If It Please the Court, Who the Hell Asked You?

Democrats, those stalwart champions of democracy who tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot, have an endlessly malleable understanding of whose view prevails whenever disputes arise between any combination of Congress, the courts, the president and the states. It’s almost as if they decide based not on any fixed principle, but on whose side they take.

When Joe Biden was president, he openly defied Supreme Court rulings — and bragged about doing so. Despite the court repeatedly telling him he had no authority to forgive student loans, he kept doing it. “The Supreme Court blocked it,” he said, “but that didn’t stop me.” No complaints from the left.

When Barack Obama was president, federal control of immigration was absolute! Arizona was said to be prohibited from following federal law because the president had decided not to follow the law. Suddenly, every Democrat was talking about the supremacy clause and claiming Arizona had been overtaken by Nazis.

Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s so-called “Papers Please” law, and the hysterics, confident that no one would remember their smug assurances that the law was unconstitutional, went right back to uttering their weighty pronouncements.

But when Trump was abiding by federal law in issuing what liberals called “the Muslim ban” (that, oddly enough, never mentioned Muslims), district courts and Trump’s own acting attorney general decided that their interpretation of a president’s duties should prevail over his.

They were heroes! At least until the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s non-Muslim-mentioning Muslim ban. It seems that — contra every editorial page in America — federal law expressly grants the president authority to exclude aliens if, in his opinion, their presence “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Whereupon everyone who’d screamed that we were living through a “constitutional crisis” (defined as “anything Democrats dislike”), “authoritarianism,” “tyranny” and “Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal” (a New York Times headline) pretended not to notice the decision and never spoke of it again.

Now, here we are again. The Constitution vests “[t]he executive Power” exclusively in one man — you may know him as “the president of the United States” — and directs him, among other things, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” In order to faithfully execute the laws, he has to construe them, and there’s nothing in the Constitution to suggest that a court’s construal of the law takes precedence over the president’s.

The judiciary’s role is to resolve disputes, not to declare what the law is. Interpreting law is merely incidental to resolving disputes — just as it is incidental to the president faithfully executing the laws.

Often — not always — someone has to have the final say, and most people simply assume that the courts do. But in these cases, that’s insane. For example, USAID itself was created by executive order. The man who controls 100% of the executive branch is supposed to listen to a dinky little district court judge, who represents, at most, .05% of the judicial branch? Administering a program totally within the executive branch is simply not an exercise of “judicial power,” the only power courts have.

It bears mentioning that these lower court judges blocking Trump are constantly being overruled by the Supreme Court. This suggests they aren’t even trying to interpret law, but rather are interpreting the policy preferences of constitutional scholars like Sunny Hostin and Andy Cohen. This track record is another reason to give precedence to Trump’s reading of the law.

Liberals are especially bent out of shape that the man leading Trump’s attack on ludicrous government expenditures is Elon Musk. In case you haven’t heard, he is “unelected”!

You know who else is “unelected”? Federal judges. For devotees of “democracy,” I’d think the guy who just won a massive victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote would deserve a little more deference in his interpretation of the law than an unelected 1/2,000th part of a co-equal branch.

In faithfully executing the law, President Trump apparently believes — again, to take one example — that USAID is not doing its designated job of spreading goodwill around the world by spending $68 billion in taxpayer dollars on such programs as:

— a transgender opera in Colombia,

— a DEI musical in Ireland,

— a study of the transmission of HIV among sex workers and transgenders in South Africa,

— a TransCare Clinic in Vietnam,

— promotion of atheism in Nepal,

— a transgender comic book in Peru,

— pursuing “non-heterosexual objectives” around the globe,

— and, here at home, teaching illegals how to avoid deportation as well as assisting them in their drug and human trafficking.

As crazy as it sounds to end these wonderful programs by so much as a single discontinued penny, Trump did run on a promise to deep-six the woke enthusiasms of the progressive left, from importing the third world to DEI and any federal program that directly or indirectly has anything whatsoever to do with Rachel Levine.

It’s absurd enough to imagine that the Supreme Court could abrogate powers committed solely to the president. In this case, a mere district court judge thinks he can superintend President Trump’s decision to fire progressive lunatics who’ve burrowed into his own department and are expropriating taxpayer money to do the exact opposite of what the law intended.

If the president’s authority to make personnel decisions in the executive branch is subject to judicial veto, can a district court judge veto bills? Order Congress to adjourn or to pass a law? Make treaties? Perhaps we could have all 677 district court judges give their own State of the Union addresses next January!

The only reason the media are in mortal fear of Trump refusing to defer to the district courts subverting his authority — evidently, that would constitute another “constitutional crisis” — is because it’s so obvious that he should. If Trump is half the non-trans man his 77 million voters think he is, he will abide by the Constitution and ignore delusional judges.