So far, many have shot down Trump’s foulest efforts
Just over a half-century ago, a federal judge appointed by an honest Republican president stood up to a corrupt Republican president and made history.
John J. Sirica, a son of Italian immigrants who put himself through law school by boxing, demanded in 1973 that Richard Nixon cough up secret Oval Office recordings. On one, Nixon plotted with aides to quash the infamous Watergate burglary investigation. The late judge’s subpoena – and later release of the tapes, as well as the trials of the Watergate burglars over which Sirica presided – led to Nixon’s humiliating resignation.
Ah, if only humiliation worked on this shameless White House.
But, today, we again see other courageous judges taking on a far more corrupt president and setting him back on his would-be regal heels. Donald J. Trump and his minions have been scorched by one court decision after another in their long parade of efforts to twist, stretch and violate the law.
Trump has lost decisions ranging from one damning a company’s blacklisting from defense contracts to proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting. He’s been slapped down in areas as diverse as tariffs and deportations, as well on his efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The administration lost a big vaccines case, was forced by a court to pull back on National Guard deployments in cities and suffered setbacks on revenge cases he brought at critics.
The list of judicial defeats goes on and on. The president and his colleagues have lost cases dealing with congestion pricing in city streets, withholding federal funds from schools in diversity, equity and inclusion cases, and on cuts in funding to sanctuary jurisdictions.
And the judges involved have been withering in their rulings against the administration.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle, a Ronald Reagan appointee, called Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship “blatantly unconstitutional,” for instance. Another Reagan appointee, Appeals Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, said of the illegal deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia: “There is no question that the government screwed up here.” The judge, sitting in Virginia, added: “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Even deep in Trumpland, judges have been blistering.
District Judge Fred Biery, serving in Texas and ordering the release of a 5-year-old illegally detained by immigration authorities, didn’t hold back, for example. “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” Biery, a 78-year-old Clinton appointee and grandfather, wrote in a three-page ruling. “And the rule of law be damned.”
Still other judges have taken aim directly at Trump.
U.S. District Judge William Young railed against the administration in a free-speech case involving pro-Palestinian protesters such as the Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk. In his 161-page opinion, the Reagan appointee accused the president of violating “his sacred oath” to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and . . . to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States … by ignoring the Constitution’s command that the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Indeed, Young wrote that Trump favored muzzling free speech. “After all, the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech on the part of two of his senior cabinet secretaries,” the judge thundered.
Young, who sits in Massachusetts, also took aim at Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, particularly its love of masks.
After hearing from a top ICE official, Young wrote that the court “rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable.”
“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” he contended. “Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor — and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”
Ouch.
Of course, to Trump the law is just an annoyance, a small obstacle to be overcome. And judges, to him, are lackeys in a system that just gets in his way. Beating the system and the judges is a kind of game that, if stretched out long enough, he is sure he can win or sidestep.
“The time has also come for Republicans to pass a tough new crime bill that imposes harsh penalties for dangerous repeat offenders, cracks down on rogue judges. We got rogue judges that are criminals. They are criminals, what they do to our country. The decisions that they hand down and hurt our country,” Trump said at a March 25 National Republican Congressional Committee event in Washington.
He previously called Supreme Court Justices who had ruled against him in a tariffs case “fools and lap dogs” for political opponents. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”
He recently ratcheted up his language, saying that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett “sicken me.” He had appointed both of them, but they joined four other Justices in ruling against him in the tariffs case. The majority held that Trump had illegally sought to authorize some levies under an emergency law that was not suited to the charges.
Such tariffs are a mainstay of Trump’s 18th century view of economics. After he lost that Supreme Court case, Trump just found other rules to rationalize the charges, albeit temporarily.
So much for respect for judges and the laws they are upholding.
The “lap dog” judges that “sicken” him on April 1 will be among the nine who will hear oral arguments on one of the hobbyhorses Trump rides to limit the rights of immigrants, birthright citizenship. Recall that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, grants citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. (with a few exceptions, such as for children of diplomats).
Ever since then, it has been understood that the language of that amendment is clear and inarguable. Nonetheless, Trump on his first day back in office in January 2025 issued an executive order aimed at overturning that, holding that a child born to parents in the U.S. unlawfully is not entitled to citizenship.
Several judges have shot down Trump’s so-called EO.
“The plain language of the Citizenship Clause—as interpreted by the Supreme Court more than a century ago and routinely applied by all branches of government since then— compels a finding that the plaintiffs’ challenges to the EO are nearly certain to prevail,” one such judge, Leo Sorokin, wrote in enjoining enforcement of the order. “The Citizenship Clause speaks in plain and simple terms.”
As quoted by the judge, the amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” And the judge then wrote: “The words chosen by the drafters and ratified by the states, understood ‘in their normal and ordinary’ way, United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 731 (1931), bestow birthright citizenship broadly to persons born in the United States.”
Now, it will be up the Supreme Court to rule on whether Trump has the power to, in effect, rewrite the amendment.
Praising Sorokin’s ruling last July, former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said he was “thrilled the district court again barred President Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional birthright citizenship order from taking effect anywhere.” Platkin, who helped lead the suit the judge considered, added: “American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation’s history … The President cannot change that legal rule with the stroke of a pen.”
Decades ago, an appeals court considering one of Judge Sirica’s orders about the Watergate tapes rejected efforts by Nixon’s lawyers to “refashion the Constitution” to suit him.
“Though the President is elected by nationwide ballot and is often said to represent all the people, he does not embody the nation’s sovereignty,” the court wrote. “He is not above the law’s commands. Sovereignty remains at all times with the people, and they do not forfeit through elections the right to have the law construed against and applied to every citizen.”
These days – and today happens to be the nation’s third “No Kings Day “– we are seeing once again whether a president is “above the law’s commands.” Sirica, one imagines, would be appalled by this president but likely would take heart from the many judges standing in the way of Trump’s monarchical impulses.