America’s federal court judges: a self-anointed priesthood.

Image by AI. [Resized]

Although the Democrats were initially rocked by the speed with which Trump moved upon taking office, they’ve regrouped and are coming back with a formidable counterattack: Judges. This counterattack would have stunned the Founders, who intended the unelected judiciary to be the weakest branch of government, but it’s completely logical to those of us who have seen leftist judges at work over the decades.

Day after day, the news is filled with stories of Democrat-appointed federal judges (with a very few NeverTrump Republicans thrown in for good measure) blocking Trump’s initiatives. While their orders are issued in minutes, the Democrats know that it may take months or even years for them to work through the legal system.

You know how it goes. An appellate court affirms or reverses the lower court’s order. The losing party takes it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court places it on the calendar to be heard eventually. At long last, there’s a big hearing, only to have Justice Amy Coney Barrett ignore the glaring substantive constitutional issues and focus on an inconsequential procedural matter that requires returning the whole thing to the trial court. Then, the cycle starts again.

As many have said, the Supreme Court must stop this—and this is true whether the deciding justices are NeverTrumpers like Roberts, cowards like Comey Barrett, Gorsuch, or Kavanaugh, or even leftists like Sotomayor, Kagan, or Brown Jackson. If these justices wish to continue to be employed, they’d better return to the institution of the federal judiciary to at least some gloss of impartiality and reverence for the rule of law. Otherwise, the lower court’s overreach will spell the federal judiciary’s doom, as the voters will either (a) elect representatives who will defund the system entirely or (b) cease to respect its rulings and will urge their elected leaders to do the same.

The need for an immediate Supreme Court intervention is especially necessary because of something notable about this round of rulings against Donald Trump’s initiatives: The judges aren’t even pretending to abide by legal principles—and this goes beyond arrogating to themselves the right, not just to decide the case before them, but to blog entire administrative actions.

Judge Boasberg is the poster child of a judge without regard for the law. When asked to stop the flight containing illegal alien Tren de Aragua members headed to El Salvador, he threw procedure and law to the wind.

Although the federal procedural rule controlling temporary restraining orders, whether oral or written, must contain specific information to justify the ruling, Boasberg issued a bare-bones oral order from the bench. The same federal rule requires that the party seeking a restraining order must post a bond, but Boasberg ignored that requirement, too. And most importantly—really, the predicate matter—Boasberg ignored entirely controlling Supreme Court authority, stating explicitly that unelected judges have no authority whatsoever to touch an elected president’s decisions under the Alien Enemies Act.

It wasn’t just Boasberg. When the Trump administration appealed the order, the D.C. appellate court did exactly the same: It, too, ignored entirely the fact that it lacks jurisdiction and opted for a substantive analysis that the same long-standing rule of law prohibits it from exercising.

Then, just yesterday, Edward Chen, a federal trial judge in San Francisco, blocked the Trump administration from ending the temporary legal protection that Biden gave to Venezuelans who entered America illegally. To justify this, the judge effectively said that it just wasn’t fair for the Trump administration to send these 350,000 people away because he’d made the substantive finding that doing so would destroy America’s very safety and economy. The same, he said, applied to the 500,000 Haitians who illegally flooded America.

The problem is that, had Chen bothered to check the law in his own circuit (the Ninth), he would have discovered that this is another area in which judges have no say. Oh, wait! He did know. It was his ruling that the Ninth Circuit reversed!

Those are just a small number of examples, but you can find dozens more. Judges, whose role is supposed to be limited to applying the law, have tossed out that job description and are busy making the law.

So, what gives? Well, as it happens, I had a few decades to learn what’s going on because I spent my career working as a defense attorney on business litigation claims in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, of course, businesses are automatically assumed to be guilty. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you eventually prove through facts or law (or both) that they are innocent. The judges will still undercut you.

I worked on cases where judges said, “I don’t care about the law,” where they said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” where they gave erroneous instructions to the jury, knowing that the business had no resources to appeal, and where they simply lied about objective facts (as in, there was clear documentary evidence) to force their position against my clients.

So, again, what gives?

Well, my theory requires a small acquaintance with parish priests in the late medieval era. If you’ve ever read Boccaccio’s wonderful The Decameron, written during and after the Black Death (1348-1353), you’ll know the priests I mean. These tales describe greedy, illiterate, irreligious, and very, very lusty priests. Although exaggerated, this was a problem across Christendom. Many in the priestly class just didn’t live up to the church’s ideals.

The big question was how men who were so openly sinning against Biblical morals and church rules could consecrate the host and administer the sacraments. Congregants were worried about their eternal salvation, so the answer mattered. The Church’s response was that the priests’ ordinations turned them into vessels…conduits, really. No matter their personal sins, they were a straight channel to God, so when they performed mass, no matter their failings, the parishioners were still receiving appropriate religious ministrations. Problem solved (at least for another 100+ years or so).

Leftist judges have dispensed to themselves a variation of the medieval church’s approach to inadequate priests. These judges feel that, when their nominations are confirmed, their oaths taken, and their robes donned, they have become a conduit to something higher and better than laws and facts. They have achieved the Marxist equivalent of a spiritual ascendence, making them not only wiser than the people’s elected officials and the judges who came before but also imbuing them with a moral purpose that requires them to use their power to impose their political vision on America.

The Founders would be horrified, and we should be, too. Ours is a nation of laws, from the Constitution on down.  When the judges hold themselves above the laws, we are a nation on the brink.