“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 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.
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.’
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. It was praise.
"Good," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) 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 Mayor Cavalier Johnson, a Democrat, complained 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 reporters.
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 being prosecuted for alleged obstruction of justice is as monarchical as it gets.
Judges are but one facet of the American justice system, and as Democrats loved reminding us all 15 minutes ago: “No one is above the law.”
Of course, Democrats’ lack of interest 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, liberals 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.
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At the same time, radical judges in Colorado and Illinois, along with 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 line of cases challenging Trump’s policy pursuits, 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 Supreme Court has lately 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 Murphy’s nationwide block on third-country deportations in June, Murphy continued to insist that the Trump administration allow six illegal immigrant defendants 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, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, 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.”
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Unlike certain recent additions to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito has consistently delivered for God-fearing conservatives and constitutionalists.
This consistency and Alito's resistance to the fads of the day have made him a popular target for Democratic lawmakers and other radical leftists, along with their fellow travelers in the liberal media.
Democrats including Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) have, for instance, pressured Alito to recuse himself from cases of consequence. Other Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), have painted a target on his back, calling him a "threat to our democracy." Liberal publications such as the New York Times and ProPublica have pushed false narratives framing him as an extremist or at the very least as unethical. A false-flagger who helped the Lincoln Project stage a fake white supremacist rally in 2021 futilely tried to catch Alito saying something damning on tape. A radical even allegedly threatened to assassinate him last year.
Alito underscored in his recent interview with Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution's "Uncommon Knowledge," that the judiciary has a responsibility to resist possession by the zeitgeist and to do what is right, even if unpopular.
In 2022, Alito gave a speech in Rome at a religious liberty summit convened by the Religious Liberty Initiative of the University of Notre Dame's law school, where he underscored that religious liberty is far more than just "freedom of worship."
'Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.'
"Freedom of worship means freedom to do these things that you like to do in the privacy of your home, or in your church or your synagogue or your mosque or your temple. But when you step outside into the public square, in the light of day, you had better behave yourself like a good secular citizen," said the conservative justice. "That's the problem that we face."
RELATED: American de-Christianization: Why it's happening and what it will mean for the republic
When asked in the interview published Wednesday to expound on his suggestion in the Rome speech, Alito told Robinson, "I think it is the problem that we face because support for religious liberty, unfortunately, has cratered in the last 20, 25 years."
After Alito raised the matter of how the U.S. Constitution singles out religion and gives it protection that is not similarly afforded to views that are not religiously based, Robinson said, "I can't remember who it was who said that it's fair to expect the judicial system to ignore the politics of the day but naive to expect the judicial system to remain unaffected by the politics of the era — something like that. And if public support for religion, public practice of religion — if the support, as you just said, is 'cratering' — what can the court do over the long term?"
Alito indicated that the Constitution wouldn't turn on a faithful minority just because the majority turned on faith.
"There's a reason why we're not elected. We are not supposed to do what is popular. We're supposed to do what is right," said Alito. "We're supposed to interpret the Constitution and figure out what it means, and then apply the Constitution. That's the purpose of this institution, the core purpose of this institution."
RELATED: Secularists think they won at the Supreme Court — but they’ll lose in the end
While suggesting that America is "basically a democratic country," Alito noted that the Framers, wary of the mob and its impulses, applied "some restraint on things that people might do."
James Madison was among the Founding Fathers aware of the need for checks on the mob, noting in Federalist No. 55 that "passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."
In Federalist No. 51, Madison discussed how the republican government could serve as a check on the tyranny of the majority, ensuring that the "rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority."
"We have to stand firm on this, and I think we have done a pretty good job on it," said Alito, "but we have to keep it up because challenges ... will continue to come."
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Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has often served as critical voice of reason on the U.S. Supreme Court. So, it wasn’t a surprise when he delivered a much-needed dose of reality about the high court’s constitutional role during a rare public appearance late last week. Speaking at the Catholic University Law School, the current court’s longest-serving […]
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