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President Trump is trying to rid the country of the violent South American gang members who entered the country when Old Joe Biden’s handlers opened the southern border, and what sane person would be against such a project? It is thus understandable that Trump is annoyed with the far-left judge, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, who tried to block deportation flights to El Salvador, and on Tuesday morning, the president took to Truth Social to tell us what he really thinks:
This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President – He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS want me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
But boasting about his mandate may distract from the valid point Trump was making: he was indeed elected in part because of widespread disgust with Democrat policies that led to millions of illegal immigrants, including an unknowable number of criminals and terrorists, entering the country, evidently in order to secure a Democrat electoral majority for generations to come. Patriots are fed up with leftist activist judges arrogating to themselves the power of the president and overruling the actual president, enacting public policy from the bench.
Boasberg, however, does have his supporters, and they aren’t all green-haired, bone-through-the-nose, socialist, internationalist, open-border lunatics. Journalist Michael Shellenberger, author of the superb and essential books “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” and “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” declared that what the Trump administration did when it flew the criminal migrants out of the country just ahead of Boasberg’s order not to do so was “unconstitutional.”
Shellenberger explained: “It’s up to the courts, not the Administration, to determine whether it is non-justiciable. The administration must comply with the order until a higher court reverses it or sets it aside. That’s how our system works.” He added a warning: “If the Trump administration continues with these obviously unconstitutional actions, then it will lose the legitimacy, public support, and power it needs to pursue free speech diplomacy, which would be a very disappointing outcome.”
One X user, however, asked Shellenberger a pointed question: “Huge fan. So — do you believe district court judges have unquestionable authority to issue any order they want until it gets overturned by a higher authority? trying to understand.”
That was the problem. Shellenberger and others are concerned that Trump is trampling upon the powers of the judiciary. The idea of judicial review, that the judiciary has the right and responsibility to review the decisions of the executive and legislative branches and rule on their constitutionality, is not in the Constitution but dates back to the 1803 Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison. That decision, however, simply did not envision rogue judges of the Boasberg type, nullifying perfectly lawful actions of the chief executive based on his political opposition to them.
This is an issue that is going to have to be hashed out sooner or later. The American system, after all, was constructed as a system of checks and balances — that is, checks on the power of each branch of government by the other branches of government, so that a tyranny cannot develop. Yet what we have in the form of Judge James E. Boasberg and other far-left judicial ideologues like him is an incipient judicial tyranny that has no checks on its power.
Should a district judge really be allowed to overrule the president of the United States when the president is working within the law to remove illegal migrants from the country, simply because he wants the migrants here in order to serve the interests of his political party? The Supreme Court ruled in 1948’s Ludecke v. Watkins that “the very nature of the President’s power to order the removal of all enemy aliens rejects the notion that courts may pass judgment upon the exercise of his discretion.” Boasberg’s ruling is not the way the American system ought to work. Impeaching Boasberg and removing him from office would be a tough battle, as a two-thirds majority would be needed in the Senate. Still, it would be a good forum to settle these issues once and for all, or at least to work toward a settlement, before these petty judicial dictators lead to the demise of the republic itself.