US judges become targets in combative political environment

Having taken the White House and congress, Donald Trump’s movement is unleashing its fury on the branch of government it doesn’t control: the judiciary.

Utah Republican senator Mike Lee posted a picture online of a judge who ruled against a Trump order. Picture: AFP

Having taken the White House and captured congress, President Donald Trump’s movement is unleashing its fury on the one branch of government it doesn’t fully control: the judiciary.

As more judges have blocked or slowed some of Mr Trump’s initiatives, the President’s surrogates have been increasingly strident in their responses, casting adverse rulings as not only incorrect but also illegitimate.

“Judges targeting President Trump are political hacks and their decisions belong in my SHREDDER,” Republican Representative Andy Ogles wrote on X.

“This is a judicial power grab. Plain and simple,” Chad Mizelle, Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, said in a social-media post after a pair of judges temporarily halted mass lay-offs at government agencies.

Utah senator Mike Lee, who has called for impeaching “corrupt judges”, reposted a photo of US District Judge Beryl Howell, who blocked sanctions Mr Trump imposed on a Democratic-leaning law firm, Perkins Coie. Senator Lee also has proposed legislation to limit federal courts’ power to rule on administration policies.

Perhaps the most aggressive has been Elon Musk, the President’s surrogate and billionaire benefactor, who has accused judges of interfering with the democratic process. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” he said in one post.

Mr Trump’s aggressive assertions of presidential power, and the speed with which he has imposed his agenda, have put judges on the hot seat. More than 100 lawsuits challenging Trump initiatives are moving through the courts. Adding to the tensions, Mr Trump’s challengers frequently have asked judges to temporarily block his moves at the outset, to avert what they have argued are irreparable harms they would suffer while their cases spend months or years working through the legal system.

The attacks haven’t distinguished between judges appointed by Democratic presidents or Republican ones. Instead, the central criterion: whether a judge has been an impediment to Mr Trump, even at an early stage of a case while legal arguments are far from a final resolution.

Mr Ogles filed impeachment papers against judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee in Washington who last month ordered the Trump administration to restore government health websites and data sets that had been modified or taken down in an effort to scrub references to “gender ideology.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Trump appointee celebrated for cementing conservative control of the Supreme Court, recently found herself an unlikely target of the MAGA movement. She joined Chief Justice John Roberts and three liberal justices in a 5-4 vote not to intervene at Mr Trump’s behest in lower court litigation over foreign aid funding.

“Amy Coney Barrett shows the danger of Republican DEI,” right-wing personality Jack Posobiec told his 3.1 million followers on X.

Judges say the blowback won’t influence their rulings. But they fear that the messages from on high are whipping up threats and potentially violence against judges and their families.

“It’s something that we really take seriously because the threats seem to arise directly from judges just doing their job. We’re supposed to say what the law means,” US Circuit judge Jeffrey Sutton, the executive committee chairman of the US Judicial Conference, the judiciary’s policymaking body, said on Tuesday.

“It’s been developing for a while, whether it’s polarisation, whether it’s the internet, who knows. But the number of threats, the types of threats to judges have changed over the last decade.”

US Circuit judge Richard Sullivan, a 2018 Trump appointee to the federal appeals court in New York and head of the judiciary’s security committee, said impeachment threats were out of line.

“We have a system of justice that allows for appeals,” he said. “Impeachment shouldn’t be a short-circuiting of that process.”

During a deeply partisan political era, both parties have decried rulings against their key initiatives. Chief Justice Roberts, in a year-end report last December, suggested that tensions between the judiciary and elected officials were reaching a point not seen since the civil rights era, when southern politicians called for massive resistance to desegregation orders.

Faced with threats, efforts at intimidation and mischaracterisation about what court decisions actually say, Chief Justice Roberts said the judiciary had few options. “Judges typically speak only through their decisions. We do not call press conferences or generally issue rebuttals,” he wrote.

Still, some judges are escalating their own rhetoric.

US District judge Ana Reyes, hearing a challenge to a Trump order expelling transgender service members from the military, got into tense exchanges with a Justice Department lawyer. She analogised Mr Trump’s categorical disqualification of all trans personnel to saying that no law school graduate of the University of Virginia – the lawyer’s alma mater – could argue in her court because they are “all liars and lack integrity”.

Mr Mizelle, the Attorney-General’s chief of staff, responded by filing a conduct complaint against Judge Reyes, arguing she lacked professional decorum.

While the judiciary largely has offered a united front, there are cracks to be seen. US Circuit judge James Ho, a prominent conservative, has resigned from the Federal Judges Association to protest a statement the group issued warning of threats to judicial independence.

Speaking at a Federalist Society event, Judge Ho said the nonpartisan group was hypocritical because it hadn’t previously issued a statement responding to “attacks” on conservative Supreme Court justices. “You can’t say that you’re in favour of judicial independence only when it comes to decisions that you like,” said Judge Ho, a Trump appointee to the federal appeals court in New Orleans.

The Wall Street Journal