March 19: Trump vs. the Judges
More bombs on Houthis; Trump's deadline to Khamenei; The JFK files
The Big Story
The conflict—feud? standoff?—between the Donald Trump administration and the federal judiciary is heating up.
The biggest headlines have come from the dispute over the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. On Saturday, as we noted earlier this week, a federal district judge, James Boasberg, ordered the Trump administration to turn around two deportation flights bound for El Salvador, which the administration ignored, arguing variously that the president’s deportation powers are “non-justiciable” (which is not historically true) and that the administration had in fact complied with Boasberg’s written order, just not with a broader oral order that would have required them to turn around planes that had already left the United States.
Boasberg was unable to prevent the flights, but that hasn’t saved him from rhetorical fusillades from the president and his allies—Trump wrote in a Tuesday Truth Social post that Boasberg was a “Radical Left Lunatic” who ought to be “IMPEACHED.” That in turn prompted a statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said Tuesday that “for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
That’s led to plenty of speculation about an impending judicial crisis, though the president was more circumspect in an interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday:
Ingraham: Going forward, would you defy a court order?
Donald Trump: No, you can’t do that. However, we have bad judges … At a certain point you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.
It’s not just one “rogue judge,” however. Here are just a few of the administration’s adverse court orders since the end of last week:
On Friday, a federal judge instructed the administration not to “deport” Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University Medical School professor denied reentry after attending Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Lebanon, without advance notice to the court.
On Tuesday, a judge ruled that the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development had violated the Constitution’s appointments clause—Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has not been confirmed by the Senate—and infringed on Congress’ authority over the agency. The judge ordered the administration to reinstate fired USAID employees.
On Tuesday, a judge blocked the administration’s effort to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military on the grounds that it represented unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of sex. Judges have also blocked Trump’s attempts to pull federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-transition care to minors and to transfer male-to-female transgender inmates to women’s prisons.
Also on Tuesday, a judge enjoined the Environmental Protection Agency from seeking to terminate billions of dollars in grants to progressive climate nonprofits, which were approved during the lame-duck period of the Biden presidency.
Perhaps that’s just the “rule of law” at work, but as Benjamin Weingarten notes in an article for Real Clear Investigations, federal judges have historically taken a “shoot first, aim later” approach to Trump when it comes to tying his initiatives up in litigation. According to a 2024 study in the Harvard Law Review, just over half of all nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges for the entire 61-year period from 1963 to 2024, and 67% of all injunctions since 2001, were issued against the first Trump administration. From 2017 to 2021, there were 64 nationwide injunctions against administration policies, compared to only 32 in the 20 years of the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden presidencies. As Eric Teetsel notes on X, that number doesn’t include the 15 nationwide injunctions imposed by district judges in February 2025—more than during the entire Bush presidency.
Trump, Elon Musk, and others have all floated the possibility of impeaching judges, and Republican members of the House have already introduced articles of impeachment against three: John Bates, who ordered federal health agencies to restore gender-identity web pages removed under one of the president’s executive orders; Paul Engelmayer, who prevented DOGE employees from accessing payment systems at the Treasury Department; and Amir Ali, who issued the temporary restraining order blocking the State Department’s pause on foreign aid.
Judicial impeachment, as Weingarten notes, is an extreme remedy, and has traditionally only been pursued in cases of flagrant corruption, which means that these efforts are likely little more than bluster—for now. But the Trump administration suspects, with some justification, that the web of injunctions represents a special type of lawfare applied only to Trump, whose ultimate purpose is to deny him policy victories until the Democrats have a chance to recapture one or both houses of Congress. That’s not a sustainable arrangement, and things that can’t go on forever, don’t.
The Rest
→The United States launched new airstrikes against the Houthis on Wednesday, including on the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. We haven’t seen a reliable damage assessment yet, but President Trump is apparently not satisfied with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continued support for the Houthis, which he made clear in a post:
→Are the strikes on Yemen actually about … China? That’s the theory of Burcu Ozcelik, writing in The National Interest:
The administration has a broader geopolitical agenda—one that includes countering China’s economic leverage, particularly Beijing’s reliance on Iranian oil. By targeting the Houthis, the United States is not only safeguarding vital shipping lanes but also exerting pressure on the Iran-China energy nexus, a key component of Beijing’s strategic posture in the region.
As Ozcelik notes, China, Russia, and Iran (plus Iran’s proxies) function in certain respects as one geopolitical unit—China buys about 90% of Iran’s oil exports, and it may in turn be providing the Houthis with covert financial and even military support in the form of weapons components. As Ozcelik notes, the U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Houthi operatives based in China for “facilitating weapons transfers and dual-use components into Yemen,” and last October, the Treasury sanctioned several Chinese companies for their role in an Iranian-Houthi arms smuggling operation.
→Trump’s letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei included a “two-month deadline” to reach a new nuclear deal, Barak Ravid reports in Axios. According to “one U.S. official and two sources,” the “tough” letter included proposals for new negotiations to be completed within two months (though it’s unclear when the clock starts), as well as threats of consequences should the Iranians refuse to comply. Khamenei has referred to Trump’s offer as a “deception,” but, according to Axios, “Iran’s foreign ministry said in a briefing with reporters earlier this week that Trump's letter is still being studied and Iran's response is being drafted.” The problem with negotiating with the Iranians is always that they will attempt to drag things out indefinitely to buy themselves breathing space; the deadline is, at the very least, a positive sign that the White House doesn’t want to get drawn into that particular trap.
→On Tuesday, the Trump administration released around 30,000 pages of classified “JFK files,” after promising earlier in the week that the files would eventually be declassified in full. If you were hoping for a smoking gun that, say, Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy to become president and continue escalation in Vietnam (director Oliver Stone’s theory), or that rogue elements of the deep state contracted with Cuban exiles to frame Fidel Castro for what they expected would be a failed attempt, and thus force a U.S. invasion of Cuba (novelist Don DeLillo’s theory), then you’re out of luck. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the released files appear to have been classified in order to conceal clandestine operations (for instance, the existence of a CIA station in India) or to protect foreign governments from embarrassment (one document shows former Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, publicly a critic of U.S. meddling in Cuba, privately applauding Washington’s efforts to overthrow Castro). There’s nothing that we’ve seen—yet—that would meaningfully prove or disprove the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or … whatever your favorite theory happens to be.
→Quote of the Day:
When they talked about the Trump Peace Plan, the Trump administration wanted to get both Benny Gantz, the opposition head, and Netanyhu behind it before it unveiled the plan … This [question of consensus in Israel] is something that [the White House] does care about. Trump himself, in the White House a couple weeks ago meeting hostages that were recently released, asked what the Israeli public thinks about a deal. I mention all this about consensus, because I think it will be something important that Trump takes into consideration when he decides whether or not to back the government’s approach right now to resume fighting.
That’s The Times of Israel’s Washington correspondent, Emmanuel Fabian, speaking on The Times of Israel Daily Briefing podcast this morning about Trump’s attitude toward Israel’s recent resumption of military operations in Gaza. We can consider this as one among many theories of what’s driving the president’s decision-making on Gaza, but we mention it because … there’s not exactly a lot of consensus in Israel right now. Opinion polling suggests that a majority of Israelis oppose a return to the war, Wednesday saw protests from both the Haredim and liberal opponents of the Netanyahu government, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who appears to be trying to position himself as the leader of the “anybody-but-Bibi camp,” said Wednesday that the prime minister’s office had potentially committed treason in the so-called Qatargate scandal.
→Image of the Day:
That’s from a report in the Financial Times analyzing years of Gallup polling data on the attitudes of young Americans. Looking at cross-country comparisons, the FT found that across multiple measures, such as “confidence in the national government” and “dissatisfied with freedom in your life,” young people in the United States consistently ranked alongside young people in Greece and Spain—perhaps the two worst economic basket cases in Europe—as the most dissatisfied people in the developed world.
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What was Roberts doing as the lower Federal courts descended into insanity? A little stewardship would have gone a long way. Avoidance of clear, well-supported decisions is usually his calling card.
A Republican Congress can and should pass a statute limiting severely the powers of federal courts to grant nationwide injunctions.