Dems Cry ‘Constitutional Crisis’ If Trump Ignores Leftist Judges. Here’s What They Told Biden.

While Democrats are screaming that the Trump administration is fomenting a “constitutional crisis” by contending that leftist activist judges are impeding the administration’s agenda, they were singing a different tune during the Biden administration, when they were only too willing to advise ignoring judges’ rulings.

On January 31, District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from freezing payments for grants and other programs.

On Sunday night, President Trump said, “Well, you’ve got some very bad rulings, and it’s a shame to see it, frankly. They want to sort of tell everybody how to run the country when they say that certain people in charge of massive agencies or people doing very, very — important people, smart people — doing investigations of fraud, and they don’t talk about what you’re looking at. All they just say is, oh, it’s unconstitutional. Judges should be ruling; they shouldn’t be dictating what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice-President Vance echoed. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

On Monday, McConnell accused the Trump administration of ignoring his order, arguing that the Trump administration was working “to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds,” adding that the freeze was “likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country.”

Democrats and their allies in the media then heightened their rhetoric. “This isn’t hyperbole to say that we are staring the death of democracy in the eyes, right now,” Democrat Senator Chris Murphy (CT) exclaimed Monday night. “The centerpiece of our democracy is that we observe court rulings. Criminal court rulings, civil court rulings and constitutional court rulings. No one is above the law. And whether we like it or not, the courts interpret the law.”

“If the President of the United States says, ‘You know what, I don’t care what the courts say, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want,’ that’s essentially the end of the rule of law,” he declared. “Because if the President isn’t bound by our laws and the Constitution, then why would anybody else be bound by our laws and the Constitution? …. If they were to openly declare that because they disagree with, for instance, a court’s order to reopen USAID, or to get Elon Musk out of the Treasury Department, simply because on the merits, they disagree with the court’s ruling, then you are clearly in the most serious constitutional crisis.”

Legacy media outlets are following the Democrats’ lead on the issue. “Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and others in the Trump administration are openly challenging the centuries-old power of the nation’s judiciary, foreshadowing a possible constitutional breakdown of American government,” CNN’s chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic asserted.

The New York Times joined the effort in an article titled, “Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say.” “Law professors have long debated what the term means. But now many have concluded that the nation faces a reckoning as President Trump tests the boundaries of executive power,” the Times’ Adam Liptak wrote.

Yet Democrats and their allies in the media took a very different approach when Biden was in office. In February 2023, Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (OR) advised the Biden administration to ignore a Texas judge’s ruling on abortion, stating:

There are moments in history where Americans and their leaders must look at circumstances like this one and say, “Enough.” … A judge’s rulings stand because elected leaders and citizens have agreed that abiding by them is right and necessary to uphold the rule of law. That’s part of the social contract in America. 

But the judiciary must uphold its end of the social contract too. It must follow the rule of law and earn the confidence of the American people continually, every day, every month, every year. The awful reality is, from the moment this case landed in front of Judge Kacsmaryk, it’s been a rigged game all along. It’s illegitimate. The case is an affront to the Constitution and to the rule of law in the United States of America. 

So here’s what must happen if and when Judge Kacsmaryk issues his nationwide injunction halting access to mifepristone. 

President Biden and the FDA must ignore it. 

New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed the call to ignore the court two months later, telling Anderson Cooper of CNN: “I think we’ve been preparing and anticipating for there being these egregious overreaches by members of the judiciary appointed by a right-wing Republican Party, whose goal for a very long time was to just pack these Courts with partisan Judges often under qualified or completely unqualified for the for their role. And so there has been thought I believe given to this. Senator Ron Wyden has already issued statements, for example, advising what we should do in situations like this, which I concur, which is that I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling.”