During his Sunday broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Life, Liberty & Levin,” host Mark Levin reacted to lower court federal judges putting stays on many of President Donald Trump’s executive actions.
Levin called it a “budding judicial tyranny” and urged the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved.
Transcript as follows:
[W]e’re living right now in what is a budding judicial tyranny, and if the United States Supreme Court doesn’t step in, it will, in fact, be a judicial tyranny.
We have over a hundred lawsuits filed against President Trump and his administration. Federal district judges, a vast majority of whom were appointed by Biden, Obama, and Clinton who are trying to undo the last election. Their jurisdictions are in overwhelmingly Democrat metropolitan areas — Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island.
Not a lot of cases in the Heartland, nope, not a lot of cases in the suburbs and the rural areas. Nope. This is the Democratic Party blue state lawyers dressed up as judges, getting a black robe against We, the People.
They are now effectively running the federal government or seeking to, it’s a cabal. There is no question many of them talk to each other, but they don’t have to. One sees what the other is doing.
They’re in charge of firing and hiring federal employees. They’re in charge of the data, payroll lists, and other files of the federal government. They’re in charge of immigration decisions, including whether the President can deport who is effectively a Hamas operative.
They’re in charge of website content. They’re in charge of spending decisions. They’re in charge of restructuring the federal government. These are all Executive Branch responsibilities having nothing to do with unelected judges.
What they are, are left wing Democrat lawyers in black robes, who are making a complete mockery of the judicial system. They are together acting as a National Committee of left wing lawyers who are ruling over the country and We, the People, without regard to the last election, a landslide election. What they are is part of the left wing resistance who are constitutionalizing and legalizing the policies of the left, the Biden regime, prior Democrat administrations, and immunizing the policies, the bureaucrats, the fraud, waste and abuse from a Republican President who is trying to reverse course.
This is judicial tyranny, and if the Supreme Court doesn’t step in, we will become a judicial tyranny.
Let’s talk about this at some more length here.
The biggest myth about judges is that they are somehow imbued with greater insight, wisdom, and vision than the rest of us, that for some reason, God Almighty has endowed them with superior judgment about justice and fairness.
But the truth is that judges are men and women with human imperfections and frailties. Some have been brilliant, principled and moral; others have been mentally impaired, venal and even racist.
Were our forefathers to view the American federal government of the 21st Century, I believe they’d be appalled at these activist judges, because activist judges, they’ve taken over school systems, prisons, private sector hiring and firing practices and foreign quotas.
They’ve ordered local governments to raise property taxes in states to grant benefits to illegal immigrants. They’ve expelled God, prayer, and the 10 Commandments from the public square. They’ve endorsed severe limits on political speech, and they’ve protected virtual child pornography, racial discrimination in law school admissions, flag burning, and the seizure of private property without just compensation.
They’ve announced that morality alone is insufficient as a basis for legislation. Courts now second guess the commander-in-chief in time of war, they confer due process rights on foreign enemy combatants. They intervene in the electoral process, and now they’re trying to reverse a landslide election by a country that wants things reversed.
Think about that, folks.
Thomas Jefferson said in 1825: This member of the government, the Judiciary, at first, considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs, but it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm, the foundations of the Constitution can do what open force would not dare to attempt.
So how did America reach the point where the federal judiciary has amassed more influence over more areas of modern life than any other branch of government? From which section of the Constitution were the courts granted the authority to overrule Congress and the President?
Nowhere in the Constitution has a federal Judiciary expressly given the authority to interject itself into every facet of federal and state operations. Federal Courts have accumulated their power under the rubric of judicial review. Judicial review involves a court overturning an act of Congress or of the Executive Branch on the grounds that the act in question contravenes the federal Constitution.
It is founded on the principle that courts will be unbiased guardians of the clear meaning of the Constitution. At the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there were only a handful of instances in which state courts overruled legislations for violating state constitutions and state courts did not assume carte blanche authority to rule on any subject.
Those courts followed British common law. They ruled on criminal law, matters of equity between individuals and businesses, and other legal matters. In “Federalist 78” that was Hamilton, the Judiciary did not represent a threat, Hamilton wrote, “So long as the Judiciary remains truly distinct from both the Legislative and the Executive Branches. For I agree that there is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” This is separation of powers.
These federal district courts are stomping all over separation of powers and in front of our eyes right now, the last six or seven weeks, they are seizing authority for themselves from the Executive Branch, from the President of the United States, something they would never have done under Joe Biden, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Period.
Robert Yates was an anti-Federalist and delegate to the Constitutional Convention from New York, was an especially articulate opponent of the Constitution. In a series of essays published in the “New York Journal,” which became known as the “Anti-Federalist Papers” — you should read those too, by the way — Yates wrote under the name of Brutus and in Essay 11, Yates questioned the powers and pitfalls of the proposed federal judiciary system.
Here is what he said: “The real effect of this system of government will therefore be brought home to the feelings of the people through the medium of the judicial power. It is, moreover of great importance to examine with care the nature and extent of the judicial power, because those who are to be vested with it are to be placed in a situation altogether unprecedented in a free country. They are to be rendered totally independent both of the people and the legislature, both with respect to their offices and salaries.
No errors they may commit can be corrected by any power above them, if any such power there be, nor can they be removed from office for making ever so many erroneous adjudications. The only causes for which they can be displaced is conviction of treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors.
That’s the basis for impeachment. And he said, the problem is, it doesn’t reach them when they’re rogue and they’re grabbing power.
This part of the plan is so modeled as to authorize the courts not only to carry into execution of powers expressly given, but where there are wanting or ambiguously expressed, to supply what is wanting by their own decisions.
Yates went on to say, when the courts will have a precedent before them of another court which extended its jurisdiction in opposition to an act of the Legislature, is it not to be expected that they will extend theirs especially there was nothing in the Constitution expressly against it? He is saying, they create their own precedent, and they build on their own precedent, so they cite the court in front of them for the basis of ruling and expanding what the court in front of them did.
He says, and are they authorized to construe its meaning and are not under any control? The power in the judicial will enable them to mold the government into almost any shape they please.
The point is this, the courts today, if the framers of the Constitution, the ratifiers in the states, had any inkling that they would have the power that these federal district courts have had, scores of them, to basically take over the Executive Branch and even the ministerial decisions of the Executive Branch, there is no way this Constitution would have been adopted in Philadelphia or ratified by the State Legislatures. There’s simply no way.
Jefferson’s concern about judicial power grew stronger as he passed an old life. For Monticello in 1820, the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote to a friend, William C. Jarvis the following: To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
You, Democrats like the phrase oligarchy, you learned a new word. Now, I will use it properly.
Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so they have with others, the same passions for party, for power and the privilege of their core and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible as the other functionaries are to the elective control. The Constitution is erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more widely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.
Now I have made proposals to address this, and this has gotten out of hand, completely out of hand, and now we have to rely on, hopefully, five members of the Supreme Court to fix this. We now have, last week, a federal judge, 79 years old, appointed by Clinton on senior status, meaning they’re only taking a few cases, but we have a lot of these judges coming back and taking these cases that are brought against the Trump administration.
He’s in San Francisco because the case was forum shopped in San Francisco, a judge was cherry picked. Now, that in and of itself, is corrupt, but that’s what’s going on in a hundred or more cases now.
And this judge writes a scathing opinion of little legal and constitutional basis, as if he is in high school writing an op-ed for the school newspaper. It’s full of blather, it’s full of hyperbole, and it lacks law.
And so he says this reduction in force that’s taking place in these six federal agencies involving tens of thousands of people is a sham, is a farce. That’s what he says. And these probationary employees, meaning they are on probation, many of them are individuals who’ve just come into the federal government that they use that for a reduction in force, is a complete lie, he says from the bench, a complete lie.
Therefore, in San Francisco, a federal district judge in San Francisco is ordering the President of the United States, of the whole country, you are now to re-employ and I say immediately, all those people, tens of thousands, in all of these federal agencies, you must re-employ them.
What a complete disgusting farce.
We have another federal judge who’s ruled that the CDC must put language back on its website. Huh? We’ve another federal judge who’s ruled that an individual that Donald Trump has fired, that individual must be re- employed.
And so the Department of Justice was appealing that, but the individual said, nah, you know what? I better get out of this. And so he pulls back, and of course, the appellate court overruled the district court.
We have another district court that has said that the Trump administration must expend $2 billion in foreign aid that the President doesn’t want to spend, or at least spend 60 days looking at and your U.S. Supreme Court, without any explanation whatsoever, the Chief Justice of the United States orders Trump to do exactly that and to comply with the federal district court, and that’s where Justice Alito and the other three constitutionalists said, wait a minute. What the hell is going on here?
Number one, these courts don’t have this kind of jurisdiction. They’re federal district courts, as I said last week, not federal national courts. No district court has this kind of power. What are these guys, ladies and gentlemen? They are men and women who are lawyers, who are plucked from obscurity, who are rammed through the Democrat Senate to become judges. So now they’re brilliant. Now, they’re all Solomon. Now, they’re just unbelievably earnest.
No, they’re not. They’re slip and fall, ambulance chasing lawyers in a black robe who have a Potemkin courtroom, a pretend courtroom, where they know what they want to do, where their ends justify the means. They go through the motions, but they spit out the same result.
The American people are losing faith in the Judiciary, not because the Democrats are trying to destroy the independence of the Supreme Court, pack the Supreme Court, turn it into a politburo, no. That’s why they’ve lost faith in the Democrats. No, it’s the Democrat judges and the never Trump judges who are creating mayhem.
So now, who is in charge of the Executive Branch when it comes to its ministerial tasks, personnel, and human resources? Who retires? Who is fired? Who is hired? How to restructure the federal government to make it more efficient? Who is in charge of that?
Who is in charge of the federal government’s websites and the content on the websites? Who is in charge of the data? Who has access to the data? The payroll information to make sure the checks are going where they are supposed to go? Who is in charge of that?
Who is in charge of decisions about whether a prior administration’s policies in funding radical left wing groups in America and overseas and their friends, whether that should continue or be stopped? Who’s in charge of that?
Who’s in charge of whether you deport a terrorist sympathizer, who’s among others creating mayhem at Columbia University? You know, the liberals like to talk about January 6. We’ve had January 6, week after week, month after month, year after year on our college campuses.
Columbia University, Barnard, NYU, UCLA, you name it, they don’t belong to America anymore, do they? Who’s in charge of that?
The question is, what aren’t these judges in charge of? What aren’t these federal district judges in charge of? They are the least scrutinized nominees when they go before the Senate, they are rammed through by a majority of Democrats who control the Senate, no matter how radical, irresponsible and unqualified they are.
Oh yes, there’s more.
We have a judge who used to work on DEI projects, that was his job as a lawyer, who’s just ruled that they have to continue funding DEI projects.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is judicial tyranny. Yates was right. Jefferson was right. Judicial review, as I’ve told you before, is an implied power. It’s not one that’s granted by the Constitution, and it never would be.
It was a power stolen, stolen from the other branches. Next week, I’m going to discuss some resolutions to this, some ways to address this, whether or not they’ll be followed is a whole other issue, but we cannot allow this to go on.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t fix this, we will have a complete change in our constitutional construct. We will have an all-powerful Judiciary, not at the Supreme Court level so much, but at the lower levels, the courts that don’t even exist in our Constitution.
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