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From its beginning, the foundational story of the United States has been the struggle between freedom and tyranny, which is a conflict over power. Should the elite minority defined by lineage, wealth, or education control and rule the collective people; or should the people share in that power, since their consent is required? Which is worse, the tyranny of the few, or the tyranny of the many?
Most of our political conflicts go back to those questions. Take the current clash between Donald Trump’s administration, and the unelected federal judiciary. A district court judge has ordered Trump to stop deporting vicious illegal alien gangsters, per the 1798 Act Concerning Aliens, which makes it “lawful for the President of the United States . . .to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof, to depart out of the territory of the United States.”
This judge also violated the principle of separated and balanced powers by egregiously interfering with the president’s power. Another district court judge issued an injunction against Trump’s Executive Order to transfer biologically male prisons who self-identify as women, back to male prisons. According to the judge, “The fact that they have already been transferred and, allegedly, have been abused at their new facilities can only strengthen their claims of irreparable harm.” You don’t have to work in a prison, male or female, to know that all inmates are subject to physical abuse, rape, and other sexual assaults.
That injunction also violates the Constitution’s separation of powers for district court judges to encroach on the powers of an elected president who is carrying out his duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed”? And as such, are not the judges’ orders an act of tyranny?
According to Aristotle, tyranny is “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man willingly endures such a government.” Unelected district court judges who issue restraining orders on elected presidents can be a tyranny of one, disenfranchising the millions of citizens who put the president into office.
In our history, this moral hazard of tyrannical harm has been a bone of contention between those who favor the people, and those who favor elites. Andrew Jackson, our first non-elite, populist president, frequently addressed this struggle. Such “closed elites,” as historian Walter McDougall calls them, were empowered by the federal government, and vulnerable to the corruption of concentrated power. In 1824, Jackson wrote that a Federalist administration “is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.”
Furthermore, Jackson wrote, “Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people . . . I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people,” a belief that challenged the technocratic pretensions that elites were more capable than the non-elites who relied on experience, virtue, faith, and common sense to guide their political choices. Jackson also distrusted institutions like the Supreme Court, whose authority “must not . . . be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacity.”
The recent use of restraining orders validates Jackson’s fears of corrupt encroachments on executive power. This abuse of restraining orders by unelected judges has increased in recent years in order to serve partisan ideological ends by using egregious double standards that overwhelmingly favor Democrats.
PJ Media’s Matt Margolis has pointed out this violation of the 14th Amendment. “In the sixty years between 1963 and 2023, federal courts issued a total of 127 nationwide injunctions.” But 64 of those were issued against Trump during his first term alone. . .” Worse, “in just the first two months of Trump’s second term, activist judges have already issued 37 more injunctions.”
Moreover, Margolis reports, “The partisan nature of this judicial assault couldn’t be more obvious. A staggering 92.2% of the injunctions against Trump in his first term came from Democrat-appointed judges. Only five Republican-appointed judges joined this partisan circus.”
Many of our Founders and populist ancestors would not have been surprised at this corruption, which they predicted would follow from social and economic elites who had control of concentrated federal power, especially a judiciary unaccountable to the voters. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ inappropriate scolding of the president for even talking about impeachment was also a blow to the separation of powers and accountability. Impeachment, after all, is one of the guardrails given to the people for checking, albeit indirectly, the tyranny of the federal government minority.
But there are other partisan assaults on the critical Constitutional structure of divided and separated powers. One of the more tempting forms of judiciary corruption is court-packing, altering the structure and protocols of the Supreme Court for partisan advantage. The Biden administration last July attempted to “reform” the Court, as obviously self-serving as FDR’s in 1937.
Biden’s “reforms” comprised 18-year term limits for justices; and government oversight, external to the Court itself, to investigate and punish dubious or manufactured charges of “corruption.” The real purpose was to prepare the court for Dems to appoint activist, “living Constitution” candidates when Democrats are in power. By this means Dems could swamp conservative and originalists like several of the current Court’s justices, who have corrected unconstitutional precedents such as Roe v. Wade, which was a grievous blow to progressives.
Finally, the second Trump administration has already made great strides in rolling back the century-long progressive assault on the Constitution’s structure of separated and balanced powers, and the Bill of Rights–– not just to thwart the technocratic progressives’ aim of “solving problems.” More important, Trump’s reforms will restore guardrails protecting the freedom and unalienable rights of citizens to improve their own lives, rather than surrendering to the dysfunctional, tyrannical, and corrupt federal regulatory Leviathan, and its pretensions to “follow the science” at the same time they marginalize common sense and the Constitution’s traditional wisdom.
But that achievement is only the start of restoring our Constitutional order. The party of the centralized empowerment of elites may seem in disarray at the moment, but like Yeats’ “worse,” they are full of “passionate intensity.” The lovers of ordered liberty, and haters of tyranny must never flag in their defense of their freedoms and unalienable rights, but prove Aristotle right when he said of tyranny, “No free man willingly endures such a government.”
