[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
Judge James Boasberg issued an oral order demanding that planes carrying Venezuelan gang members, who were not even a party to the lawsuit before him and over which he did not have jurisdiction, be turned around in international airspace. Boasberg is now infuriated that his mere utterance, not even set down in writing, was not immediately obeyed.
Democrats and their media have taken to crying that any disobedience of Boasberg, who was appointed by Barack Obama to apparently rule not only the entire country, but the planet and all its airspace, is a “threat to democracy” and a violation of checks and balances.
It’s not. If anything, it’s an urgently needed restoration of those checks and balances which have been trampled on by judges who have seized unlimited power from elected officials like Trump.
Boasberg’s coup began when the D.C. judge decided to hear a lawsuit from the ACLU based on the detention of four inmates in Texas and one in New York. Despite it being the entirely wrong venue, Boasberg took the case. The 5 inmates who were on average 1,500 miles away from Boasberg denied that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang targeted by Trump. Despite that, they claimed they were at risk of deportation because Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act and demanded that Boasberg block a 200-year-old plus law that predates D.C.
The lack of minor matters like venue and standing didn’t stop Boasberg from blocking the implementation of a law that predates the White House, the Capitol and the entire principle of ‘judicial review’ that only came 5 years later in Marbury v. Madison before issuing an oral order turning around planes in midair. King George III would have been less presumptuous.
There’s a term for this that ends in a ‘y’ and it’s not ‘democracy’.
President Trump is not defying ‘checks and balances’ when he pushes back against a D.C. judge declaring that his word is law around the country and the world, he’s implementing them. A judiciary unbound by laws, by the limitations of venue and standing, where judges pick and choose precedents and then go with their feelings is unchecked and unbalanced tyranny.
And it’s the farthest thing from what the Founders and the Framers had in mind for America.
Boasberg may be one of the worst examples of a judicial insurrection in which Democrat judges collude with allied political organizations to seize power and impose their will on everything. In recent weeks, Democrat federal judges have seized the power to manage every contractual detail of federal appropriations, the perpetuation of federal agencies only brought into being by presidential fiat, and mandated the presence of mentally ill crossdressers in the military.
Boasberg’s attack on the Alien Enemies Act not only uses the principle of judicial review to block a law that predates the very concept of judicial review, but is a direct assault on the Constitution.
Judicial review does not exist in the Constitution. The Constitution created the Supreme Court and allowed for the creation of “such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Marbury v. Madison, which established judicial review, actually rolled back a previous judicial expansion of power as a violation of the Constitution.
“By the constitution of the United States, the President is invested with certain important political powers, in the exercise of which he is to use his own discretion, and is accountable only to his country in his political character, and to his own conscience,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote. “In cases in which the executive possesses a constitutional or legal discretion, nothing can be more perfectly clear than that their acts are only politically examinable. But where a specific duty is assigned by law, and individual rights depend upon the performance of that duty, it seems equally clear, that the individual who considers himself injured, has a right to resort to the laws of his country for a remedy.”
Who exactly then is violating these checks and balances? President Trump or Judge Boasberg?
Does the president have a right to declare a Venezuelan gang as enemies and deport its members, who are not legally citizens of this country, in keeping with a law four times older than the now discredited Roe v. Wade, three times older than the origins of the pro-crime Miranda warning, and older even than judicial review? Or does a D.C. judge have the right to declare, on behalf of parties who were not at issue and not even in his jurisdiction, that he may not?
Can a federal judge demand that planes outside the U.S. turn around at the sound of his voice?
Constitutionally, Congress makes laws, presidents implement them and judges hear claims by individuals whose rights were violated by them. Nothing entitled Judge Boasberg to declare potential deportees a ‘class’ based on a lawsuit by foreign non-deportees who were not even in his jurisdiction and then give orders to planes to turn around to bring back gang members who were not even a legitimate party to the lawsuit by a leftist advocacy group. The ACLU’s argument that the Tren de Aragua gang does not qualify as a foreign enemy and Boasberg’s willingness to go along with that argument is entirely a matter of opinion and one left to presidential discretion. Neither Judge Boasberg nor the ACLU have presidential powers.
Federal judges do not get to decide which groups the president can declare are invading the United States. Such matters are the very definition of constitutional presidential discretion. An unbalanced judge who tries to seize the warmaking powers of the presidency is engaged in a coup and Boasberg is just the latest such judicial coupster since the aftermath of 9/11.
The White House’s rejection of judicial authority upholds checks and balances. It’s an impeachable offense and a violation of the constitutional role of the judiciary.
Disobedience to the rule of judges who issue such rulings is obedience to the Constitution.
