Washington did not freeze at Valley Forge, nor did Lincoln bleed the Union at Gettysburg, so that two and a half centuries later, federal judges could rewrite American foreign policy from a bench in Boston. Yet here we are: unelected district court judges issuing orders with global repercussions, shackling the executive branch, endangering diplomacy, and destabilizing entire regions.
The case of D.V.D. v. DHS, now immortalized in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s sworn declaration, is the most vivid and alarming example yet. A single judge, Brian E. Murphy, appointed by President Joe Biden, has upended delicate international arrangements, disrupted military coordination in a counter-terrorism hotspot, and jeopardized humanitarian efforts across the Horn of Africa, all with a flourish of his gavel.
This is not justice, it is judicial imperialism. And if it is not stopped, it will unravel the fabric of constitutional government.
Let us begin with the basics. The Constitution vests foreign policy authority in the executive branch. Article II is unambiguous. The President “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers,” and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, “make Treaties.” In practice, the president, through the Secretary of State, negotiates with foreign powers, calibrates the tone and tenor of our international presence, and oversees the strategic deployment of both soft power and military muscle.
The judiciary, by contrast, was never intended to function as a foreign policy apparatus. The Federalist Papers make this clear. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse.” Its power “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” Yet what we see today is the inverse: a judiciary with the will of a legislature and the force of an executive.
Consider the chaos Judge Murphy has sown. Secretary Rubio’s declaration outlines how the judge’s May 20 injunction halted the removal of eight foreign nationals, including convicted felons, who were en route to South Sudan, rerouting them into Djibouti instead. This was not a harmless detour. It required US diplomats to scramble and re-explain our shifting commitments to a key regional partner. It delayed counter-terrorism operations headquartered at the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. It chilled humanitarian coordination efforts in famine-stricken zones. It even postponed a major energy deal in Libya, costing American enterprise and reducing our leverage in a country already teetering on civil war.
What gives one man sitting in a courthouse on the East Coast the authority to rewrite US policy in Tripoli, Juba, and Djibouti? What constitutional principle justifies such reach?
None. But the vehicle of this judicial arrogance is the nationwide injunction, a tool so radical, so constitutionally suspect, and so corrosive to governance that even liberal legal scholars have begun to question its proliferation. Justice Clarence Thomas, prescient as ever, warned in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that nationwide injunctions “have a tendency to encourage forum shopping, politicize the judiciary, and deprive other courts of the ability to weigh in on legal questions.”
Indeed, if one sympathetic judge can block an executive action across all 50 states, then the presidency is no longer unitary, it is hostage. Foreign leaders are not engaging with the United States government, but with whichever district judge last issued a ruling. Our diplomacy becomes erratic, our word less reliable, our authority diluted.
This distortion of power is not theoretical. It is real, and it is recurring. Remember when a district court blocked President Trump’s ban on travel from terrorism-prone countries in 2017? That nationwide injunction, issued by Judge James Robart in Washington, not only overruled the president’s national security judgment but also forced foreign governments to reevaluate their cooperation with US intelligence, uncertain if the courts or the White House were truly in charge.
The incentive structure is equally perverse. Activist groups now scour the country for friendly judges, ideological allies with a record of lawfare activism, then file lawsuits not to win narrow relief for plaintiffs, but to engineer sweeping political victories that Congress never authorized and voters never endorsed. These are not lawsuits, they are stealth coups.
One need not be a strict textualist to grasp the danger here. Imagine if a single judge could halt a military deployment, override a treaty, or block a Secretary of State from evacuating embassy personnel. We are sliding into precisely that paradigm. The judiciary, far from checking the executive, is usurping its powers outright. The result is paralysis, confusion, and an erosion of the separation of powers upon which our constitutional order depends.
The problem is compounded when the judiciary aligns itself with globalist NGOs and open-borders ideologues. In D.V.D., the class members whose deportations were halted include not just migrants with questionable asylum claims, but convicted criminals. By granting them judicial sanctuary, the court effectively overrides the State Department’s security assessments, replacing sovereign discretion with ideological dogma. Is the court prepared to vet these individuals itself? Is Judge Murphy better informed on regional conflicts in the Horn of Africa than the National Security Council? Or is this just another example of a liberal judge indulging his priors at the expense of the republic?
The stakes are high. With the return of President Trump to office and the reshaping of America’s global posture, the courts must not become a backdoor veto. We are witnessing a transition away from the apologetic diplomacy of the Obama-Biden years toward a policy of strength, reciprocity, and unapologetic national interest. That pivot cannot be sabotaged by judges still committed to the prior regime.
What is to be done? First, the Supreme Court must act on the opportunity already before it. The Court has heard oral arguments in a pending case involving birthright citizenship that includes critical questions about the legitimacy and scope of nationwide injunctions. All that remains is a decision. The Court should use this case to strike down the practice as inconsistent with Article III limitations on judicial power. Such rulings should be confined to the parties before the court, not the entire country. Injunctions should bind defendants only to the extent necessary to provide relief to plaintiffs, not to reshape executive policy for 330 million Americans.
Second, Congress should act. A statute should clarify that nationwide injunctions exceed the judicial power under the Constitution. This would restore balance, eliminate forum shopping, and return the courts to their proper role: arbiters of disputes, not architects of foreign policy.
Finally, the executive must resist. The State Department and DHS should not preemptively concede to every nationwide injunction as a fait accompli. Where there is ambiguity or statutory discretion, the administration should assert its prerogatives. The president is elected. The judge is not. Accountability matters.
History offers little comfort to those who allow unelected tribunals to dictate the terms of sovereignty. Empires have collapsed under the weight of judicial excess. Rome, after all, did not fall to barbarians alone, but to internal legal sclerosis and a metastasized bureaucracy. If we do not rein in our courts, we will cede our republic to their whims.
Let us end this judicial coup before it becomes a permanent regime.
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So who and when will the corrupt democrat party federal judges be stopped? All I keep seeing is case after case of judicial intervention stopping Trump and his administrative team from performing their constitutional duties and someone saying, “if someone doesn’t do something”. Who is someone and something. This is a clear case of the judicial usurping presidential powers. Trump had better have an entire team of constitutional lawyers attacking this problem before his term is up and he has accomplished nothing because none of his E.O.’s have been codified and federal judges are running the country,.
Not much of a choice. Either allow the judicial branch to also become the executive branch or the executive branch could blow them off until the supreme court or congress does something right for a change and reigns these executive branch wannabees in. There are actually laws out there that have been and are being legislated from the bench. “With respect to the lower federal courts, the constitutional authorization for Congress to from time to time ordain and establish inferior courts may imply that Congress can alter the system it establishes, including by eliminating exiting federal courts.3 Moreover, having left to Congress the decision whether to establish lower federal courts, it would be anomalous for the Constitution to provide that, once a court was established, Congress could never eliminate it. Historical practice suggests that Congress may abolish lower federal courts, though the Constitution may limit its ability to unseat current federal judges in doing so.” If those judges no longer have a court to be over (by the legislative branch abolishing them), it would follow they would either retire or find another job. And this action would all be because the Congress or the the Supreme Court refuse to bridal those making rulings out of their jurisdictions or out of their job descriptions to make a ruling for. Of course, if the courts are abolished, this would automatically increase the workload of the supreme court since they would have to take over the cases for those abolished courts. No more weekends or vacations for them!
THIS IS WHY I SAY CORRUPTION GOES ALL TH WAY TO SO-CALLED “JUSTICE” BC IF SCOTUS CARED ABOUT OUR CONSTITUTION HE WOULD PUT A STOP TO THIS EFFORT OF TH LEFT TO DESTROY AMERICA! AM I WRONG ? NO!
Very plainly none of the judiciaries business.
”District”” Courts have ZERO authority over the Executive branch actions.
Over 120 days in and Democrats and RINO’s in Congress are ignoring this travesty of justice!
The over 670 “”District”” Courts are NOT in the US Constitution.
They’re created …by Congress!
When will the Feral Marxist “”District”” Courts be …
ELIMINATED …by Congress?
They have that power, where is it?
Congress, Democrats and RINO’s, are not codifying Trump’s MAGA agenda and Executive Orders into law! They are slow walking this!
Judges are so concerned about “due process”. Illegals were not concerned with due process when they crossed the border. They broke the law and need to be deported immediately.
Don’t count on the Supreme Court. Justice Barrett has been so intimidated and frightened for her family’s safety that she is increasingly siding with the Left, and Chief Justice Roberts has long maintained a balancing act to protect the Court, and as a George Bush Republican, he doesn’t care for President Trump or his agenda.