Media Hype Rogue Judges’ Attacks On SCOTUS

When President Trump criticizes rogue lower courts for issuing overreaching rulings, leftists treat it as an existential attack on the independence of the judiciary. But when these rogue lower court judges criticize the Supreme Court for refusing to uphold their overreaching rulings, it’s to be considered an undeniable act of bravery.

That was the case on Thursday, when NBC News published an “exclusive” story featuring temper tantrum-style criticisms from a dozen lower court federal judges against the Supreme Court. Speaking anonymously with the outlet’s Lawrence Hurley, many of these jurists specifically took aim at the justices’ openness to temporarily shutting down lower courts’ overreaching injunctions attempting to sabotage the Trump administration.

Since returning to office, President Trump has faced an onslaught of leftist-backed lawsuits aimed at grinding his agenda to a halt. This new rendition of anti-Trump lawfare has been warmly received by numerous (predominantly Democrat-appointed) lower court judges, who have issued expansive injunctions trying to block the administration from implementing the president’s policies.

This trend has prompted the Trump Justice Department to appeal many of these injunctions to SCOTUS, which has used its emergency docket to issue temporary stays on these orders while the merits of the cases make their way through the lower judiciary.

In addition to complaining that these Supreme Court orders often come with little or no explanation, 10 of the 12 anonymous lower court judges whined to Hurley that the high court’s actions may be “validating the Trump administration’s criticisms” of their and their fellow jurists’ egregious conduct.

“A short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, [the judges] argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump,” Hurley wrote.

“It is inexcusable,” one judge reportedly said. “[The justices] don’t have our backs.”

Naturally, Hurley portrayed these judges as simple victims caught in the president’s crossfire. Writing warmly about how they “painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings,” he noted that “administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms” “[w]hen they go against Trump.”

The NBC News writer also appeared to run interference for leftists’ weaponization of the courts against the executive branch.

While correctly acknowledging that “the increase in cases in hot-button nationwide disputes [has been] sparked in part by presidents of both parties relying more on executive orders than passing legislation via Congress,” Hurley went on to seemingly lay blame for the increased use of the Supreme Court’s emergency (or “shadow”) docket at Trump’s feet. He wrote, “The shadow docket has exploded in recent years, with the first Trump administration turbo-charging the trend by rushing to the Supreme Court when lower court rulings blocked nationwide policies” (emphasis added).

These judicial activists’ criticisms of SCOTUS (and specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts) will undoubtedly meet with glowing comments from Democrats and their media allies, all of whom have been engaged in a months-long meltdown about Trump and conservatives criticizing their party’s judicial coup.

In March, The New York Times editorial board penned a hyperbolic op-ed warning readers about what they laughingly claimed to be an “intimidation campaign against the legal system” by Trump and his allies. “The evident goal” of this made-up campaign, the clearly unstable board members wrote, “is to spread anxiety and fear among judges and keep them from fulfilling their constitutional duty to insist that the Trump administration follow the law.”

Unsurprisingly, the NYT writers attempted to characterize Trump’s criticisms as being on “a different scale” than those of former Presidents Bush (43), Obama, and Biden — the latter of whom openly threatened Supreme Court justices to their faces at his 2024 State of the Union address over the court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. More outlandishly, they even tried to paint Trump’s rhetoric as more egregious than a radical leftist attempting to assassinate Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the Dobbs ruling.

“Liberal critics of the Supreme Court have harassed justices at their homes, and in one extreme case, a man unhappy with the court’s approach to abortion planned to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” the NYT board members wrote. “Yet Mr. Trump’s efforts at judicial intimidation are of a different scale. As president, he is encouraging a campaign of menace. In case after case, he argues that the only reasonable result is a victory for his side — and that he alone can determine what is legal and what is not. His allies then try to dehumanize the judges with whom they disagree and make them fear for their safety.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Atlantic, The Hill, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek are among the many outlets to run columns fomenting the unhinged conspiracy that Trump is the greatest threat to the judiciary in American history.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood