Donald Trump and his allies have spent days scorning for the courts, insisting that the judiciary—district judges, in particular—has limited power to check the president’s authority.
Trump even echoed calls for James Boasberg, the “local judge” who issued an order to block his use of wartime powers to accelerate mass deportations, to be impeached. “I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do,” Trump posted on his social media page Tuesday, describing Boasberg as a “troublemaker and agitator.”
But on Tuesday, the courts struck back. Chief Justice John Roberts, whose conservative Supreme Court could ultimately be forced to weigh in on Trump’s expansive assertion of executive power, issued a rare rebuke of the president. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
That kicked off a day of more decisions with which Trump surely “disagrees.”
District Judge Ana Reyes blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender Americans from serving in the military, condemning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s policy as “unabashedly demeaning.” In her blistering ruling, Reyes wrote that the “policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”
Another federal judge, Theodore Chuang, said in a Tuesday ruling that Elon Musk’s unilateral dismantling of the US Agency for International Development “likely violated” the Constitution and undermined the separation of powers. “They deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” Chuang wrote, granting a partial injunction.
Completing the trifecta was Tonya Chutkan, the judge who presided over the federal government’s January 6 criminal case against Trump, which was dismissed after his reelection in November. On Tuesday, the DC judge temporarily blocked Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, from ending $20 billion in “green bank” grants, writing that his “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient” for doing so.
It must be noted that the decisions rebuked specific Trump actions—not his broad claims of virtually uncheckable executive authority. However, they came at a time when Trump officials are openly seeking a “showdown” with the judiciary, which may right now be the only formal check on the president, given the sycophancy of the Republicans who control the legislative branch.
Trump insists that he respects that check on his power, claiming to Fox News host Laura Ingraham after his string of legal defeats Tuesday night that he “never did defy a court order” and that he never would. “You can’t do that,” he said. But the president and his administration are already doing just that.
And even with Roberts’ pushback, Trump, Musk, and other regime officials have continued to attack judges who have, in their estimation, tried to “assume the role of President” in issuing unfavorable rulings. “We have very bad judges,” Trump told Ingraham. “These are judges that shouldn’t be allowed.”
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