provide inspiration for us all.
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