Not a week seems to go by without a rogue lower court judge issuing yet another overreaching edict designed to subvert the will of the American people.
On Monday, an Obama-appointed district court judge attempted to block parts of President Trump’s executive orders ending subsidization of programs promoting DEI and radical gender ideology. On June 5, a different Obama-appointed judge handed down an injunction aiming to halt the Trump administration’s prohibition on international students attending Harvard. A week before that, yet another Obama-appointed judge sought to prevent the president from ending a Biden-era “parole” program for foreign nationals living in the United States.
While these “judges” certainly deserve criticism for rubber-stamping leftists’ lawfare, there’s one individual who deserves primary blame for this concentrated effort to cripple Trump’s presidency via a judicial coup: Chief Justice John Roberts.
Over the past five months, rogue lower courts have issued nearly 200 overreaching injunctions and temporary restraining orders attempting to prevent Trump from fulfilling his Article II obligation to execute the nation’s laws. And yet, despite this egregious usurpation of constitutional authority, the Supreme Court’s leading justice has done nothing substantive to stop it.
While Roberts and several of his colleagues have handed down temporary relief to the administration in a handful of cases, the high court has declined to permanently shut down lower court judges’ abuse of universal injunctions — despite having ample opportunities to do so.
The first notable incident occurred in early March, when Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the high court’s Democrat appointees on a case centered on foreign grants. In a 5-4 decision, the majority declined to vacate a lower court judge’s ruling ordering the Trump administration to disburse roughly $2 billion in foreign grants to nongovernmental groups.
The ruling — which left Associate Justice Samuel Alito “stunned” — was everything leftists could have hoped for. In one fell swoop, a majority of the justices gave the green light to other activist judges to exceed their constitutional authority and issue similarly flagrant edicts against the administration.
Had Roberts (and/or Barrett) sided with the other Republican-appointed justices and definitively declared that the lower judiciary does not have the authority to issue such expansive orders, the flurry of overreaching lower court injunctions handed down since and the chaos stemming from them could have been avoided.
But Roberts’ refusal to control the insurrection within his own branch is even worse than it appears. On more than one occasion, the chief justice and several of his colleagues have been eager participants in this leftist-backed judicial coup.
In the dead of night on Easter weekend, Roberts and six of the justices issued (without explanation) an order seeking to block Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport violent Venezuelan gang members. The court’s majority has only continued to play political games with the matter in the weeks following, prompting strong criticisms from Alito (and by default, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas) and a circuit judge whose court is overseeing the case.
To the average American, Roberts’ behavior may seem baffling. On the surface, it defies logic for the chief justice — who has devoted his entire SCOTUS career to upholding what he sees as the judiciary’s “legitimacy” in the eyes of the public (and the media) — to be so unwilling to stamp out his own branch’s war on America’s separation of powers.
But the truth, as it turns out, was seemingly confirmed by Roberts a few short weeks ago. While speaking at an event in Buffalo, New York, the chief justice effectively endorsed judicial supremacism. That is, as Roberts put it, that courts can unilaterally “strike down … acts of Congress or acts of the president” they view as unfavorable or unlawful — irrespective of the people’s wishes as expressed through their elected representatives.
Judging by his own words, it’s not outlandish to assume that Roberts has no interest in curtailing the lower judiciary’s anarchic actions because he believes that what these rogue judges are doing isn’t excessive at all. While he may offer the Trump administration relief in certain cases here and there, his willingness to permit this usurpation of the president’s Article II powers to continue unabated — and to publicly attack those who criticize it — speaks volumes.
Whatever his true motivations, Roberts’ refusal to end this constitutional crisis has made him the face of leftists’ judicial coup. The longer he (and a majority of his colleagues) allows this three-ring circus to go on, the more faith the American people will lose in the courts and their ability to operate as a trustworthy branch of government.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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