However, the administration is running into predictable resistance, focused on the courts. And the response has been disturbing, if understandable. Elon Musk angrily complained: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW.” Vice President JD Vance was more measured in tone but more extreme in practice: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, sounded like just another leftist when he trashed one judicial decision as “an assault on the very idea of democracy itself.” There’s little doubt that many MAGA supporters would like the president to ignore adverse legal rulings. As President Andrew Jackson declared a couple centuries ago, announcing: Supreme Court Chief Justice “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Yet only a couple months ago, Republican senators were battling against lame-duck approval of the last Biden judicial appointments because responsible jurists are necessary to uphold the rule of law. (Biden actually ended up winning approval of two more federal judicial appointments than Trump, but the latter triumphed in the Supreme Court category 3–1.) And just a few months ago, back when Democrats still claimed that Joe Biden was energetically carrying out his presidential duties, his administration, under pressure from the Left, released a blueprint for judicial reform. Surprisingly, given his general surrender of domestic policy to progressives, the proposal was modest and left the judiciary intact.
This did not satisfy lefties who were angry that judges were upholding the law — for instance, blocking the president’s attempt to buy votes by turning student debt over to the taxpayers. Progressives determined to use the courts to make, rather than enforce, law were apoplectic when the Supreme Court returned to reading, rather than rewriting, the Constitution, as when it overturned Roe v. Wade. Those who believed courts are to act as continuing constitutional conventions with the duty to steadily expand state power proposed a range of radical “disempowering reforms,” and, most importantly, court packing, simply adding judges and turning the courts into unelected legislative bodies. Conservatives led the fight against such measures, as they did nearly a century ago when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed such a scheme, which failed to pass but appeared to trigger a Supreme Court retreat, the infamous “switch in time that saved nine.”
Although conservatives today are frustrated by judicial barriers to radical change, the Founders intended that Congress reign supreme. They were adamant that the newly liberated colonies were not going to replicate the British monarchy with a permanent and powerful president. And political experience around the world, including in the U.S., has demonstrated the danger of overweening executive power, vindicating the Constitution’s framers.
Particularly important in recent years, the courts have become a vital redoubt for free speech and especially religious liberty. Democrats once stood with Republicans in defense of faith. For instance, Congress overwhelmingly approved the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993. Indeed, the legislation was sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer. However, it turned out that the Left’s backing for freedom of religious conscience only extended to quaint faiths, such as the Amish and Native Americans. When others, most notably orthodox Christians, opposed the Left’s planned social revolution, many Democrats decided that the state should crush opposition and force the recalcitrant into line. For instance, if even one photographer refused to cover or baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, it apparently was seen as the end of the progressive dream.
