Misrule of Law

The nation’s political climate in 2025 reminds me of Charles Dickens’s introduction to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….”   

Thanks to CutJib Newsletter (here) and Ace of Spades HQ (here)!

In my forthcoming contribution to a symposium in The Claremont Institute’s digital publication The American Mind, I observe that “In my lifetime, we have never had a better Supreme Court, or a worse culture.”  I elaborate by saying that “Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy.”

I neglected to mention another component of the abyss—a news media so biased and committed to promoting phony left-wing narratives that they resemble propaganda organs such as Soviet-era Pravda. Most of the “reporting” done by legacy media outlets serves as a “PSYOP” (or psychological operation) designed to manipulate public opinion through the repetition of false information. Each week, the news coverage of President Trump’s administration illustrates the extent of the media’s enmity toward the MAGA agenda. But President Trump persists.

President Trump’s energetic use of executive branch prerogatives has reversed decades of acquiescence to the Deep State, but Trump 2.0 faces unprecedented resistance from rogue judges, insurrectionist Democrat elected officials (some of whom openly encouraged active military personnel to disregard their chain of command–literally sedition), and a mendacious Fake News media. This week’s topics are:

Reapportionment Shoot-Out in Texas

In what is easily the most entertaining legal story in the news this past week, a three-judge panel of federal judges in Texas (consisting of two district judges—one appointed by Trump and one by Obama–and a Fifth Circuit judge appointed by President Reagan) ignited fireworks over the propriety of Texas’s mid-decade reapportionment of congressional districts. The newly-drawn maps would likely have the result of increasing the number of Republicans in Congress (by as many as five) in the 2026 elections, thereby increasing the chances of the GOP maintaining control of the House of Representatives. The judicial panel split 2-to-1, with the majority ruling that the reapportionment was invalid. The dissenting judge disagreed, finding the re-drawn districts to be a permissible partisan reapportionment.

State legislators are authorized by the Constitution to draw congressional districts, and this process—by custom but not by law done each decade following the census–has been a brazenly partisan exercise since Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry approved a rigged district in the shape of a salamander in 1812, thus coining the term “gerrymander” for districts drawn for the benefit of the political party then in control of the state legislature.

This is precisely what the Texas legislature did this year, at the suggestion of President Trump, and with the support of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The “2025 map,” as it is called, was challenged in federal court by “civil rights” groups funded by George Soros. Following a nine-day trial, the two district judges decided to grant an injunction blocking the use of the 2025 map, and began to write their opinion, a process that took over a month. When the majority decision was finished—consisting of 168 pages and 655 footnotes—the author of the majority opinion, Jeff Brown from Galveston, published it before the dissenting judge, Jerry Smith, a 37-year veteran of the Fifth Circuit and a conservative stalwart, even had a chance to pen his dissent.

The case is captioned LULAC v. Abbott.

When Judge Smith issued his dissent a few days later, the level of his ire was unmistakable. Commentators agreed that they had never seen such a strong denunciation of one judge (Jeff Brown) by another (Jerry Smith) in a published judicial decision. Smith’s dissent is 106 pages long and begins with this quote: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

The dissent is a tour de force—an epic smackdown that may never be equaled in American jurisprudence. Appeals of three-judge panel decisions go directly to the Supreme Court, and Smith’s dissent was obviously written for the Supreme Court’s benefit (since the majority’s decision had already been written and published).

Smith peppered his dissent with taunts and insults aimed at Brown, whom he accused of “pernicious judicial misbehavior.” Smith thundered that “In my 37 years on the federal bench, this is the most outrageous conduct by a judge that I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved.” Smith proclaimed that “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law.”

The dissent drips with disdain: “If…there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate.” And this: “In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.” And this: “If this were a law school exam, the opinion would deserve an ‘F.’” And so on, for over 100 pages. “Judge Brown is an unskilled magician. The audience knows what is coming next.” “Looks like Judge Brown’s so-called ‘direct evidence’ doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.” Etc.

I encourage everyone to read Judge Smith’s extraordinary dissent. 

If Judge Jerry Smith was trying to attract public attention to the majority opinion, he succeeded. His dissent became a sensation. For several days, the Internet was abuzz over the acrimonious dissent. And if Smith was trying to elicit the support of the Supreme Court, he succeeded. On Friday, Justice Samuel Alito issued a stay (at the state of Texas’s request) of the injunction, allowing the 2025 map to remain in effect pending the Supreme Court’s review.

My bet is that Judge Jerry Smith’s dissent will carry the day. It is unlikely that Jeff Brown will ever live down the woodshedding he received from Judge Smith. It is inexplicable that Brown, who was appointed by President Trump, would provoke such a catastrophe.   

Judge James Boasberg Is in Trouble

In previous reports, I have talked about the judicial insurrection being conducted by the Chief Judge of the District Court in D.C., James Boasberg, appointed by Obama. The federal bench in D.C. is the worst in the country. Boasberg is a terrible judge who has already been reversed by the Supreme Court. He seeks to hold Trump administration officials in contempt for violating a court order that was found to be invalid! His scofflaw rulings continue, and evidence of his partisan shenanigans continues to emerge. He issued subpoenas for personal phone records of eight Republican Senators, accompanied by illegal orders forbidding the cell phone carriers from notifying the Senate (or the Senators) of the subpoenas!

It turns out that Boasberg also subpoenaed the personal phone records of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan—for a period of more than two years! Fox News reports that “The request appears to be the most expansive yet of the publicly known subpoenas targeting senators and current and former House members during Arctic Frost, the investigation that led to [Special Counsel Jack] Smith bringing election-related charges against President Donald Trump.” Smith also obtained the phone records of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Revelations of Boasberg’s dragnet subpoenas have prompted a joint House-Senate demand to Boasberg to answer questions, with responses due by December 4. With the headline “GOP Leaders Grill Judge Boasberg For Allowing Jack Smith To Spy On The Senate,” The Federalist lists the eight questions Boasberg must answer. The climate in Congress is becoming heated. The Federalist reports that “Calls to impeach Boasberg have been growing louder, with Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, filing Articles of Impeachment earlier this month. Taking it a step further, a group of Republican senators has demanded that D.C. Circuit Chief Sri Srinivasan suspend Boasberg while those efforts are ongoing, as The Federalist reported. ‘We cannot tolerate rogue, self-professed prejudicial judges ruling on our nation’s most important cases,’ Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said.”

Boasberg’s days may be numbered. Law professor Jonathan Turley states that “It is difficult to overstate the gravity of this intrusion into the legislative branch. These records can reveal whom members spoke with and when such calls took place. It can reveal communications with journalists, whistleblowers, and others speaking confidentially with representatives. It can also reveal embarrassing information about members from their personal numbers.”

The Federalist reports that “Half a dozen Republican senators are calling on the leading judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to suspend a rogue district judge as efforts to impeach him get underway.” The signatories to Schmitt’s letter include Tennessee’s Sen. Bill Hagerty.

Boasberg is the poster child for rogue judicial activism. He must be impeached, disciplined, reversed, and removed from the bench.

 Big Tish’s Dilemma

Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Letitia James, architect of a failed lawfare scheme against President Trump, stands accused of mortgage fraud, having been indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. Evidence has surfaced confirming that James lied on both her mortgage application and homeowners’ insurance documents for the house she purchased in Norfolk, Virginia by claiming that the property would be her “principal residence.” This was a lie.

James lived and worked in New York at the time, has never lived in the property, and has collected rent from the relative who did reside in the house. The Federalist reports that “Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, noted the filings make the case against James appear both open-and-shut and fairly routine for that judicial district. ‘Lindsey Halligan’s prosecution of Letitia James is a righteous, garden-variety mortgage fraud prosecution,’ Davis wrote on social media. ‘As her filing shows, prosecutions are routinely brought in the Eastern District of Virginia for fraud over similar amounts of cash.’”

James also treated the house as a rental (i.e., investment property) for tax purposes, refuting the claim that it served as her “secondary home.”

Big Tish is in big trouble. She got caught red-handed. A jury will decide her fate.

The Lying Media Covers for Jim Comey

Former FBI Director James Comey has more friends in the D.C. swamp and the media than Big Tish. Accordingly, his fellow swamp dwellers are running interference for Comey by trying to impugn interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, who spearheaded the indictments of Comey and James. Biased reporters try to make a big deal out of comments made by a magistrate handling the case, William Sullivan, referring to him as a “federal judge” when he is not a life-tenured Article III judge confirmed by the Senate, but a clerk-like functionary chosen by the swampy judges who inhabit the D.C. bench.

Reporters are nit-picking the manner of Halligan’s appointment, her conduct of the grand jury, and so forth with headlines such as “Judge scolds Justice Department for ‘profound investigative missteps’ in Comey case” and “Judge blasts DOJ for ‘missteps’ in Comey case.” Even the Wall Street Journal has engaged in this PSYOP, with a story headlined “Trump’s Chosen Prosecutor Faces Test of Legitimacy.” None of these inquiries relate to the evidence against Comey. They pertain to mere technicalities. In any event, Halligan strenuously defends her handling of the grand jury proceedings, “claiming that the magistrate judge had misrepresented her comments before the grand jury and that his opinion attacking the Comey case should be set aside.”

As it turns out, the Fake News media were peddling a false narrative. The lowly magistrate made a mistake, not Halligan. In a report in The Federalist headlined “The Media’s Latest Push To Sink Comey Indictment Was Entirely Based On A Lie,” the truth emerges. As explained by Mike Davis, “‘The confusion arises solely from the magistrate judge’s misinterpretation of the administrative correction removing Count One from the indictment after the grand jury returned a true bill on Counts Two and Three.’ ‘That adjustment simply reflected the grand jury’s vote; it was neither unusual nor improper,’ Davis said.” In summary, “the same propaganda press that spread the hoax is now scrambling to pretend like it was the Justice Department that ‘reversed’ itself rather than just admitting the obvious: The magistrate judge misunderstood what happened, and the media simply regurgitated that misinterpretation.”

Mike Davis has all the receipts, and posted the exculpatory documents on X (here, here, and here). Sunlight is truly the best disinfectant. Left-wing groups are resorting to lawfare against Halligan to protect Comey, such as filing a bar complaint against her. This is a familiar tactic in the Left’s playbook.

Pronoun Wars in the Sixth Circuit

Back in the 1960s, high school students in Des Moines, Iowa wore black arm bands to school to protest the Vietnam War, and were suspended for violating school policy. The school administration felt that wearing arm bands in class would be disruptive. This led to a landmark Supreme Court case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) that famously held that neither “students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Student expression won.

Fifty-six years later, what types of expression are being litigated in America’s public schools? Pronouns–at least in Ohio. An article in Law & Liberty entitled “The Latest Legal Battle of the Pronouns” explains the latest legal developments in the Sixth Circuit, which also covers Tennessee.

A large school district in Ohio enacted a policy requiring students to use a classmate’s “preferred pronouns” if they are “transgender” or “nonbinary.” In other words, a student could be disciplined for referring to a biologically male classmate as “he” or ‘him” if the classmate “identified” as female. And vice versa for biologically female students who “identify” as male. Students challenged the policy as a violation of the First Amendment. The school was impinging on their freedom of expression by forcing them to adopt phony pronouns contrary to biology—demanding that they adopt the delusion of the transgender classmate.

Not surprisingly, the students won, but the case was heard by the Sixth Circuit en banc, meaning that all 17 judges on the Sixth Circuit participated.  The vote was 10-to-7 in favor of the students. (The 2-to-1 panel decision in 2024 ruled in favor of the pronoun rule.)

The majority, dissenting, and concurring opinions in the case, Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District Board of Education, are 112 pages long. Predictably, the judges split along partisan lines. Republican-appointed judges voted for the students; Democrat-appointed judges voted to uphold the woke policy. The article states that “the judges voted in blocks: all ten judges appointed by Republican presidents (six by Donald Trump, three by George W. Bush, and one by George H. W. Bush) sided with the plaintiffs, all seven judges appointed by Democratic presidents (four by Joe Biden, two by Bill Clinton, and one by Barack Obama) sided with the defendants.”

If this seems like a silly issue to devote such an enormous amount of time and resources on, you’re right. And this is not the first pronoun case the Sixth Circuit has decided. A few years earlier, in a case called Meriwether v. Hartop, the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of a college professor who challenged disciplinary action he received from his employer, a state-funded college, for refusing—on religious grounds—to refer to students by their chosen pronouns and gender identity. Shawnee State, where the professor had taught for 25 years, adopted the pronoun policy in 2016 and refused the professor’s request for accommodation on religious grounds.

The Sixth Circuit ruled, in 2021, that Shawnee State’s discipline of Meriwether violated his First Amendment rights. Yet, five years later, the same court is divided 10-to-7 over a pronoun policy in a public high school?  This is just stupid. Let’s declare the transgender movement a passing episode of mass delusion and move on.

By the way, the students in Defending Education were represented by one of the smartest and most capable lawyers in the state of Tennessee, Cam Norris, who lives in Knoxville. Cam also successfully argued the affirmative action case against Harvard in the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Judicial Insurrection Round-Up

Finally, the ongoing judicial insurrection against President Trump’s enforcement of federal immigration laws, and efforts to restore public safety to America’s cities, continues. The rogue judges’ latest mischief occurred in Chicago, Portland, D.C., and even Tennessee! Attorney General Pam Bondi is busy playing Whack-A-Mole appealing these activist decisions.

In Chicago, the Seventh Circuit stayed an order requiring ICE to release 600 illegal aliens who were apprehended in Operation Midway Blitz. This is good news, but the activism by rogue judge Sarah Ellis continues. CNN reports that “Though the appeals court did not explain why it sided with the Trump administration in the detention case, its decision comes just a day after a three-judge panel with the 7th Circuit blocked a different judge’s order because they believed the judge had overstepped their authority by imposing strict limits on how federal agents could operate in Chicago.” The smackdown received attention on X. The Seventh Circuit will hear argument on the merits of that case on December 2.

Power Line comments that this was “not a good week for rogue district court judges. Little by little, sanity creeps back.” We can hope.

In Portland, Judge Karin Immergut continues to block President Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to that city.

In D.C., Biden-appointed Judge Jia Cobb ruled, bizarrely, that President Trump lacked authority to deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital, even though it is a federal territory subject to federal control. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Cobb, a 2021 Biden appointee, delayed implementation of her ruling until Dec. 11 so that the administration could appeal.” I’m not a betting man, but I would wager that Cobb will be reversed.

In Tennessee, a state court chancery judge in Nashville ruled that Governor Bill Lee lacked authority to deploy the National Guard in Memphis. This bizarre ruling has received criticism and is likely to be overturned on appeal.

Partisan hacks wearing black robes, and posing as judges, will issue lawless edicts as long as the appellate courts let them. If the judicial insurrection is to be stopped, legislators must rein in rogue judges through impeachment, discipline, or restricting their jurisdiction. The future of the republic is at stake.