David French: Why Trump is mad at ‘sleasebag’ Leonard Leo

Last Thursday night President Donald Trump turned on one of his the majority major allies A day after a three-judge panel from the U S Court of International Bargain which included a judge he appointed in his first term rejected his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of to grant him expansive tariff authority Trump posted a rambling screed on Truth Social condemning the judiciary He posted his rant despite that the court s decision was almost promptly stayed by a court of appeals while it considers the administration s arguments Even so the initial ruling was too much for Trump he had to unleash That s not new He s been condemning judges who rule against him since before he first became president This time however he went after Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society The Federalist Society is easily the largest and the majority influential organization of conservative lawyers in the country I was a member in law school and Leo is long one of its key leaders Trump declared himself so disappointed in the Federalist Society because of its bad advice on judicial nominations But he reserved his real venom for Leo calling him a sleazebag and a bad person who in his own way apparently hates America An image of former President James Madison is seen behind Leonard Leo as he speaks at the National Lawyers Convention in Washington in this Nov file photo AP Photo Sait Serkan Gurbuz file Leo helped Trump choose conservative lawyers and judges for both the judiciary and his administration Trump s decision in his first run for president to publish a Supreme Court short list stocked with leading lights of the Federalist Society helped him win over skeptical conservatives in But there was a predicament The Federalist Society never capitulated to Trump It s a decentralized group and its members are stubbornly independent I ve spoken to dozens of Federalist Society learner groups and they can vary wildly from school to school One chapter can be reasonably Trump-friendly but never in my experience fully MAGA while another is mainly Never Trump For every John Eastman a Federalist Society luminary who was prosecuted and suspended from practicing law in California after he helped Trump try to steal the voting there are multiple Federalist Society judges and lawyers who ve ruled against him or resisted him in other procedures The examples by now are almost too numerous to count During his first term Trump had a worse record at the Supreme Court which had a Republican-nominated majority than any previous modern president When he challenged the outcome of the electoral process Federalist Society judges ruled against him time and again During Joe Biden s term the Supreme Court rejected several MAGA legal arguments and during his second term so far Trump is faring very poorly in federal court According to an analysis by a political scientist at Stanford Adam Bonica as of May Republican-appointed district judges ruled against Trump of the time That number is remarkably close to the rate of losses before Democratic-appointed judges And the Supreme Court seems no more hospitable to Trump in his second term It s already unanimously ruled that deportees under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to due process before deportation it s upheld a district court order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia s return and just now it ruled - against the administration in still another Alien Enemies Act episode holding that the administration was still not providing sufficient due process to deportees Trump hasn t reliably lost of discipline He won key rulings at the Supreme Court that expanded presidential immunity and kept him on the ballot in but there is still an immense difference between judicial conservatives and say congressional Republicans The bulk judges have a spine Most of members of Congress do not Another way of putting it is that when there is a conflict between conservative legal principles and Trump s demands conservative judges almost consistently adhere to their principles Members of Congress do not And don t think for a moment that it s a Republican member of Congress job to completely yield to Trump Constitutionally Congress is a superior branch of authorities to the presidency and it is explicitly designed to check the president As James Madison wrote in Federalist No Ambition must be made to counteract ambition Trump is baffled At the beginning of his Truth rant he refers back to the Court of International Contract and asks Where do these initial three Judges come from How is it accomplishable for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America Is it purely a hatred of TRUMP What other reason could it be Trump and I have something in common We ve both been thinking about why the judiciary has held firm when multiple other American institutions especially conservative institutions have collapsed Why have a vast majority of conservative judges remained faithful to their legal philosophies when we ve watched a vast majority of Republicans twist themselves into pretzels celebrating Trump for practices and policies they d condemn in any other person or politician I come from the conservative legal movement I have friends throughout the conservative legal movement including plenty of Trump-appointed judges and I think I know the answer or at least part of it The immense pressure that Trump puts on his perceived rivals and opponents exposes our core motivations and the core motivations of federal judges are very different from the core motivations of members of Congress Think of it as the difference between seeking the judgment of history over the judgment of the electorate and to the extent that you seek approval you place a higher priority on the respect of your peers than the applause of the crowd If you ask judges or members of Congress why they do what they do you ll likely get similar answers They feel called to population operation But how do they measure their success While politicians might respect the idea of the noble loser in theory in practice that is not the path they take It s become easy for politicians to rationalize their compliance How plenty of one-term senators or short-term members of the House have made a difference in American history they ask Look at all the Republican politicians who tried to stand against Trump and are now out of office What did they accomplish To matter they have to win and winning can soon become the only thing that matters But in a court system built on precedents not elections it s your decisions that measure your worth Roger B Taney was chief justice of the United States for years but when we hear his name one decision springs to mind Dred Scott He wrote the decision that stripped citizenship from Black Americans rightly tarnishing his reputation forever If your decisions are the measure of your worth then seeking the applause of the crowd can lead you down a dangerous path Countless parts of the Constitution are intentionally counter-majoritarian They re designed to protect both individual rights and our republican form of executive from majoritarian mobs The people have spoken can be the least convincing argument to federal judges especially when he or she is interpreting the Bill of Rights Due process is rarely popular for example And popular speech doesn t need legal protection There aren t plenty of constituencies clamoring for the rights of criminal defendants and when two sisters who were Jehovah s Bystanders refused to pledge allegiance to the flag during the height of World War II they faced punishment not popular celebration Yet the decision to protect their right not to speak is one of the Supreme Court s finest moments I m not naive I know there can be a dark side to a heritage of counter-majoritarian independence At their worst federal judges can be arrogant and imperious But even this stubborn pride is having a virtuous effect Both professionalism and pride are working together to preserve our constitutional order If you try to intimidate a judge you re often confirming to the judge the necessity of her or his ruling And a few judges take acts of intimidation as a kind of personal insult They don t become afraid They just get mad We should be grateful for that anger It s stiffening their backs not altering their reasoning The combination of dedication to the rule of law and a kind of How dare you stubbornness in the face of intimidation is resulting in one of the rarest spectacles in this miserable modern political era one branch of administration indeed doing its job David French writes a column for the New York Times Related Articles Cory Franklin The lessons of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the MLB s rewriting of history Clive Crook The US is about to discover if deficits don t matter Parmy Olson AI sometimes deceives to survive Does anybody care Maureen Dowd Dance with emolument Ezra Klein 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