Trump administration ramps up rhetoric targeting the courts amid mounting legal setbacks
World
Trump’s supporters in Congress have raised the specter of impeaching judges
WASHINGTON (AP) – The new populist president railed against the judiciary as they blocked his aggressive moves to restructure his country’s government and economy.
This was in Mexico, where former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador eventually pushed through changes that required every judge in his country to be elected rather than appointed.
The reforms, and the promise of more by his successor, caused markets to lose confidence in his country’s reliability as a place to invest, which led its currency to weaken.
It was one in a series of assaults that populists around the globe have launched on the courts in recent years, and legal observers now wonder if the United States could be next.
As the courts deliver a series of setbacks to his dramatic attempt to change the federal government without congressional approval, President Donald Trump’s supporters are echoing some of the rhetoric and actions that elsewhere have preceded attacks on the judiciary.
Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, posted last week on X: “Under the precedents now being established by radical rogue judges, a district court in Hawaii could enjoin troop movements in Iraq. Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election.”
“We either have democracy,” said Miller, who once ran a legal group that sued to get judges to block former President Joe Biden’s initiatives, “or not.”
Trump’s supporters in Congress have raised the specter of impeaching judges who have ruled against the administration. Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump backer whose Department of Government Efficiency has ended up in the crosshairs of much of the litigation, has regularly called for removing judges on his social media site, X.
On Sunday, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Chuck Grassley, reacted furiously to a Washington judge’s order briefly halting deportations under an 18th century wartime law that Trump invoked hours earlier.
