Tyrannical, Power Hungry Judges Attempt To Seize Total Control Of The Government

Whenever a new administration takes over the White House, a lot of major changes are obviously going to take place. I’ve covered many of these changes already in the past few weeks, Trump’s executive orders and so on. But there are also some minor changes that no one really talks about, even though they may have symbolic significance.

In particular, one of the first moves Trump made when he first took office, back in 2017, was to install a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. Jackson was a war hero who served in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, when he led American troops to a historic victory in New Orleans. Jackson was also a populist who wanted the United States to expand and grow its borders because he believed it would benefit the average American. And so, for four years, Jackson’s portrait remained in the Oval Office.

Then, the minute he became president, Joe Biden quickly removed the portrait. No one in Biden’s administration could stand to look at Andrew Jackson. They didn’t destroy the portrait, however, they apparently just put it in storage. So now, four years later, the game of “Andrew Jackson tug-of-war” is continuing. The portrait is officially back.

???? First view of the new Oval Office – ANDREW JACKSON and ABRAHAM LINCOLN can be spotted on the walls. pic.twitter.com/4r1j2QWHRM

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 20, 2025

As you can see from this photo from the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago, Abe Lincoln is on the left, and Jackson is on the right. If you ask a typical Biden supporter about this, they’ll tell you that this is an outrage, because Andrew Jackson was a slave owner, and on top of that, he wasn’t exactly a big fan of the Indians. And therefore, he’s canceled.

That explanation, however, actually misses one of the defining moments of Jackson’s presidency. A moment that, very soon, could have a lot of relevance for the second Trump term. I am referring to a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1832 which held that the Cherokee Indians were a sovereign nation that had the right to govern themselves, without interference from the states. This was a ruling that threatened to disrupt Jackson’s plans for American expansion to the West. It was also a major blow to the concept of states’ rights, and it would have significant ramifications for Georgia in particular. Of course, as Jackson saw it, it was also an unlawful ruling. In response to this decision, according to various accounts, Jackson uttered some version of: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

In other words, when a court — even the Supreme Court — exceeds the limits of its authority, then there’s no requirement that anyone follow the court’s rulings. There’s certainly no way for the courts to compel the executive branch to do anything. So if a court ever goes rogue, and begins to issue rulings that flagrantly disregard the Constitution — as well as the outcome that a majority of Americans want — that’s how you deal with it. Jackson set that precedent. A century later, FDR built on that idea. When the courts began striking down his New Deal legislation, he threatened to pack the courts. Very quickly, the Supreme Court backed down and started upholding some of those laws.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

Depending on who you ask, Andrew Jackson and FDR were either villains or heroes in these stories. Either way, their actions illustrate an important point: In our system of checks and balances, everything depends on legitimacy. If courts are seen as legitimate, then their orders are enforced. If courts are seen as illegitimate, then nothing they do really matters. Donald Trump, as a student of Andrew Jackson, certainly understands that. We can assume judges understand this principle as well.

That’s why the flood of federal injunctions that have already been issued in Trump’s second term are best understood as a deliberate provocation by the judiciary. Every other day, an unelected federal judge — usually a Left-wing judge — is issuing a nationwide injunction, barring some aspect of Trump’s agenda. This is happening so frequently that most people don’t understand the scale of the problem.

So let me run down a non-exhaustive list of some of these injunctions:

• A Biden judge blocked Trump’s halt on federal grant spending. 
• A Clinton judge in Massachusetts blocked Trump’s plan to issue buyouts to federal workers, and also blocked the Trump administration from transferring a trans-identifying man to a man’s prison facility, where he belongs. 
• An Obama judge in New York blocked both DOGE and the Treasury secretary himself from accessing internal Treasury records. 
• A Biden judge in Massachusetts blocked Trump from cutting billions of dollars in fraudulent spending that was earmarked for scientific research, including wasteful overhead, as we discussed yesterday. 
• Another judge in Washington DC, appointed by Trump, halted the suspension of USAID workers, who were spending billions of dollars orchestrating foreign coups and sponsoring transgender theater. 
• An Obama judge in D.C. ordered Trump to reinstate the head of a Special Counsel office. 
• A Reagan judge in D.C. blocked prison officials from transferring trans-identifying men to men’s prisons. 
• Three judges — including Biden, Bush and Reagan judges, in New Hampshire, Washington and Maryland — blocked Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. 
• And most recently, a D.C. judge named John Bates issued what may be the single most obviously unconstitutional ruling ever written by a federal judge.

Before we get into that last ruling, let’s take stock of the sheer magnitude of orders listed here, and where they’re coming from. Without exception, these are judges located in Left-wing jurisdictions. Most of them were appointed by Democrats. And in every case, they’re unilaterally issuing emergency temporary restraining orders, which are supposed to be an “extraordinary and drastic remedy,” according to established legal precedent. If you’re trying to portray the courts as legitimate, nonpartisan institutions, this simply does not look good. In fact, it’s a travesty. And it gets much worse when you look at what these rulings are saying. So let’s go back to the ruling by John Bates.

This ruling prevents the Trump administration from removing content from websites that the Trump administration controls. In fact, the ruling goes further than that, it requires the Trump administration to keep old content from the Biden administration online. That is not an exaggeration. The order, by its own terms, bans the Trump administration from, “removing or modifying health-related webpages and datasets,” while also compelling the administration to, “restore webpages and datasets that they have already removed or modified.” In other words, an unelected federal judge has just named himself the official web editor of the entire federal government. He’s saying in effect that the executive branch has no power whatsoever. They can’t even control what they’re putting on the internet. Trump, as the president of the United States, and most powerful man in the world, actually doesn’t even have the power to make alterations to a website.

Specifically, the ruling comes in response to the Trump administration’s executive order ending gender ideology in the federal government. Pursuant to that order, the administration removed a lot of content from websites that are run by the CDC, HHS, FDA, and so on. Some of that content was related to sex-changes and cross-sex hormones. Some of it included activist research on the risk of suicide among trans-identifying individuals, which of course has been used to justify child castration — instead of treating their obvious mental health condition. Some of the materials had to do with nonsense concepts like “environmental justice.” Some of it was about drugs that gay people can take in order to prevent the spread of HIV while they’re engaging in reckless and dangerous sexual activity. And on and on. Whatever you think of these materials — and you should think they’re garbage — it’s clearly within the federal government’s purview to delete them from their own websites. That is why we have elections.

But Judge Bates disagreed. He ruled that, “By removing long relied upon medical resources without explanation, it is likely that … each agency failed to examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.” He goes on to say that the administration has violated something called the “Paperwork Reduction Act,” which is a law that no one knows anything about, or cares about in any way, shape or form.

There’s more to the ruling, but let’s stop there and address this part of it. He’s saying that there’s “no explanation” for why this content was removed. So apparently we can’t “reduce” this particular “paperwork.” This would be a compelling argument if the judge were, say, living in a cave with no internet access, or access to newspapers or other human interaction, for the past decade or so. But everyone else understands exactly why the Trump administration is gutting these websites. As we discussed yesterday, activists have taken over scientific and medical research in this country. They have promoted child butchery and other obviously immoral practices, which the overwhelming majority of Americans reject. Trump ran against all of that and he won a resounding victory. That’s all the “explanation” the federal judge should require.

Then the judge goes on to offer another explanation for his ruling. Again, from the decision: 

If those doctors cannot provide these individuals the care they need (and deserve) within the scheduled and often limited time frame, there is a chance that some individuals will not receive treatment, including for severe, life-threatening conditions.

The judge is now claiming that doctors are reliant on government websites in order to treat their patients. As proof of this, he cites a doctor from Yale who says it now takes her a little longer to prescribe contraception to her patients. Without these websites, she’s totally clueless. Her medical school training wasn’t enough; her residency wasn’t enough; her years of practice weren’t enough; her access to thousands of research papers isn’t enough. She needs a small handful of government websites in order to do her job, apparently. Now, if we take this claim literally, of course it means that this doctor is incompetent to practice medicine. Instead, the judge takes it as proof that he needs to dictate what content goes on the internet.

If you go through any of the other 10 million injunctions that judges have filed against Trump so far, you’ll find that this kind of reasoning — as egregious as it is — is pretty much the norm. Judges are taking anecdotal claims from activists, and they’re using them to throw up roadblocks in the way of the new administration. And they’re doing it so that CNN can report that Trump is causing a “constitutional crisis,” when in fact the judges are the ones doing that. Watch:

>> @kaitlancollins: "We are three weeks into the second Trump presidency, three weeks, and tonight, there are warnings that the U.S. is dangerously close to a constitutional crisis." pic.twitter.com/PCHCm6MmRf

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 11, 2025

As you just heard, there are hints in that reporting that the Trump administration may not comply with some of these orders. Trump himself hasn’t come out and said that. He’s apparently weighing his options at this point. But as this continues — which it inevitably will — the Andrew Jackson solution is going to become more and more appealing. And ultimately it will be necessary.

To be very clear about this: There is nothing in the constitution that gives any random federal judge absolute power to override anything the president does or any decision he makes at any time. If a single judge in a place like New Hampshire or Washington can decide that the president can’t reduce foreign aid, or fire his own employees, or kick men out of women’s prisons, or even control the content that’s posted on government websites, then essentially the president has no power at all. That’s the result the Left obviously wants. And now that the deep state and the career bureaucrats are being terminated, they see the courts as their only hope.

That’s why Chuck Schumer (D-NY) just spoke on the floor of the Senate, declaring that courts are essentially infallible, and their rulings must always be honored. Watch:

If you remember just a couple of years back, Democrats like Schumer were standing in front of the Supreme Court, threatening individual judges over their rulings. AOC was telling Anderson Cooper that Biden should just ignore Supreme Court rulings — and he did. He admitted that the Court had struck down his plan to cancel student loans, so he just went ahead and implemented it anyway. Now these same Democrats are maintaining that judges should never be questioned, under any circumstances.

The reality of course is somewhere in the middle. Judges are not infallible. They can deliberately and maliciously violate the Constitution, just like anyone else can. And when that happens — when a judicial coup is underway — a response is necessary. We’re not talking about one or two bad rulings here. We’re not talking about rulings that block a handful of policy goals or anything like that. We’re at the point where the president is not being allowed to do anything. He can’t even edit a website anymore. Left-wing judges are issuing emergency injunctions without even deciding actual cases.

The only way to get us out from under this judicial tyranny is for Trump to disregard these orders and for Congress to impeach the judges responsible for them. Throughout our history, there have only been a handful of times when presidents have needed to consider drastic action like this. The country was clearly better off because Andrew Jackson did it. And now, two centuries later, it’s equally clear that this country would be better off if the Trump administration followed in Jackson’s footsteps and dared these judges to enforce these rulings. They couldn’t do it, obviously. They would complain and issue more injunctions and more opinions. Meanwhile, the rest of us — people who want to see this country improve — will get exactly what we voted for.