by John Daniel Davidson at the Federalist
What’s happening right now is that Democrats, having been thrown out of power by American voters in a landslide victory for Trump, have decided they’re going to deploy a widely-used tactic from Trump’s first term to thwart the president’s agenda: use the federal judiciary. Under the false pretext that the lower federal courts are part of a “coequal branch of government” with the executive, they’re aiming to shut down Trump’s reform efforts with a fusillade of preliminary injunctions.
In recent days dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration by Democrat attorneys general and various left-wing groups. These groups have carefully selected their venues, ensuring the lawsuits come before rabidly anti-Trump activist judges. So far, the tactic seems to be working. As of this past weekend, eight different rulings from the federal bench have temporarily halted the president’s executive orders.
Federal judges in Democrat-majority districts have issued preliminary injunctions blocking Trump’s executive actions to end birthright citizenship, reform and downsize the United States Agency for International Development, and offer buyouts to federal bureaucrats. A federal judge this past weekend blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and all other political appointees in the Trump administration — including the Treasury secretary and his deputies — from accessing payment data at the Treasury Department.
One judge even issued a restraining order halting a Trump order that would have ensured federal inmates are housed according to biological sex, not transgender identity, and also would have prevented tax dollars from being used to pay for “gender transitions” for federal inmates. (Another judge, appointed by Obama, took the extraordinary step of ordering the administration to pay back every cent of federal funding that’s been paused or canceled — and threatened anyone who violates his order with criminal contempt.)
What all this lawfare amounts to is a kind of judicial coup against
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