Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Judges within our Federal Judiciary are acting to thwart the will of the American voter. These activists are off-mission because they are politically involved—jurists striving to make law from the bench. Their personal ideology is at odds with the mandate won by President Trump and the Republican majority. So, instead of protecting the Constitution, these judges twist the law and betray their trust in order to fight MAGA.
Elected officials are entrusted by voters, under our Constitution, with the responsibility of proposing and passing laws that they believe will make us a more perfect Union. At the Federal level, it is for our representatives and senators to devise and refine legal remedies to the many challenges that threaten our ongoing freedom. The Legislative Branch is to make laws within
the framework of our Constitution.
The President, elected to administer the Executive Branch, is also entrusted by voters with shaping legislation as well as implementing and enforcing laws. He is given broad authority under the Constitution to hire, fire, and direct agencies of bureaucrats to this end.
Elected officials are chosen by voters, not by judges. In our Republic, the source of all legitimacy is the expressed will of the voter. Within our liberty-oriented worldview, there is no other foundation for any claim for the right to rule than that of electoral victory. Secular power flows from the will of the majority of voters, as expressed among other things through the Electoral College.
Of course, the scope of every elected official’s effort must be constrained within the framework of their particular role, that of the specific office to which they were elected. They must each contend with other elected officials playing their discrete roles, wrestling and negotiating with these peers to forge bills into laws. No official, not even the President, can or should rule alone and unchecked.
The role of the Federal Judicial Branch of government is to assess the Constitutionality of legislation passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by the President. Judges and Courts are intended to operate without being directly subject to the political pressures that dominate the professional lives of politicians. Jurists are intended to be dedicated to one all- encompassing objective; the preservation of our Constitution’s letter and spirit in all laws; past, present, and future.
Activist judges, willfully contending in the political arena to override the agenda of elected leaders, have betrayed their Constitutional trust. These manipulative social engineers never placed their name into electoral contention. They never earned a mandate of votes to enact their preferred political program. They have absolutely no legitimate role in shaping policy.
Their role is similar to that of the ancient Roman Republic’s Tribune of the Plebeians. Tribunes were empowered to “VETO” (to forbid) anything that they determined was against the spirit and letter of the Twelve Tables of Roman law. In particular, Tribunes were entrusted to ward Romans against predatory behavior by avaricious Senators and Patricians.
As important as Tribunes were, they were entrusted with a very particular duty. Never were Tribunes permitted to propose laws. They were supreme in stopping what they determined to be harmful laws, but had absolutely no scope to shape policy by making laws. That was the province of others.
Like Tribunes, judges can stop “bad” laws, but not propose “good” laws. However, since the Progressive Era, increasing numbers of Leftists have legislated from their Courtrooms. The worst of these was liberal Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren and his 1950s and 1960s U.S. Supreme Court.
The Warren Court fundamentally redefined the relationship between the Federal government and every U.S. citizen. They upended the way that policing was conducted, how evidence was gathered, how criminals were judged, and how the condemned were punished. Forbidding school prayer and the compulsory reading of Miranda rights upon arrest were all part of their legacy.
Whether or not their policies were beneficial or harmful is irrelevant. No one had entrusted Warren or his confederates with the responsibility of making law. Instead of preserving the Constitution, they expanded the Courts’ role to include restructuring America by judicial decree.
This Constitutionally questionable and caustic judicial activism is alive and well today as Federal District Judges intrude themselves into every aspect of the Trump/MAGA agenda. While Democrats at all levels writhe in a self-inflicted identity crisis, these judges act for them to subvert all Trump/MAGA initiatives.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has just issued a rare reprimand, criticizing any who are moving to impeach these activist judges. To protect the system, Roberts demands that everything operate through what has become the customary system of appeals.
These are not normal times. We have no freedom if activist judges partner with unaccountable bureaucrats to rule us independent of electoral mandates. This has already happened in Obama and Biden’s America. This judicial and bureaucratic authoritarianism must be recognized, confronted, stopped, and reversed.
Trump/MAGA were given a mandate to restore a more limited role for the Federal government, as well as to reaffirm the security of our borders and citizenship requirements. This policy agenda, by its very nature, involves challenging the very status quo that Roberts defends.
Remember that John Roberts was the deciding vote in preserving Obamacare. He cast this vote to protect the Supreme Court from the kinds of criticisms that his predecessor Rehnquist experienced after intervening to resolve the 2000 election. To his everlasting shame, Roberts acts to preserve the reputation of the U.S. Supreme Court, not to uphold the Constitution.
Judicial activism is as much an enemy of our liberty as an unaccountable Federal bureaucracy. As we should actively support Trump and DOGE in removing the permanent bureaucracy’s heel from our necks, we should support efforts to impeach obstructionist and activist judges.
We should also support an insistence that such judicial challenges that are made do not originate anywhere in the Federal Judiciary. There are proper venues for challenging Trump policies, such as the Court of Federal Claims and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
These bodies should be purged of activists and be made the exclusive venues where national policies can be fairly adjudicated. The role of every minor Federal District Judge should be clarified so that the current practice of activist “judge shopping” to oppose every Trump/MAGA initiative will no longer be effective.
The strict construing of law compared with the original intent of our Founders, as expressed in our Constitution, is the only legitimate role of the Judiciary. As all legitimacy flows from the expressed will of the citizen, we can and should support those who would restore Constitutional limits to the bureaucracy and the Judiciary, such as President Trump and MAGA Republicans are attempting to do on our behalf.
