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A shifting selection of unofficial theme songs has long helped to define the public image of the Democratic party, from FDR's “Happy Days Are Here Again," to "High Hopes" under JFK, and no Boomer can forget Bill Clinton and Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop." Today's Democrats are angry and frustrated, so if I might be bold enough to recommend a new song, perhaps they should go with Talking Heads' 1983 smash, "Burning Down The House."
It starts, as it does so often, with the judicial system. But it hardly ends there, as you'll see.
Conservatives have long warned against judicial overreach — judges effectively legislating from the bench or bossing the chief executive around when he's acting well within his Article II constitutional authority. But we've perhaps never seen such judicial overreach as we have during Trump 47, and the administration is just two months old as of today.
PJ Media's own Lincoln Brown called it "Selling Your Soul for ‘The Greater Good’" on Wednesday and, if you missed his column when it was first published, do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.
Anyway, you'll remember Judge James Boasberg, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, as the guy who tried to order a flight filled with cartel gangsters on their way back to Venezuela to turn around midair and return to the United States to restore its precious cargo to their rightful (yet illegal!) places.
The remigration flight was ordered by the White House under the broad authority enjoyed by POTUS (and recognized in the 1948 Ludecke v. Watkins court decision) to remove aliens under the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798. Boasberg seemed not to care about the law, established precedent, or even the desirability of sending violent criminals — here illegally — back to their country of origin.
As Lincoln put it, "It is tempting to say that Boasberg suffers from TDS, and if Trump is for anything, Boasberg, and his compatriots must de facto oppose it, consequences be damned. And there may be some truth to that. There is a frightening, albeit expected, trend among the Left to set fire to the country for the greater good, no matter who dies from third-degree burns."
Burning down the house, indeed.
It isn't just Boasberg, of course. Constitutional law professor — the Instapundit himself — Glenn Reynolds described "a wide-ranging legal resistance effort, mostly organized by various left-leaning legal groups that engage in 'judge shopping,' to get anti-Trump decisions out of friendly district jurists."
Two weeks ago, Judge John J. McConnell Jr — who contributed significant financial support to Democratic campaigns before being appointed to the bench by Barack Obama — "blocked President Donald Trump’s move to reevaluate federal spending," and issued an order "requiring the administration to release billions in funds that had been temporarily halted."
Attorney General Pam Bondi told Larry Kudlow in response, “We’ve been getting some bad rulings out of liberal district court judges who think they control the entire country, but they don’t. You know, they’re issuing rulings ex parte at 1 a.m. on a Saturday trying to stop us, trying to stop everything we’re doing, trying to stop DOGE, trying to stop Secretary Bessent, secretary of Treasury."
More from the Daily Caller:
The reemergence of the judicial “resistance” reached a fever pitch, when Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York City attempted to stop Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department payment systems, and Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island threatened Trump administration officials with criminal contempt. Those rulings followed Vice President JD Vance’s post on X last Sunday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York City went so far as to forbid Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department payment systems. Not allowing the executive branch to see what the executive branch is doing is quite the flex.
The best these judges can hope for is that they'll discredit the very judiciary the Left hopes will finally put a stop to Trump. A court's legitimacy rests on its reputation, and Boasberg and company are running around their own house with a gallon of gas and a book of matches.
Or maybe there's nothing more sinister involved than simple graft. Here are a couple of facts about the Boasberg that seem to have flown under the dinosaur legacy media's radar like a sixth-generation stealth fighter:
WOW! It's not just Judge Boasberg's daughter in the non-profit game, apparently his sister Margaret and her Bain Capital husband Christopher Bierly are also big players shoveling cash into the NGO financial underground.https://t.co/xDNMmYEoe1 pic.twitter.com/0heRbzPSxR
— Crowdsource The Truth (@JG_CSTT) March 18, 2025
Sister, really?
But the point is that the Boasbergs appear to be high-flying passengers in the first-class car of the Washington Gravy Train that Trump and DOGE are working mightily to derail. That's a conflict of interest that in my humble opinion ought to require Judge Boasberg to recuse himself from anything related to the current administration. Hell, even the mere appearance of that kind of grift ought to have him tarred, feathered, and run out of the District of Columbia district court on a rail.
For its part, and despite constant complaints about Trump's "reckless" behavior, the Federalist's senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland noted on X this week that the administration has shown remarkable restraint in the face of nearly (?) unprecedented overreach. (Those are my words, not hers.)
The Trump administration, she wrote, "has faced an avalanche of unconstitutional court orders from single federal judges" and yet "Not ONCE did [they] declare 'fine, then enforce your order,'" recalling when President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said, "The Chief Justice has made his decision, now let him enforce it," after deciding to ignore the Supreme Court's decision in Worcester v. Georgia. "For every MAGA person screaming 'ignore those illegal orders,' the Trump Administration has NOT done that," Cleveland continued, "And we are talking about clearly illegal orders that infringe on his executive power."
"Trump is not being pedantic — he is being prudent," she concluded.
It looks to me like the White House is dotting its i's and crossing its t's in preparation for the inevitable Supreme Court showdown. That isn't just smart; it demonstrates far more self-control and respect for our institutions than judges like Boasberg have.
Be patient is my advice. We're only two months into Trump 47 and, if you want the changes to stick, Trump can't join the Democrats' arson brigade.
While the White House demonstrates a respectable amount of foresight, I wish I could say the same for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis noted this week, "The sabotaging of President Trump’s agenda by ‘resistance’ judges was predictable" and that “Congress has the authority to strip jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide these cases in the first place.” Why, he wondered, were there "no jurisdiction-stripping bills teed up at the onset of this Congress?”
Sad to say — and this goes for members on both sides of the aisle — but Congress is now less a place to commit serious acts of lawmaking and more of a perch for launching lucrative social media side gigs and sweetheart stock trades. If it doesn't generate engagement on X or generate a 20% return, not enough congresscritters seem to be very interested.
Remember the bumper sticker popular in the '80s and '90s suggesting that people "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty?" I always liked that one, and I seem to remember it could usually be found on the back of an older Volvo or a newer Subaru wagon driven by a kindly hippie.
That was then. Now it's "random acts of vandalism and senseless acts of poop smearing."
No, really.
BREAKING - A man from Indianapolis smears his OWN fecal matter onto a Cybertruck.
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) March 19, 2025
This is the state of the democrats.
pic.twitter.com/6a9uNqWQqh
As much fun as I have on X, social media platforms are too often used to promote Orwell-style Two Minutes Hate, except they can generate hate 24/7/365. In "1984," the hate was more performative than anything else. You had to be seen by your comrades (and the everpresent telescreens) demonstrating the proper revolutionary zeal. That's one way dictatorships maintain their control, through the illusion that if you're a dissenter, you're the only one.
The emotionally disturbed — like our poop-smearing friend or Trump's second would-be assassin — take these things too seriously and act out in antisocial or even violent ways. The Left knows this. Winding up impressional or unstable people is just one of their tools for disrupting society enough to impose leftism.
The New York Post's Eddie Scarry noticed today that "multiple Democrats have now started highlighting that Elon Musk is 'an immigrant from South Africa.' Tim Walz was among them... Definitely didn't anticipate Democrats leaning into xenophobia."
Ah, but when you're busy whipping up those Two Minutes Hate, any excuse will do.
I'm so old, I remember when Elon Musk was the toast of the Left because Tesla was going to save the planet. Now he's a neo-Nazi from the bad old apartheid South Africa. That makes me barely over two years old. Precocious, aren't I?
More to the point, who was that supposed to move? No one, really. Today's Democrats are past arguing and into tantrum-throwing. Even their presidential candidate could muster an argument more compelling than "We've never had a black female president before."
These aren't stupid people. You might wonder how they fail to recognize the long-term institutional damage Democrats are doing in pursuit of the short-term goal of stopping Trump and DOGE. But it may well be that the institutional damage is just as intentional — as important a goal — as protecting any particular program or forestalling any particular policy.
I've written here more times than I can count that anything the Left can't control, it will destroy, and if it can't be destroyed, they'll smear it. Out of power in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the Supreme Court, Democrats are in full Destroy & Smear Mode.
The courts are a legitimate tool for restraining executive power, but only when the judges lean Left and the executive leans Right. Musk transmogrified from eccentric billionaire folk hero to Literally Hitler™ for turning Twitter into a free speech platform. USAID has the right to spend your money on partisan causes without oversight or accountability. Illegal aliens can't be removed.
Institutional damage? What of it? Leftism doesn't require separation of powers, defined and limited government, or constitutionally protected individual rights. It requires, above all else, raw power and the conformity that comes with it. It seems to have always been the plan, as much as there ever was a plan, to maintain the form of a democratic constitutional republic while destroying the function.
Burning down the house isn't a problem just so long as they can rule over the ashes. But "watch out," Talking Heads warned, "you might get what you're after."
