Judges are increasingly 'forgetting to stay in their lane.' What happens if Trump starts ignoring them to fulfill his duties?

By Gary Abernathy

If a court ruling endangers our safety and security, does the president have a duty to ignore it to protect citizens?

Does there ever come a time in the U.S. when it’s justified for a president to ignore a court ruling? And are we approaching such a time?

Such questions are becoming increasingly relevant as the actions of the Trump administration and the administration’s enemies — yes, it’s a suitable description — result in an unprecedented number of challenges and questions before lower courts and, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite what we like to believe is the case in a perfect world, courts have always been influenced by the political persuasions of judges who sit on any particular bench, from municipal and common pleas judges in local communities to the highest court in the land and the state and federal courts in between. Good judges try hard to set aside their personal beliefs and follow the law. But clearly — and especially when it comes to Trump — some judges try harder than others.

A story from NBC News on Thursday brings the issue into sharp focus. NBC News claims to have spoken with 12 federal judges on the subject of the Supreme Court. I say “claims to have spoken with” because the judges were all granted anonymity, so we have to take NBC’s word for it, which I find increasingly hard to do in this day and age. NBC, of course, is part of the far-left media system, formerly known as the mainstream media. The far-left media is the main opposition to Trump and the GOP, far exceeding the Democratic Party.

First, it’s a breach of judicial decorum to criticize fellow judges. Even NBC News acknowledges that “all 12 judges spoke on condition that they not be identifiable, some because it is considered unwise to publicly criticize the justices who ultimately decide whether to uphold their rulings…” Unwise, and inappropriate.

There are more than 1,700 federal judges in the U.S. when that term is broadly defined (bankruptcy courts, tax courts, fixed terms versus lifetime appointments) but even under more narrow definitions, there are hundreds. NBC describes their sources merely as “lower court judges” who were appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. Settling on 12 is a small pool indeed. But most of these 12 judges are not happy.

According to the story, “Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings.” (“Painstakingly research?” So says NBC News.) “When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.” (What does the “6-3 conservative majority” have to do with it?) “And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation. Emergency rulings used to be rare. But their number has dramatically increased in recent years.”

Anti-Trump bias among judges

The judges interviewed generally feel that “the Supreme Court should better explain those rulings, noting that the terse decisions leave lower court judges with little guidance for how to proceed.” And “a short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, they argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump.”

In fact, they often do shoddy work and are biased against Trump. The short answer to their complaints is to stop being biased and get it right so their rulings do not have to be overturned. This option is barely alluded to in the NBC News story, with one exception.

A judge appointed by President Obama acknowledged that “the whole ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is a real issue. As a result, judges are mad at what Trump is doing or the manner he is going about things; they are sometimes forgetting to stay in their lane.” Amen.

While conservative justices on the Supreme Court have often made their politics rather clear, particularly Clarence Thomas, neither conservative nor liberal justices have been so blatantly political in their written rulings or dissents as the newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden in 2022.

Jackson makes no effort to pretend to follow the Constitution. She openly admits that she sees her role as “to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues.” As Jonathan Turley noted in a column for The Hill, “Jackson has attacked her colleagues in opinions, shattering traditions of civility and restraint. Her colleagues have clearly had enough. She now regularly writes diatribes that neither of her fellow liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan — are willing to sign on to. Indeed, she has raged against opinions that her liberal colleagues have joined.”

After a highly publicized decision in which the high court reversed a district court judge who barred the Trump administration from canceling $783 million in grants for the National Institutes of Health, Jackson threw a fit, writing, “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”

It is revealing that Jackson turned to a comic strip rather than the Constitution for her preferred text. One could also infer that her conclusion was an open admission of her opinion that “this administration should always lose.”

No issue has pitted the Trump administration against the courts more often than immigration, with some judges appearing to appoint themselves as the administrators of immigration policy, even superseding the president of the United States. From ordering airplanes to turn around in mid-flight to demanding that children on their way to Guatemala to be reunited with their parents or guardians instead be held in government custody, some judges clearly see themselves and not the president as the final word on immigration and national security.

The Trump administration is finally treating illegal immigration as the invasion that it has long been, along with finally attacking the drug problem as the war we always claimed it was. Shutting down our borders, aggressively seeking out illegal aliens for deportation and stopping drugs before they get here — such as our military attack on a Venezuelan drug boat this week — are actions so overdue and so neglected by previous presidents that suddenly addressing them seems harsh to many people.

Judicial intervention vs. safety and security

But the president of the United States has a duty to do these things. It is concerning when state officials from governors to mayors stand in the way of a president attempting to clean up city streets ravaged by crime and serving as havens for illegal inhabitants. It is even more concerning when judges erect roadblocks to making our communities safer for our citizens.

At what point are courts overstepping their authority by preventing the president from carrying out his obvious duty? At what point are judges sliding out of their lane and into the lane of the executive branch? Put another way, at what point does judicial intervention endanger citizens to the extent that a president is not only justified, but duty-bound, to continue protecting his constituents even if it means ignoring the decision of a rogue judge?

Our three branches of government are specifically designed to provide checks and balances so that no single branch can exceed its constitutionally mandated authority. We should all be concerned if a president is abusing his powers. Likewise, we should be equally concerned if a court is preventing a president from exercising what seems a clear and lawful duty to protect the lives and well-being of our citizenry.

We know from the Washington, D.C. experience that the deployment of troops works. “Within the first 13 days, federal authorities reported around 550 arrests and preliminary MPD data showed a 40% drop in robberies and auto break-ins. By Aug. 24, aggregated data indicated over 700 arrests and 91 illegal firearms had been seized, showing a substantial uptick in enforcement activity,” Fox News reported.

Even D.C.’s mayor gave kudos to Trump for helping lower crime. But Thursday it was announced that D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has filed a lawsuit demanding removal of the troops. Once again, a judge will make the call.

When New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and other cities have become cesspools of crime, homeless encampments, rampant drug abuse and weekly murders in numbers that have become so common as to be accepted numbly by most Americans — and when local mayors, governors or other elected officials merely shrug it all off as basically being “just the way it is” — a president who says no, it doesn’t have to be that way, should be applauded.

Too often, though, judges are stepping in. As they issue injunctions or otherwise rule against the Trump administration, how many murders in the meantime do they find acceptable? How many drug overdoses are okay? How many assaults, thefts, carjackings etc. that would otherwise be prevented are tolerable? To what extent is it bearable to these judges to endanger the safety and security of American citizens while they insert themselves into presidential decision making?

Through most of U.S. history, court decisions have been obeyed by presidents and held as sacrosanct. But we are in unchartered territory, both in regard to the number of court cases brought against the Trump administration and in the scope of the issues that courts are being asked to consider. The sheer volume of cases has helped bring to light just how much the political, rather than legal, considerations influence many judges across the country. As one judge told NBC News, a growing number of Trump-hating judges “are sometimes forgetting to stay in their lane.”

I hope we don’t reach the point where a ruling is so outside a judicial lane that the president is forced by considerations of time or safety and security to ignore the decision. So far, Trump has shown remarkable restraint, especially for someone so obviously headstrong and often impatient. But he has been able to do so only because of the knowledge that the Supreme Court will likely correct the bias and errors of the lower courts and side with him.

If Trump ever does ignore a court ruling, we already know that the far-left media will automatically blame him, declaring that Trump is igniting a “constitutional crisis,” and claiming that democracy is being imperiled, even when the judicial branch is the one at fault.

We need judges who make sure that the judicial branch is fulfilling its check and balance on the other two branches, just as we need the legislative and executive branches to do the same. Achieving the proper balance among all three branches is imperative. Lately, the judicial branch is dangerously overstepping into executive branch territory.

In the NBC News article, judges were calling on Chief Justice John Roberts to do more to defend them and their decisions against criticism and attack. In fact, the best thing Roberts could do is remind the lower courts of the boundaries of their lanes, and remind them to stay between the lines.

*Corrected. An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Justice Clarence Thomas.