The Dictatorship
Chief Justice John Roberts stood up to Trump’s attacks on judiciary — and not a moment too soon
President Donald Trump on Tuesday called the federal judge adjudicating a challenge to recent deportation orders a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator” and called for his impeachment. In response to this and other, similar attacks on judges, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement condemning such attacks.
As the chief justice explained in his statement, “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.”
This could be a signal that Roberts might not be willing to rule with the Trump administration when it comes to its many forays into seemingly unconstitutional territory. And not a moment too soon.
Like most chief justices who have preceded him, Roberts tends to let his judicial opinions deliver his messages. This time, as the Trump administration’s attacks on the courts are growing, we face the likelihood of seeing federal officials defy court orders in the very near future (if they haven’t done so already). That’s why the chief justice’s statements couldn’t come at a better (or more perilous) time for the rule of law, which seems constantly under threat.
Federal judges, like many other federal officials, are subject to removal from their otherwise lifetime appointments through impeachment. Removal of federal judges through impeachment is very rare, however. It has happened only five times over the last 100 years and typically for things like outright corruption. The purpose behind the lifetime appointment of federal judges and the high bar of impeachment is, as Alexander Hamilton explained, to insulate judges from the political winds and outside pressure.
Indeed, Hamilton argued in Federalist 78 that not just independence, but also “complete independence of the courts” was “peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution,” one in which other branches were constrained by the Constitution and the courts had to help enforce those constraints.
The recent attacks on judges fly in the face of this “complete independence.”
Since the start of Trump’s second administration, calls for impeachment have emanated from members of Congress, Elon Musk and now from the president himself. What is more, we seem to be headed for a significant constitutional crisis over whether the Trump administration is willing to defy court orders.
This could be a signal that Roberts might not be willing to rule with the Trump administration when it comes to its many forays into seemingly unconstitutional territory.
Almost at the same time that the chief justice was issuing his statement, in a courthouse down the street, lawyers for the federal government were trying to defend the actions of the administration over the weekend, when it seemed they might have ignored a direct order of another judge, this one from James Boasberg, the chief judge of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. This is the same judge Trump called a “radical left lunatic,” who just happened to have been confirmed by the Senate in a 96-0 vote in 2011.
In that case, Judge Boasberg had directed the government to stop its deportation of hundreds of migrants without due process of law, including directing the government to turn any planes around that might contain such migrants and might have already taken off.
Despite some defiant statements over the last few days that the court had no power to issue such orders or that the government didn’t have to obey them, lawyers were in court Tuesday afternoon trying to explain that the actions of the federal government weren’t actually in contravention of the court’s order. Their position in court has been very different from the bold statements from several Trump officials, made to the media, that the administration could simply flout the court’s directives.
While it is obviously critical for the chief justice to speak up against unconscionable attacks on judges because they might disagree with the Trump administration over the law — which is all that the judges who have been attacked so far have done — the Roberts defense could signal that he may serve as a bulwark on the court against the more extreme positions of the Trump administration more generally and the arguments raised by its lawyers.
When an emergency application came before the Supreme Court over cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, at first Roberts issued an administrative stay of a lower court order to give the entire court a chance to consider the Trump administration’s request to enable it to continue to devastate this agency. That gave some court watchers pause, and many expressed concerns that the Trump administration would be unleashed to take action against not just USAID but also other government agencies.
Several days later, though, the entire court ruled, with Roberts in the majority (with Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices), to allow the lower court’s order protecting USAID to take effect once again.
During his confirmation hearing in 2005, Roberts famously said his job was to “call balls and strikes,” like an umpire in a baseball game, and not to set the strike zone. Perhaps he realizes now that he has to do more than sit by impassively passing judgment, however. Perhaps he is starting to understand that without a sustained, vocal and affirmative defense of the judiciary, he might find that there might be little left to adjudicate in the event the branch whose job it is to “say what the law is,” as former Chief Justice John Marshall once said, finds itself hobbled and silenced by such overt threats to the rule of law.
Ray Brescia
Ray Brescia is a professor of law at Albany Law School and author of the forthcoming book “The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Warsh was confirmed with 54 votes: “The Senate voted to install Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, handing the millionaire Trump ally the reins of America’s monetary policy even as he faced skepticism over his ability to remain independent of presidential influence.”
* When Barack Obama visited China in 2009, he was greeted by Xi Jinping himself. Nearly two decades later: “President Trump arrived Wednesday night in Beijing, where he was welcomed by a military band, an honor guard, hundreds of Chinese youth waving flags and China’s vice president, Han Zheng. Such carefully designed receptions for foreign leaders telegraph Beijing’s attitude toward these visits. … This time, they sent someone who is high-level but whose position is mostly that of a figurehead — which could be a way to send a layered message.”
* All the news on inflation is bad: “Wholesale prices in April posted their highest annual increase in more than three years, signaling more nettlesome inflation as pipeline costs intensify. The producer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.4% for the month, much higher than the 0.5% Dow Jones consensus forecast and the upwardly revised 0.7% March increase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. This was the largest monthly gain since March 2022.”
* The bar is low, but this represents a little progress: “Republican divisions over the Iran war deepened on Wednesday as three GOP senators voted with Democrats to curtail the conflict, signaling greater headwinds for President Donald Trump as he seeks to stem economic impacts that have damaged the party’s political standing. While the Democratic-led measure failed, it was the closest a war powers vote came to advancing in the Senate in the seven attempts since the war began as GOP concerns slowly grow over the path forward.”
* ICE’s newest chief: “The Department of Homeland Security has selected David Venturella, a former private prison executive, to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of President Donald Trump’s controversial effort to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Venturella, who has served as a senior ICE adviser since February 2025, will be named acting director following the departure of Todd M. Lyons, DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement Tuesday.”
* In related news: “Ten thousand losses. That’s the Trump administration’s track record in court as federal judges grapple with the way ICE agents have swept through major U.S. cities and detained thousands of people in support of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.”
* It’s always interesting to me when discharge petitions work: “A bipartisan effort to force a vote on legislation sending fresh American security aid to Ukraine has amassed the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote, the latest in a series of instances of rank-and-file lawmakers wresting control of the chamber’s agenda from Republican leaders.”
See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
Ku Klux Klan denialism is in vogue for the MAGA movement these days.
As the GOP uses Jim Crow-like racial profiling and voter suppression tactics such as gerrymanderingsome Republicans are engaged in a campaign of obfuscation and misinformation to downplay allegations of racism.
And it increasingly seems that some of President Donald Trump’s supporters want to use falsehoods about the KKK to advance their goals.
Last week’s fact-free diatribe from Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., about the KKK supposedly being a leftist organization is a prime example. As I recently wroteRepublicans have used the Justice Department’s dubious indictment of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center to falsely portray racist extremism, which the SPLC tracks and investigates, as either nonexistent or a liberal contrivance. This tactic mirrors rhetoric deployed by conservatives who sought to deny the threat of the KKK during its rise, or even its mere existence.
The aforementioned falsehoods about the SPLC were the subject of an exchange Hageman had with conservative podcaster Winston Marshall in which she made the demonstrably false claim that the KKK, Nazis and the Aryan Nation are “far-left organizations” and “always have been.”
Hageman told Marshall:
The Aryan Nation, the Nazis and the KKK are not far-right organizations. Those are far-left organizations, and they always have been. The KKK was created and started by the Democrats in the United States to prevent Blacks from being able to participate in the political arena, if you will. So I’m going to say they’ve never been associated with the right; they’ve always been associated with the left.
This is the kind of derangement that would make a reputable historian weep.
And you can see in Hageman’s comments why speaking of politics in directional terms (i.e., “right” vs. “left”) is flawed. The KKK has never been liberal and essentially has always been a conservative group of Christian white supremacists. Some Republicans — particularly Black supporters of Trump’s, as we have seen lately — like to portray Democrats as the party of the KKK because at the time of the organization’s rise, the white Christian conservatives most vehemently opposed to Black civil rights called themselves Democrats.
But in reality, the KKK didn’t belong to any particular party, and the Democratic Party didn’t create it. People suggesting otherwise are most likely trying to score cheap political points.
As historian Elaine Frantz explained in a 2011 essay titled “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse,” the conspiracy to turn a blind eye to the KKK and its racist terrorism was a bipartisan project:
While Klansmen and their Democratic political allies deliberately spread doubt about Klan reports, they could not have succeeded as thoroughly as they did without the substantial, if intermittent, collaboration of their Republican opponents.
Hageman and some of her fellow Trump supporters apparently don’t want Republicans to be associated with racists, but pseudointellectual diatribes on American history are not the way to avoid that. Instead, I’d suggest not using phrases popularized by the KKK decades ago, such as “America First,” and refraining from celebrating former klan leaders, like Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And, of course, ceasing the GOP’s demonstrable and devastating political crusade against Black people would go a long way.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
The Trump administration allegedly paid off FBI agents fired or punished for misconduct, including one who impeded a probe into a white nationalist group and another agent who appeared at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Those are the bombshell claims at the heart of a new probe Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin opened Tuesday into the Justice Department, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Raskin “launched an investigation into a scheme inside the Department of Justice (DOJ) to direct millions of taxpayer dollars to FBI agents fired for serious misconduct, many of whom are aligned with Donald Trump,” according to a press release announcing the probe.
Raskin’s letter to Blanche demands details on the alleged payouts, which Raskin said were negotiated by Empower Oversight, a well-funded conservative activist group linked to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley that has focused on MAGA conspiracy theories under the guise of defending “whistleblowers.”
Raskin cites as an example an FBI agent who allegedly received a payout and reinstatement at the FBI after being removed for refusing to participate in a probe of the white supremacist group Patriot Front, which has been involved in acts of violence and intimidation toward Black people and immigrants. Raskin said this occurred despite revelations that the agent also “engaged in commercial sex overseas while on an official FBI assignment—unequivocal grounds for security clearance revocation and dismissal from the FBI.” The letter notes the agent was reinstated under Patel.
This claim seems particularly noteworthy in light of the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Centerwhich investigates racist extremism and has even previously assisted the DOJ in such investigations. The SPLC is seemingly being targeted for purported fraud in connection with its work against white supremacist groups. Meanwhile, Raskin’s allegation is that the Justice Department rewarded someone for refusing to investigate white supremacy.
Raskin’s list of alleged payouts overseen by Blanche or Patel includes an agent who was reinstated and given more than $100,000 by the department after a court declined to reinstate him after he leaked details of a probe into the far-right group Project Veritas to the media. The representative also references an agent who was reinstated and given his security clearance back after facing punishment over documents, including photos and video, that showed him in a restricted area during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol back in 2021.
“There are many more examples of these indefensible and lawless payments,” Raskin’s letter to Blanche claims.
The letter demands a list of all FBI or DOJ employees who have received settlements or back pay after being fired or disciplined for alleged misconduct, and all documents pertaining to the negotiations.
Raskin lays out the picture of a lawless regime that prioritizes loyalty to the president — the first to be convicted of a felony — and subservience to his political agenda over seemingly all else. If the allegations are accurate, it’s a disturbing development, but arguably a predictable one.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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