OPINION:
The judicial resistance sustained a major setback last week. Thanks to a long-overdue Supreme Court intervention, lone judges can no longer hold the nation hostage to their whims.
In the 5½ months since President Trump’s second term began, Justice Amy Coney Barrett sat on the sidelines with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Their refusal to join their conservative colleagues allowed inferior judicial magistrates to paralyze the administration’s agenda through universal injunctions.
The longer the reluctant justices restrained themselves, the more brazen the defiance became. Left-wing groups filed a staggering 306 lawsuits in deep-blue jurisdictions to demand boundless court orders protecting the “rights” of illegal aliens, mandating wasteful spending, allowing race-based discrimination and forcing the military to embrace cross-dressing sailors and soldiers.
Liberal legal aid societies found no shortage of activist judges willing to swing their gavels against a president they despise. Although these pages have not been sparing in criticism of the moderate justices’ inertia, Justice Barrett didn’t hold back last week.
The former Notre Dame law professor penned a 6-3 ruling demolishing the arguments leftists have been advancing to suggest courts of limited jurisdiction have unrestricted power to impose their will on the executive branch.
District courts exist only because Congress created them in 1789. If district judges truly had authority to pronounce judgments applicable to the entire nation, it is implausible that such capabilities remained under wraps until the 1960s. It’s far more likely that federal judges fashioned this authority out of thin air to aggrandize themselves.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, famous for not being a biologist, dismissed this deep dive into the statute establishing the various courts as a “mind-numbingly technical query” into “legalese.” In other words, reading law books is boring. Grabbing national headlines by obstructing Mr. Trump is what being a judge is all about, according to the high court’s newest member.
“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
That’s quite a smackdown for what tends to be a staid and collegial body. The language reveals a deep frustration with the lack of seriousness and sincerity on the part of those who don black robes not to decide cases and controversies but to act as members of an unelected legislature claiming veto power over coequal branches of government.
The back-and-forth between the justices took place in the context of birthright citizenship, and the underlying case may not have a final resolution for several years. For now, President Trump will be able to stop noncitizens from sneaking into the country, having babies and then leveraging their children into a grant of citizenship for the entire family.
As the lower courts have yet to delve into the “legalese” of the birthright citizenship issue, the justices expressed no opinion on the matter. That said, it’s hard to see how this majority would think the authors of the 14th Amendment intended what’s happening now.
If Justice Barrett applies the same “mind-numbing” analysis to birthright citizenship, she will put an end to the abuse of the constitutional provision meant to guarantee citizenship to the children of freed slaves. It was never intended to reward those who flout our laws.
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