SCOTUS Is Injuring Its Credibility More Than Journos Ever Could

Not a day seems to go by without some activist lower court judge issuing an overreaching injunction blocking part of President Trump’s agenda.

Throughout Wednesday and Thursday alone, judges across multiple venues handed down decrees barring numerous executive actions taken by the president since returning to office. From DEI to election policy, these cases are but a few of the more than 170 lawsuits Democrats and left-wing political actors have filed to sabotage Trump and the 77 million Americans who voted for him.

Despite this clear effort to destroy American democracy via a judicial coup, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) seems to have no interest in stopping it. The nation’s highest court has had ample opportunities to halt these lower court judges’ destructive antics but has repeatedly declined to do so.

The first notable instance of this cowardice came to fruition in early March. In a 5-4 decision, a majority on the court declined a request from the Trump administration to shut down a ruling from a Biden-appointed district court judge. The judge had ordered the State Department and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to disburse roughly $2 billion in foreign grants to nongovernmental groups.

Comprised of Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and the court’s Democrat appointees, the majority offered no rationale for the decision, a move that left Associate Justice Samuel Alito “stunned.”

Writing for the dissent, Alito underscored the overreaching nature of the lower court’s order and chastised the majority for its unwillingness to shut down such abusive behavior. He wrote, “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise.”

By declining to rein in the Biden-appointed judge’s outlandish behavior, the high court’s majority all but gave the green light to activist judges across the country to take similar actions on leftist-backed lawsuits filed in their respective jurisdictions. As previously noted, this has encouraged these judicial supremacists to issue blanket injunctions barring the Trump administration from implementing policies the American people voted for, thus effectively rendering the 2024 presidential election results moot.

SCOTUS’s inclination to tolerate judicial tyranny among the lower courts is perhaps unsurprising, however, given that a majority of the justices have indicated their own infatuation with overstepping the constitutional limits erected by America’s founding document.

In the dead of night on Easter weekend, without explanation, seven of the justices essentially usurped the executive branch’s authority over immigration by blocking Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan gang members. Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Alito dissented, with the latter once again penning a scathing opinion blasting the majority’s “unprecedented and legally questionable” actions.

It’s unclear exactly what game the high court’s majority is playing. Even for a wannabe politician like Chief Justice Roberts — whose primary concern seems to be protecting the judiciary’s “legitimacy” rather than interpreting the Constitution as written — the decisions to allow the lower courts to run afoul of America’s constitutional order and issue late-night orders are unlikely to sit well with the public. In fact, one could argue the high court’s antics are doing more damage to its reputation than leftists’ smear campaigns ever could.

Recall over the past few years when Democrats and their media allies ran hit pieces against many of SCOTUS’s Republican-appointed justices. While much of this manufactured psyop was directed at the high court’s most reliable originalists (Thomas and Alito), the end goal was the same — to delegitimize the body and its constitutional rulings in the eyes of the American public.

Yet, for all their bluster, the media’s smear campaign didn’t seem to have significantly affected non-leftists’ opinion of the Supreme Court. Pew Research data published in August shows that the decline in the court’s favorability in recent years has been driven almost exclusively by Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, whose views of the court turned sour following the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

But what the media couldn’t do to SCOTUS — destroying its credibility among Americans — the high court is now doing to itself. By refusing to rein in the lower courts’ lawlessness, the justices have authorized a judicial coup that is stymying the will of the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump.

The longer a majority on the high court allows this circus to continue, the more faith citizens will lose in its ability to operate as a capable branch of government.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood