Trump Allies Start Bullying Judges After Adverse Rulings (1)

Top allies of President Donald Trump are attacking federal judges online, as many of the new administration’s policies have been initially blocked in court.

Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and Sen. Tom Cotton’s criticisms stopped short of saying the administration should defy court rulings, although several conservative figures have since done so in social media posts.

Adding to the tension between the branches is a Monday ruling by Chief US District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. in Rhode Island, who said that the Trump administration wasn’t complying with his prior decision mandating officials to restore federal funds that were earlier frozen.

The potential showdown between the Trump administration and federal courts, whose power comes from their perceived legitimacy, comes at a perilous moment as support for institutions like the Supreme Court has eroded.

“If the view is that courts are not only part of our political system, that they are part of ordinary politics, that’s a very dangerous view because it makes the rule of law essentially impossible,” said Stephen Burbank, a law professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’d be very concerned about that.”

Musk, Vance, and Cotton sharply criticized the judiciary in the wake of the late Feb. 8 ruling from US District Judge Paul Engelmayer. That decision blocked Musk’s efficiency team from accessing Treasury Department information.

Musk said that “it’s time” for Congress to start impeaching judges, and that “the worst” 1% of appointed judges should be fired annually.

Vance said that judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” analogizing it to a judge trying to tell a military general or attorney general how to exercise their powers. And Cotton referred to Engelmayer, an appointee of Barack Obama, by name in calling the ruling “outrageous.”

“This outlaw should be reversed immediately and Engelmayer should be forbidden by higher courts from ever hearing another case against the Trump admin,” Cotton wrote on X, the Musk-owned platform previously known as Twitter.

Legal experts said that federal judges — who have life tenure and can only be removed through impeachment, resignation, retirement, or death — won’t be intimidated against issuing fair rulings or as they oversee the dozens of high-profile lawsuits that have been filed against Trump administration actions so far.

Burbank said that if administration officials were to fail to comply with a court ruling, a federal judge could hold them in contempt.

Former federal judge Paul Grimm said the idea of ignoring court rulings is a dangerous one.

“Without those checks and balances, we don’t have the rule of law,” said Grimm, the director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School. “No right of any individual in this country is safe.”

Independent Courts

Legal experts said that the Trump White House could encourage Congress to punish judges by preventing them from getting raises or even trying to impeach them.

Removal from the bench would require two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict a judge of high crimes and misdemeanors.

These kinds of threats underscore the importance of the Constitution granting federal judges life tenure, said Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University who has written about judicial independence.

“If we don’t have an independent federal judiciary, then we don’t have a constitutional democracy,” he said.

Redish said that doesn’t mean judges won’t face harassment. He said that while private citizens have a First Amendment right to criticize court rulings, he hopes that politicians — of any political party — “would be very careful in their choice of words” about judges.

Burbank said that Congress could also define where resources are allocated based on a court’s jurisdiction. That would allow lawmakers to dictate which courts could still get funds to carry out the administration’s priorities — like making sure border courts can process immigration cases — while hamstringing ones that have issued rulings against Trump.

Shira Scheindlin, who used to sit on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alongside Engelmayer, said that he is a measured and thoughtful judge. She called the attacks against him “disrespectful.”

Scheindlin, now of counsel with Boies Schiller Flexner, noted that Trump attacked judges by name during his first White House term.

“Judges are the only bulwark and guardrails that we have against this administration it seems,” she said, noting that judges appointed by a variety of presidents, including Ronald Reagan, have issued adverse rulings against Trump so far.

Grimm said that Engelmayer was faced with a lawsuit in which people had said their rights were at risk, and issued a temporary ruling.

“It’s not appropriate, nor is it for the benefit of the public at large to criticize or vilify a judge for doing that, when there’s a process to seek an appeal or seek a stay of the injunction and allow the courts to deal with it,” Grimm said.