Misrule of Law

I do not question the resolve of President Trump, but have serious concerns about Congress, the courts, and faint-hearted Republicans across the country.

Thanks to Ace of Spaces HQ (here and here), Instapundit (here), and Memeorandum (here)!

This week’s report covers four topics:

First, Why are Republicans impeding MAGA?

Blue slips = blue state Senators vetoing Trump’s nominees for U.S. Attorney = dismissal of indictments. This has enabled James Comey and Letitia James to get away with their crimes. A grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has twice declined to indict Letitia James for mortgage fraud—despite what observers believe is overwhelming evidence of her guilt—after the initial indictment (secured by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan) was dismissed for technical reasons arising from the refusal of blue state Senators to consent to confirmation hearings for President Trump’s nominees.

From Politico:

Senate Majority Leader John Thune poured cold water on a fresh call by President Donald Trump for Republicans to nix the “blue slip” practice that gives senators an effective veto over presidential nominees to certain posts in their states.

“There are many Republican senators, way more Republican senators who are interested in preserving that than those who aren’t,” Thune told reporters. He comparing it to the overwhelming GOP sentiment in favor of keeping the 60-vote filibuster rule, which Trump also opposes.

Thune is giving the cold shoulder to President Trump’s request that the Senate end the chamber’s blue slip policy.

Filibuster = Senate can accomplish nothing except by a 60-vote majority (or by using “reconciliation”), meaning that nothing substantive gets done. No legislation to enact the MAGA agenda, such as codifying President Trump’s executive orders.

Indiana refused to re-district even though the state legislature is lopsidedly Republican. The Indiana senate denied the new map by a vote of 31 to 19, with 21 GOP senators joining all ten of the Democrats to vote down the proposal.

Congress passing bad legislation, undermining President Trump. From the Wall Street Journal: Last week, 20 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a bill to reverse President Trump’s executive order that stripped collective-bargaining rights from federal workers. President Trump this spring exempted roughly one million workers at some 40 agencies from collective bargaining. The Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute grants most federal workers collective-bargaining rights, but it lets the President carve out agencies involved in “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.” President. Trump applied these exclusions to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Food and Drug Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Communications Commission and other agencies whose work can affect national security. Unions sued to block the order, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals let it take effect in August. Labor agreements make it harder to reward merit and punish poor performance and misconduct. They also reduce government efficiency, which can slow project permitting, de-regulation and pharmaceutical reviews. The VA’s unionized workforce and prescriptive labor agreements are one reason its hospitals are often frustrating for patients.

Some Republicans even voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies!

No impeachment of rogue judges.

If Republicans lose the mid-terms, or fail to win in 2028, they will have only themselves to blame.

Second, The “culture of rejection” on the Right.

Different elements of the conservative movement are turning against traditional conservative beliefs, and even MAGA:

Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Nick Fuentes/groypers/anti-Semitism

Opposition to Israel (or Zionism, which is the same thing).

Embrace of crazy rhetoric blaming WWII on Winston Churchill, and absolving Hitler

“Post-liberals” who believe that Americans have “too much freedom,” leading to consumerism, hedonism, and decadence. Some even question the wisdom of the Founding.

Conservative legal scholars who criticize originalism because it does not always lead, quickly enough, to the results they favor.

Some figures on the Right express hostility toward capitalism and free markets, blaming our economic system for income inequality, low rates of homeownership among certain demographic groups, and other maladies.

Self-serving social media activists who pursue money and power by demonizing the entire “Republican establishment” as corrupt and unprincipled, and knee-jerk opposition to everything that mainstream Republicans support. This is true in Tennessee, where a self-proclaimed “conservative” activist opposes school choice, opposed the amendment of the state constitution to enshrine right-to-work, parrots trial lawyer rhetoric to impugn important agricultural products, and attacks Tennessee’s best-in-the-nation election procedures—even advocating the replacement of primary elections with rigged backroom “caucuses.”  Whose side is he on?

In all these cases, what exactly are the pseudo-conservatives conserving?

Daniel Mahoney, a noted “classical liberal” scholar, recently wrote a pair of essays for The American Mind on this topic, using the phrase “culture of rejection” coined by British philosopher Roger Scruton to argue that the rejection of traditional conservative beliefs—that have formed the basis for the conservative movement in the U.S. since the founding of National Review in 1955—”in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left.”

Third, the showdown that is developing between rogue district court judges and higher federal courts.

The award-winning Tennessee Star has made the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia familiar to readers throughout Tennessee. And now also U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis, from Maryland, appointed to the federal bench by President Obama. Judge Xinis ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released, despite his status as an illegal alien gang member accused of domestic violence and human trafficking. Xinis is apparently trying to “out-rogue” the current “rogue-leader,” Chief Judge James Boasberg from the District of D.C., who was also appointed by President Obama.  

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called [Xinis’s] order ‘naked judicial activism by an Obama appointed judge’ and said the administration would continue to fight it ‘tooth and nail in the courts.’” Abrego Garcia’s human-trafficking trial is set for January. Judge Xinis released Abrego Garcia based on her erroneous conclusion that no final order of removal exists in the file. Abrego Garcia is willing to be deported to Costa Rica, suggesting that his status as a deportable illegal alien is not really in question. The rest is absurd (and partisan) gamesmanship.

Months of pointless maneuvering will get the attention of appellate courts, who will put an end to this nonsense. The federal courts are not authorized to micromanage our immigration laws. Xinis is making a mockery of the deportation process. The Fourth Circuit will have to step in.

Meanwhile, the nation’s rogue-judge-in-chief, James Boasberg, was trying to hold a criminal contempt hearing to determine whether to punish DOJ officials for failing to comply with an oral order—for the planes carrying deported illegal aliens to turn around mid-flight and return to the U.S.!–that the Supreme Court found was beyond his authority to issue! This came after the relevant DOJ officials submitted sworn affidavits to the court explaining their actions. Boasberg was not satisfied, and demanded live testimony. Boasberg is literally trying to put DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in jail. The DOJ appealed to the D.C. Circuit, which shut down Boasberg’s high-handed overreach. According to Politico,

The Trump administration’s showdown with Judge James Boasberg escalated further on Friday, as the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to block the judge from holding a hearing next week to determine whether the administration deliberately defied his orders….

The appeals court stepped in Friday evening with a divided three-judge panel issuing an “administrative” order pausing the hearing Boasberg planned to convene Monday.

D.C. Circuit Judges Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, both Trump appointees, joined in granting the pause sought by the government. Judge Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, dissented. 

Despite the ruling by the D.C. Circuit, according to Politico,  “Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the appeals court ruling did not preclude him taking further action and he set a hearing, which was to begin Monday, with witnesses who could describe how the administration responded to his March 15 order. The judge ordered two witnesses to testify: Erez Reuveni, a former senior immigration attorney at DOJ, who was fired in April by Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Drew Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general who handled the initial proceedings in the lawsuit brought on behalf of the deportees.”

Boasberg has proven himself to be an out-of-control scofflaw judge who defies higher courts and displays an unseemly bias against the Trump administration. He needs to be impeached and removed from the bench—or at least from this case. The Tennessee Star reported the Trump administration’s response:

“This long-running saga never should have begun; should not have continued at all after this Court’s last intervention; and certainly should not be allowed to escalate into the unseemly and unnecessary interbranch conflict that it now imminently portends,” the DOJ wrote in its filing. “This Court should therefore again grant mandamus relief, this time foreclosing any further inquiry. The Court should also order the case to be reassigned given the strong appearance that the district judge is engaged in a pattern of retaliation and harassment, and has developed too strong a bias to preside over this matter impartially.”

Instead of the rule of law, we have a judicial insurrection underway. The D.C. Circuit may finally be getting sick of Boasberg’s insolence, and has put his intended contempt hearing on hold. It’s about time!

The third (and last) example of Obama-appointed rogue district judges being overturned comes from Boston, via the First Circuit. In July, District Court Judge Indira Talwani enjoined the provisions of the reconciliation bill that denied Medicaid funding to abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood. This was not due an executive order by President Trump, but an act of Congress, which has sole authority for federal spending under Article I of the Constitution. An unelected federal judge in Boston was usurping Congress’s spending decisions nationwide.

Even the left-wing First Circuit could not let that absurdity stand. Reuters reports that “A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a provision of U.S. President Donald Trump’s signature tax and domestic policy bill that deprives Planned Parenthood and local affiliates that perform abortions of Medicaid funding is not an unconstitutional punishment. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned, opens new tab a preliminary injunction issued in July by a lower-court judge who had concluded that the law likely violated the U.S. Constitution by targeting Planned Parenthood’s health centers as punishment for providing abortions.”

The First Circuit panel, consisting entirely of Biden appointees, said the law “simply does not impose ‘punishment’ as the term has been historically understood.” Either the district judge was engaged in civil disobedience, or defiance of federal law, or she is grossly incompetent. In either case, she should be impeached.

Fourth, the shockingly-dismal state of the legal academy.

Last week a Tweet went viral regarding an incident involving University of Virginia law school professor Xiao Wang. Professor Wang is a distinguished academic who attended Yale Law School and previously taught at Northwestern law school. He has published articles in the Michigan, Columbia, Vanderbilt, and Minnesota law reviews. He clerked on the Sixth Circuit. In short, he is a highly-qualified law professor with impeccable credentials. His specialty is appellate litigation, in particular before the U.S. Supreme Court. At UVA, he heads the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic and the Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Program. He teaches students how to litigate before the Supreme Court. Sometimes Professor Wang makes the oral argument himself, a rare honor for lawyers.

One case he argued was Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, 145 S. Ct. 1540 (2025). Ames involved a heterosexual woman who claimed employment discrimination under Title VII when she was denied a promotion, and later demoted, in both cases losing out to lesbian or gay employees. Ms. Ames filed suit alleging that she was discriminated against on the basis of her sexual orientation. Her case was dismissed by the district court, which was upheld by the Sixth Circuit, on the grounds that she had not made out a “prima facie” case of discrimination under the McDonnell Douglas standard, because heterosexual orientation is a “majority” status, and persons with “majority” status carry an extra burden in creating an inference of discrimination.

The Tweet, summarizing a presentation made by Professor Wang at a FedSoc event, involved the inhospitable reception that Professor Wang and his students received from fellow students and faculty at UVA by virtue of their participation in the Ames case:

Week after week, students came to his clinic saying that faculty or other students had harassed or chastised them — or had come into his office just to berate him.

At a faculty lunch, a professor who opposed the case yells at him in public and throws a plate at him.

Tenured faculty sent letters trying to “audit” his Supreme Court clinic after an open letter misrepresents his views.

The law school convenes a panel on his case — staffed entirely by critics — and doesn’t invite the person who briefed and argued it.

He says he reported the plate incident to the administration: “I’m not sure anything has happened.”

This was before the case was decided. (It was argued in February 2025.) The students and faculty at UVA were upset simply by the fact that Professor Wang and his students represented Ms. Ames. Lo and behold, when the Ames case was decided in June 2025, Ms. Ames won. The vote was 9-0—unanimous! The author of the majority opinion was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. It turns out that the case was a slam dunk no-brainer. Yet Professor Wang and his students were excoriated for being on the right side of the law and making a winning argument. Why? Because in today’s legal academy, especially at elite schools such as UVA, challenging the primacy of the LGBTQ agenda is verboten.

On this show we have frequently made fun of KBJ as the dumbest, or worst, or most left-wing Justice on the Court, and even in the history of the Court. The frightening thing about this episode is that it shows that the faculties at America’s top law schools are farther to the left than KBJ! Heaven help us!

Professor Wang ended his FedSoc presentation with this admonition, directed at his faculty colleagues: “Our job is just to teach the children, not be the children.”