Legal Expert Jonathan Turley Says Courts Are ‘Intruding’ on Trump’s Authority in a Way That ‘Can’t Stand’

Agents of the federal government destroyed the U.S. Constitution a long time ago. Today, only a shell of that document’s substance remains, and its spirit has almost entirely vanished.

Thus, President Donald Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X and head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, must defeat the Democrat-dominated establishment, including federal judges who have usurped power not granted to them by the Constitution, in order to restore some semblance of constitutional self-government in the United States.

In an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday, legal scholar Jonathan Turley insisted that the recent phenomenon of federal judges “intruding” on the president’s constitutional authority “can’t stand.”

The fascinating interview covered three major issues in less than four minutes.

First, Kilmeade asked about a judge’s decision to freeze Trump’s buyout offer for federal employees.

“I think that Trump is on very solid ground with the buyout,” Turley replied. “I’m still a bit baffled by what the court is doing here.”

The legal expert then correctly explained that those buyout offers fall under the president’s Article II authority.

“I’m not, even today, certain what the constitutional problem is,” Turley said.

Indeed, for no such problem exists. Anyone with a 5th-grade level of constitutional knowledge understands that the president controls the executive branch.

Next, Kilmeade asked about DOGE having access to data from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Turley replied that while courts conceivably could address privacy-related issues, this particular federal judge went far beyond the court’s authority in denying Trump administration officials, including actual Treasury employees, access to said data.

“But I think the court really got ahead of its skis here,” Turley said. “It went way too far in shutting down Treasury officials from looking at this material.”

“I think that ultimately that can’t stand,” he added.

Finally, Kilmeade asked about a judge’s decision to pause Trump’s mass layoffs of employees at the sinister United States Agency for International Development, a CIA- and State Department-adjacent organization that has funded nefarious projects abroad and at home.

Turley responded with a useful metaphor involving Congress, the president, and naval defense spending.

“See, that’s another problem with how these cases are constructed,” the legal expert said. “You know, Congress can make decisions. They’re the ones who buy ships, but it is the president that decides who’s going to take the ship out and the crew. He could reduce the number of crew members.”

“I think that the court is really intruding significantly into the president’s authority,” he added moments later.

Readers may view the entire interview in the YouTube video below.

The key point, of course, involves restoring the Constitution. And that requires addressing the founding document from two crucial perspectives.

First, we must understand proper boundaries, or what every American schoolchild once knew as the separation of powers.

In short, the Founders left an unambiguous record of their vision for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Members of each branch had the exclusive right to determine for themselves the extent of their own constitutional powers.

Tellingly, for instance, when Congress demanded that President George Washington’s administration turn over documents pertaining to negotiations that preceded the wildly unpopular 1794 Jay Treaty, Washington refused, citing his constitutional authority under Article II.

Meanwhile, no one suggested that the Supreme Court should settle the dispute by interpreting the Constitution for everyone else.

That changed in 1803, when Chief Justice John Marshall invented the concept of judicial review in the famous Marbury v. Madison case, an opinion adored by law-school graduates who worship their judges but one properly reviled by everyone who loves constitutional self-government.

Sixteen years later, in fact, former President Thomas Jefferson still did not take judicial review seriously.

“[I]f this opinion be sound, then indeed is our constitution a compleat felo de se [felon against itself]. [F]or intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independant, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others; and to that one too which is unelected by, and independent of, the nation,” Jefferson wrote in 1819.

In other words, Washington and Jefferson understood the Constitution far better than today’s federal judges.

The second crucial perspective involves the following truth: The Constitution and the deep state cannot coexist.

Thus, when Trump finally asserts his proper constitutional authority, which, in my view, he must do by publicly denying the power of the courts to infringe on that authority, he must give Musk all the support necessary to finish the job of destroying the deep state once and for all.

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