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I am in Washington, D.C., attending, I kid you not, the White House Correspondents’ Association Sunday Brunch at the British Embassy. Hosted by CNN, no less. 





I promise to get a photo with my favorite CNN hosts. If they will let me!

My new friend Scott Jennings invited me, and believe it or not, I almost declined. But my colleagues (especially Beege) and my wife bullied me into going, and there is something delicious about sharing a table with Jake Tapper and company. And I wanted to meet Scott in the flesh and say hello to WMAL radio host and Dan Bongino replacement Vince Coglianese, too. Vince is a good guy and one of the smartest in broadcast media. 

So while I am putting in the time to produce a Sunday Smiles, I am borrowing and extending an essay I wrote on Friday and reprinting it. 

The revisions are substantial, though. So it is worth reading, I assure you. 

You DO know that Sunday is one of my days off, right? I do this for you, so forgive me if I seem lazy today. 

My Thoughts on the Judicial Insurrection:

Two things can be true. Trump may be exceeding his Constitutional authority in some of his executive orders–that is a matter for serious lawyers and jurists to debate, and it happens in every presidency. Also, there is an obvious judicial insurrection in which judges declare that any decision they disapprove of is unconstitutional. 

The second truth is much worse. Presidents always stretch their power to see how far they can go, and the reason why we think it is legitimate for judges to rein them back in is because we believe that the judges are ruling based on the law and the Constitution. If the standard is that nobody is above the law, that must include judges. 

Legal challenges to presidential actions are a normal part of the back-and-forth the Founders built into the checks and balances of the federal government. Judicial review as a principle was established shortly after our government was implemented, and in the main, that has been a good thing. Power corrupts and all that. 

But the current argument that Trump is abusing his power by fighting back against obvious judicial overreach is based on a false premise that judges get to make up the law and the meaning of the Constitution. The assumption seems to be that the Constitution binds the president and Congress, but not the judiciary. 





This has been, implicitly, the liberal take on Constitutional law for as long as I have been alive, and against which conservatives have fought for decades. Call it the “living Constitution,” or “adapting the Constitution to the modern world,” or whatever other sleight of hand phrase you like, but the basic idea is that judges get to make public policy whenever they want. And, generally speaking, this has a ratchet effect that ensures a leftist drift away from the limited government vision the Founders wrote into law in 1787/1791 (when the Bill of Rights went into effect).

No branch of government should exceed its legitimate powers, but of all the branches, the judiciary should be most chary of exceeding its powers. The president’s role is to use prudence in executing laws; Congress to create laws reflecting the people’s will; judges are supposed to be the referees.

Think of it like this: when watching a football game, we expect players to push the limits and try to get away with fast ones. We expect the coaches to advocate for their players and team. And, most of all, we expect the referees to apply the rules fairly–to hold the players and coaches to the rules they are inclined to bend. 

Nobody blames coaches or players for grabbing every advantage they can. But if the referees are corrupt and stack the deck we all get outraged, and rightly so. 

Judges have gotten very far out in front of their skis. They are creating powers for themselves out of thin air, and some are outright breaking the law because they believe they ARE the law. 





Just NOW, the FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction — after evidence of Judge Dugan obstructing an immigration arrest operation last week.

We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest. 

Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.

When District Judges create out of thin air the right to impose nationwide injunctions against presidential decisions, or start making policies that are clearly outside their remit, they are destroying the Constitutional order and balance of powers outlined therein just as much as a president would be if he started throwing political prisoners in jail. 

And when they are doing so to invalidate an election–as they obviously are by neutering the president’s powers–they are basically insurrectionists. 

A president’s power is limited constitutionally, but it is just as true that when a president uses his legitimate power in a way that a court or judge doesn’t like, they are not constitutionally authorized to stop him. 

If, say, a majority of the Supreme Court didn’t approve of the president’s military action, that doesn’t give them the power to declare that he can no longer act as Commander-in-Chief. They are the referees, not the coaches. They don’t get to decide what outcomes they would prefer become the law. 

It is inarguable that judges are having a field day, acting as a #resistance against a president they despise. 

In many cases, these judges expect to be overturned. Still, they know that each injunction ties the president up in courts, slows his reforms, and, in effect, hampers him from exercising his constitutional authority. They simply don’t like what he is doing, and want to put as many impediments as possible before him. 

All the rest is handwaving. 





It’s notable that a number of these judges have obvious conflicts of interest. With family members receiving federal funds from programs being shut down, or direct connections to NGOs getting hammered, they should be recusing themselves. Instead, they are acting like autocrats in banana republics, defending their own interests. 

For instance, the judge recently arrested for trying to spirit an illegal alien out the back door from a court in order to help him escape arrest previously worked for Catholic Charities, one of the largest organizations involved in illegal alien trafficking operations. She may want every illegal alien she helped import into the country to stay–the man she was spiriting out of the court was before her because he beat his wife and another man and sent them to the hospital–but her preferences are not the Law. 

And she is supposed to be bound by the law, not her preferences. 

If courts and judges are not limited in power by the Constitution and the laws as written our system of government is as deeply compromised as it would be by a president, a bureaucrat, or any other corrupt official exceeding his power.

Actually, more so. 





The judicial insurrection attempts to overturn the 2024 election by other means. 

During Biden’s presidency, we had a headless executive branch run by bureaucrats that ran amok; what the judges are trying to create today is a headless executive branch with rogue judges running amok. 

ON TO THE SMILES:

BEST OF THE BABYLON BEE:





BEST OF THE REST





AND FINALLY…


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