Regardless of who you voted for in this election, we must look at the work of President Trump and judge it based on its merits. We can’t reject everything based on it being from Trump, but we can’t defend everything either. He isn’t a saint, and his actions are not above reproach.
Byron York laid out the case for the legality of Trump’s travel ban executive order, and this is fine. He made a point based on a dispassionate assessment of the facts, not a blind commitment to the creed. Trump’s challenge to a judge legislating from the bench is quite worthwhile.
But when Trump mentions a “so-called judge,” he undermines the legitimacy of the court. That’s concerning.
Sure, the judge may not have been performing the proper function of a judge. But the proper response to judicial overreach is not executive overreach.
Among those who seem to have a cultish devotion to Trump, there’s a desire for executive overreach to stop this judge. This cultic devotion even made its way into the news defending Trump’s disrespect of some judges, saying “[the best] presidents made their stands against the judiciary”.
Who are these presidents? The main examples are Presidents Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt.
I don’t know if using them to defend Trump was a sick joke, but Jackson and Roosevelt were great threats to our Constitution and the separation of powers.
Jackson refused to protect the constitutional rights of the Cherokee. The Cherokee played by our rules, and our Supreme Court supported them. The executive undermining of a Supreme Court decision was, in part, responsible for the Trail of Tears. Can this really be the guide we want to set for Trump? Someone who rejects the system of checks and balances?
Roosevelt’s New Deal threatened to change the very fabric of our country. In fact, most of our entitlement programs come from it or were inspired by it. When the Supreme Court pushed back against some of Roosevelt’s programs, he tried to pack the court. Thankfully, Congress pushed back.
There are legitimate ways for challenging other branches built into the federal government. While I don’t support Trump’s disrespect of the judiciary, I do support the power to challenge those legislating from the bench. I think it’s fine to challenge judicial overreach, and I think it’s beneficial to challenge it.
It’s not just the judiciary that’s under attack, but the entire separation of powers.
The erosion of the separation of powers is more concerning than anything else. Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau all discuss the importance of separating power, and to leave it behind is incompatible with the Constitution. It is a fundamental piece of the government and of the principles on which it was founded.
When someone defends Trump’s disrespect for the judiciary by pointing to other presidents who undermined it, it shows a cultic devotion to a man, not the Constitution. The examples set by Jackson and Roosevelt are not to be followed, but rejected.
Trump is perfectly within his rights to challenge this judge’s ruling. But in the future he needs to take the conscious steps to use the built-in challenge system.
Chris Kolbach is editor of Conservative Newsstand (a sister publication to the Washington Examiner).
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