Ignorance Is Bliss
Maybe you can just ignore activist judges after all
“When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the US president’s mass deportation effort,” The Guardian told us about a week ago.
“Instead, a top justice department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.”
That case, The Guardian claims, illustrates a “broader pattern by the US government’s executive branch,” which is now openly defying orders from the lower courts.
The Trump administration, it seems, is learning. Instead of pretending things are a-okay and hunky-dory with the three branches of government—executive, legislative, judicial—each one balancing the other two to ensure the preservation of the Constitution and the American way of life, with no single branch getting too big for its boots and claiming powers that aren’t within its rightful domain, the Trump administration has dropped the pretense entirely.
The judiciary is staffed by activists who will do anything in their power to frustrate President Trump’s second-term agenda, especially his immigration policies—Constitution, law, will of the American people be damned. Let’s not pretend otherwise. If we do, nothing will get done.
We’ve all seen it. If an Obama-appointed judge doesn’t want Kilmar Abrego Rapisto to be sent back to Squatemala where he comes from, or to President Bukele’s jungle-prison hellhole CECOT for an unforgettable extended vacation—well, that’s that. He’s not going. It doesn’t matter if Mr Rapisto is known to have entered the US illegally multiple times. It doesn’t matter what crimes he committed—let’s say he was working with the cartels to bring more migrants into the country illegally, and molesting young female migrants when he got the chance (one of the perks of the job).
No, Mr Rapisto—and we’ll refer to him as “Baltimore Man” just to generate some extra sympathy he doesn’t deserve—Baltimore Man has to stay.
Oh yeah, and by the way, you can’t deport anyone else either, because this is actually a “nationwide injunction” that covers all other possible cases where you want to deport an illegal alien.
Sorry about that.
Honestly, watching this happen time and again over the last year from my little Hobbit-hole in the Westcountry, on the other side of the Pond, has been frustrating enough. I can only imagine how much worse that feeling must be for Donald Trump or just Average Joe MAGA, who cast his vote for Trump on the strength of a promise to deport 20 million illegals in the “largest mass deportation operation in US history.”
The Guardian, drawing on a review by the Associated Press, documents hundreds of refusals to follow court orders, many in individual immigration cases, but also in cases involving government layoffs, spending cuts and economic policy. AP estimates about one in every eight orders blocking the Trump administration from doing something is now just being ignored.
Seven hundred lawsuits and counting have been filed to bring the Trump administration to heel. No luck so far.
Of course, The Guardian and AP think this is a dangerous development for the American republic and obviously the fault of Donald Trump and no-one else.
“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said a Georgetown law scholar who spoke to The Guardian.
“When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the law is likely to break down across the country.”
And I mean, they’re right: The American republic clearly is in grave peril, just not for the reasons The Guardian and AP and your average university legal eagle think. The separation of powers is a good thing, and in a properly functioning polity it keeps everything and everyone in check.
But America now has an “imperial judiciary,” to borrow a phrase from Amy Comey Barrett’s searing response to her colleague Justice Jumanji Brown Jackson, a woman whose knowledge of the Constitution, law and indeed basic logic could be tattooed on a gopher’s nutsack with a square inch of crinkly skin to spare.
The great early observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville believed American lawyers hid “at the bottom of their soul… a great repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and a secret contempt of the government of the people.” This, Tocqueville believed, was the closest America, as a democracy, could come to maintaining the old aristocratic principle that was fast-disappearing even in Europe.
Only the judges, said Tocqueville, could be expected to act in the interest of the common good, even when the common will wanted to do otherwise. The judges were the party of order, form, tradition, hierarchy, obedience to principle.
Tocqueville’s main worry was, as we well know, the tyranny of the majority—a phrase I believe he coined. He had no conception of the opposite: a tyranny of the robed minority, a judiciary whose “secret contempt of the government of the people” is no longer secret, but rather on full defiant display.
