The Big One For All the Marbles
Trump goes Andrew Jackson on John Roberts
“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
— President Andrew Jackson (possibly apocryphal)
It seems like only yesterday that I responded to a commenter elsewhere asking what it would take to end the rogue judicial war on the DJT administration, saying that it wouldn’t end until John Roberts was forced to choose between upholding the small but growing army of pipsqueak “judges” (progressive activists) using spurious legal gimmicks to hamstring Trump, DOGE, and anything else they can think of, and the President finally making it clear that if it continued, he would simply ignore the courts entirely.
Roberts, who is said to be wholly concerned with the reputation of the Supreme Court which he heads over all else, surely has some idea as to what the outcome of such a confrontation would be, should he permit it to occur.
I deliberately used the word “forced,” because Roberts, a consummate weasel, has somehow coopted the purportedly “conservative” Amy Coney Barrett as his wing-woman to fashion a pivot between the conservative wing of the court, and the batshit crazy progressive/communist wing, making him the balance of power between the two factions. In any serious confrontation, whatever “Bobby Barrett” decides will determine the ultimate decision. And Roberts has used this power not to faithfully serve the US Constitution, but to preserve his notion of the Court’s reputation as he thinks it should be.
Remember when he conjured out of thin air the notion that Obamacare was “a tax,” and hence constitutionally permissible, even though the Obama administration had specifically denied that it was a tax in order to avoid certain political pitfalls with Congress? Good times.
Recently, I commented at Instapundit to the effect that it was “Time for Trump to exercise the Andrew Jackson Solution.” And lo and behold, here comes this piece of satire (If only it were real):
It was all over the conservative net a couple of months back, generally without the caveat “This is satire,” probably because it was a sterling example of “Just too good to check.”
Lots of people were taken in, not just because it seemed like something Trump might do, but because MAGA would desperately love to see Trump give the big middle Trump finger to this swarm of progtard punk judges afflicting Trump and the larger MAGA project, especially including Elon Musk and DOGE. MAGA fears, not without reason, that Trump’s second term will turn into a replay of his first, with nothing actually being accomplished due to the pervasive lawfare being waged by Lilliputian lawyers against the tied-down Giant Gulliver Trump.
The problem here is that Trump is not by nature a Christ-figure turning over the tables in the temple and scourging miscreants with whips. His forte is making lucrative peace, not expensive and debilitating war. His art is the deal, not the duello.
The second problem is that Trump lacks normal leverage over the real problem, which is Roberts himself and his lifetime tenure as the Boss Hog of the nation’s judicial system. And Roberts knows - or seems to think he knows - it. So much of his influence on the endless lawfare against Trump seems to consist of repeating, if only to himself, “this is normal,” and then proceeding to try and actually make it normal via the nature of his decisions.
Hence we get claptrap like Roberts blabbing, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” The subtextual message is that Trump’s complaints about the overwhelming judicial assault currently being waged against him, unlike any in my own personal experience or the larger arena of historical knowledge (yes, I was alive and cognizant during the Nixon “third rate burglary” fiasco), and, more important, the tactics he is employing to combat it and prevent it from destroying his second term, is somehow normal, just business as usual, you know, politics. I suppose Roberts would have felt the same way if he’d been overseeing the colonists’ efforts to thwart the British monarchy and gain independence from it.
But saying it, even when the guy saying it is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, does not make it so. And you can stack all the John Marshal made-up-out-of-thin-ass-gas "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is” where the sun don’t shine, which is where he found the notion in the first place. And it still stinks today, because all courts since have interpreted it to mean that the judicial department possesses the supreme and overriding authority to say when the law is, and that such authority is at a higher level than that exercised by the purported co-equal branches of the Executive and the Congress. (We don’t care what the Obama Executive department says about the Obamacare individual mandate, we (which in the case of Roberts means “I”) say it’s a tax, and that’s that).
Roberts gets away with this sort of legerdemain (Look, we have magic law to go along with our magic money!) because nobody ever really challenges his contentions in any effective way. And he would really, really like to keep it that way.
Fighting all-out nuclear lawfare by using the rigged “normal appellate process” not only validates the judiciary’s claims to ultimate power (and if you think the judiciary does not view itself as the ultimate power in our political system, I refer you to one James Emanuel "Jeb" Boasberg, a Skull-and-Bones grandee and a long-time butt-buddy of Roberts himself, and a huge fan of the whole prospect of a permanent, unelected imperial judiciary, complete with secret FISA Star Chambers and national control of the other two branches by jumped up justices of the peace.
It took Trump saying, “Look, we’re not gonna do that. I am not facing a ‘judicial disagreement,’ I am trying to survive the unconstitutional acts of an out-of-control judicial system trying to destroy my administration and me, personally.”
The way you bring an out-of-control judiciary back under constitutional control is by impeaching ideologically corrupt judges, and jailing criminals in black robes.
This ultimate confrontation, still in the future but growing ever more likely, is not just between Roberts and Trump. It is between two huge, and hugely powerful factions, (see the Founders and the Framers on factions - they both hated and feared them, with, as we now understand full well, very good reason.
The progtard judiciary went full nuclear on Trump starting in 2016 and has never let up since. Trump, on the other hand, blew his first term out of the water by always reaching for the deal stick, never the whipping stick. So far, 100 days in, he seems to be at least groping toward deciding whether, and if so, what sort of whips to avail himself of.
Robert’s precious “judicial department” has, ever since Marshal’s successful power grab in Marbury, considered itself inviolate against any systemic threats to its authority. And why not? It is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” (And please note that “emphatically —” because it is not gratuitous. If you buy into it, what you are agreeing to is that any judicial conflicts must be waged on their territory, by their rules, with themselves as the omnipotent deciders. In other words, they rigged the game more than two hundred years ago, and they damned well intend to keep right on doing so.
And that is what, at bottom, Robert’s fervid and obsessive concern with the Supreme Court’s reputation is all about. He, more than most, understands that the foundation of the court’s power rests on the flimsy legal concrete work laid down by an equally power-hungry John Marshall. Marshall portrayed his actions in Marbury as being in defense of the Constitution, when there is not the tiniest squib of constitutional mention or justification for the sweeping powers Marshall claimed for the courts themselves.
“…emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is…” Kiss my rosy red ass. These people are not going to deal away their longstanding claims to ultimate authority, and why would they? They’ve pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes since Marshall handed down Marbury.
End game, President Trump. No deals. Impeachment and imprisonment. Cleanse the “judicial department” of its pride-besotted corruptocrats, secure in their undeserved and unconstitutional arrogance, thrilled at being the biggest and baddest crime family in the national criminal swamp.
Impeachment and/or jail. Say it with me. And in the meantime, give Roberts a “deal he can’t refuse,” to wit, turn him into a cornered rat who has to finally decide whether he is going to sanction, (once again), open systemic war against all things MAGA and Trump, or face being rendered irrelevant, impotent, and impeached, and his “beloved SCOTUS” brought down in flames.
It’s time.
Let’s go.
Your subheading “Trump goes Andrew Johnson on John Roberts” is wrong — it should be Andrew Jackson.