KBJ Could Learn A Few Lessons On ‘Professionalism’ From Justice Barrett
Democrats crown judges while crying about kings
“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.
Judges above the law
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.”
Democrats love activist judges
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.
RELATED: Rogue anti-Trump judges obliterated by SCOTUS’ landmark ruling
Liudmila Chernetska via iStock/Getty Images
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.
Monarchy reaches the highest court
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.
KBJ Keeps Showing America Why She Doesn’t Belong On SCOTUS
DEI Hire Ketanji Brown Jackson: I Write Supreme Court Opinions To ‘Tell People How I Feel’
Even Sotomayor bewildered by Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissenting opinion
A Clinton judge slapped the Trump administration with an injunction on May 22, blocking the president's Feb. 11 executive order aimed at "eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity" and barring 20 executive-branch entities and "any other individuals acting under their authority or the authority of the president" from executing any mass layoffs.
The U.S. Supreme Court gave the administration a big win on Tuesday with an 8-1 order in Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees pausing U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston's injunction. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter.
Conservative justices appear to have dropped the pretense that former President Joe Biden's DEI appointee knows what she is talking about.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for instance, suggested in Trump v. CASA Inc. that the arguments in Jackson's dissenting opinion were not tethered "to any doctrine whatsoever" and were "at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself." Barrett also knocked Jackson for her simultaneous critique of an "imperial Executive" and embrace of "an imperial Judiciary."
This time around, the deepest cut against Jackson came from fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who intimated her colleague may have misunderstood the assignment.
In her lone dissenting opinion in AFGE, Jackson picked up where she left off in CASA — insinuating that the president was some sort of power-hungry menace and that those on the bench who failed to stop his "wrecking ball" were sycophantic enablers whose decision was both "hubristic and senseless."
Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images
Jackson claimed at the outset of her 15-page opinion that the Clinton judge's injunction — supposedly a "temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo" — was "no match for this Court's demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President's legally dubious actions in an emergency posture."
"This Court lacks the capacity to fully evaluate, much less responsibly override, reasoned lower court factfinding about what this challenged executive action actually entails," continued Jackson.
She asserted that the high court's decision not to leave "well enough alone" would ultimately "allow an apparently unprecedented and congressionally unsanctioned dismantling of the Federal Government to continue apace, causing irreparable harm before courts can determine whether the President has the authority to engage in the actions he proposes."
"This was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground," wrote Jackson.
Sotomayor volunteered a one-paragraph concurring opinion in AFGE to point out the issue with Jackson's long-winded line of attack, namely that the court was not considering the legality of the Trump administration's specific plans.
RELATED: Supreme Court gives Trump major victory on mass federal layoffs
Photo by JACQUELYN MARTIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
After signaling agreement that "the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates," Sotomayor noted that Trump's executive order explicitly directs agencies "to plan reorganizations and reductions in force 'consistent with applicable law' ... and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much."
'I'm doing my best work.'
"The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage," continued Sotomayor, "and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law."
Sotomayor was here echoing the court's unsigned opinion, which stated, "We express no view on the legality of any Agency [reduction in force] and Reorganization Plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order and Memorandum."
"Imagine how much of a drag it must be to have the DEI justice embarrassing your side," Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said of Sotomayor's response.
Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist, noted, "I don't know what happened behind closed doors in the Supreme Court over the last month, but it seems like everyone has had more than enough of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nonsense."
"I think I am aware that people are watching," Jackson told ABC News' Linsey Davis in an interview on Saturday. "They want to know how I am going to perform in this job and in this environment, and so I'm doing my best work as well as I can do because I want people to see and know that I can do anything just like anyone else."
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SCOTUS Blocks Lower Court Injunction On Trump’s Effort To Resize The Federal Bureaucracy
Rogue anti-Trump judges obliterated by SCOTUS' landmark ruling
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling limiting nationwide injunctions has been hailed as a massive win for common sense after 40 such orders — 62% against Donald Trump.
And no one’s happier about it than the president himself.
“It took the court system out of the presidency to a large extent. The courts were almost like being the president, and you can’t have it. It was such a big decision. This is one of the biggest decisions, where you would have a local federal judge who was radical left determining the policy for the whole nation,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News, adding, “And now they can’t do that.”
“There’s been a weird reading of what an injunction is able to do that we’ve been witness to for the first Trump administration and now the beginning of the second where a lawyer can represent all people, not just the plaintiff, not just the aggrieved,” Blaze Media D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford tells Blaze TV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”
“We had a judge in Hawaii who was deciding what federal immigration policy was,” he continues. “And that is, thankfully, over.”
“Of course, there will be more tactics that are used, but that is a really essential one,” he adds, noting that one of his favorite things about the ruling was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s baseless dissent.
“Ketanji Brown Jackson — the judge who wrote the dissenting opinion for the Democrats, the one who wore a voodoo necklace to the State of the Union, just an interesting character all around — basically cited legal law that didn’t exist,” Bedford explains.
“[She] tried to say that this is a dictatorship. Just sounded much more like a Democratic activist who hadn’t actually done all of the necessary research or the readings,” he adds.
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Ketanji Brown Jackson Was Appointed To Be A Political Activist, Not A Judge
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