Federal judges crave the spotlight

In the great injunction sweepstakes that have followed Donald Trump’s second administration like a shadow, we have seen district court judges with a hankering for executive power attempt to play president in more than a hundred cases from immigration and tariffs to funding various executive branch agencies, so-called trans-rights, DEI and climate change.

Some of these injunctions and temporary restraining orders are still pending. Many, perhaps most, have been resolved by the Supreme Court in ways that favor the Trump administration, not always categorically but usually by affirming the broad scope of executive power envisioned by Article II of the Constitution. “The executive Power,” quoth that magisterial document, “shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” “A president,” mind you, a single one. Not a president and hundreds of district court judges.

The rousing start to Article II of the Constitution is neatly put, isn’t it? But those judges took it as a challenge. Trump is an affront to what every right-thinking, i.e., left-leaning, person believes. He wants to make America more prosperous, freer and more secure than it has become in the hands of Democrats and other disciples of hegemonic bureaucracy.

He moved quickly to secure the border.  Can you believe it? He is deporting scads of people who are here illegally. Outrageous. He outlawed the racist practice of DEI throughout the federal government and made federal funds contingent upon ending the scam. Horrible. He thinks that the military should be an institution specializing in fighting wars, not promoting “social justice.” Clearly he must be stopped.

Like many pro-Trump commentators, I have weighed in early and often on this legal-political charade. It is a legal charade because what we have witnessed since Trump took office again in January 2025 has been a mind-boggling misuse and hypertrophy of judicial power. Whoever would have thought that a lowly district court judge (there are some 700 of them) would successfully arrogate to himself the authority to tell the President what executive agencies he should pay for and which he should close?

It is a political charade, or worse, because what we are witnessing is the triumph of partisan passions uber alles. In case after case, judges ruled to stymie the executive branch for one main reason: because it is overseen by President Trump.

Nevertheless, until recently, most of the cases brought had a certain weight or specific gravity. It matters, after all, whether the border is sealed, whether DEI is allowed to trump merit, whether criminal aliens are allowed to roam the streets, whether fantasies of a climate emergency are allowed to choke off the robust exploitation of our national energy resources. In many instances, the matters at hand are important. It’s just that judges think that they, having correct (i.e., politically correct) beliefs, are therefore empowered to decide how public policy should proceed. It is they who decide what happens, not this strange bumpkin from Queens who somehow bamboozled the voting public into shoehorning him into the White House.

Clearly, there is a lot of injunction envy going around official judicial circles these days, especially in the deep blue redoubts that specialize in that species of hubristic bullying. Is there a faster way to get your name and your mug plastered across the news sites? That, anyway, would seem to explain Dabney L. Friedrich, a district court judge for Washington, DC. I try to wheel out Karl Marx’s one certified amusing mot at least once a year. It is time. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx cites Hegel’s observation that great figures and events tend to occur twice. He forgot to add, says Marx, that they appear first as tragedy, then as farce.

It matters whether we have a secure southern border. It is important that the Department of Government Efficiency be allowed to help curb spending and thereby make a dent in our unsustainable federal debt (currently an eye-watering$37 trillion). But how about power washing, repointing and painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the sprawling excrescence just west of the White House? Mark Twain called the 1888 structure the “ugliest building in America.” Eisenhower didn’t much like the eponymous building either. But it is home to some 1,500 federal worker bees, including the Vice-President.

The complex, looming building, designed by Alfred B. Mullett in a sort of super-sized Second Empire style, sits like a giant gray toad next to the White House. On November 12, Trump told Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham that he wanted to spruce up the grimy behemoth and paint it white (no, not gold, as some were saying).

Not so fast, said Judge Friedrich. The preservationist lobby prompted her to enjoin the administration from doing anything in the way of architectural ablutions at least until the end of the year. The administration agreed. But the headlines have been hilarious. “Federal Judge Dabney L. Friedrich has now ordered Trump not to power wash the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.”

Oh dear. What will they think to prohibit next? “Federal Judge Makeme A. Offer prohibits Trump from playing golf.” “Federal Judge Whack A. Mole orders Trump never to use gold leaf again.” The Entertainment Committee, as Bill Buckley liked to say, never sleeps.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.