Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox Business Tuesday to share his concerns about the power wielded by district judges in the United States.
District judges have increasingly used nationwide injunctions to halt the implementation of President Donald Trump’s policies across the entire United States. During an appearance on “Kudlow,” Gingrich warned at the current state of affairs where, in his view, 700 district judges act as if they have presidential powers, meddling in detailed aspects of the presidency and threatening the governance of the country.
“You can’t have 700 district judges pretending that they’re president. You can’t have judges who decide that every single detail of the presidency is somehow open to them to screw it up. It makes it impossible for the United States to survive as a country,” Gingrich said.
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Gingrich said that the Founding Fathers’ concerns about judicial supremacy reflect today’s concerns about overreaching judges.
“Jefferson said that anybody who thinks he can have judicial supremacy, that that would be an oligarchy, that it would end the possibility of the people deciding,” Gingrich told host Larry Kudlow when the host said that the Founders feared a judicial dictatorship. “And it was interesting that in the American Revolution, the number two demand after no taxation without representation was to get control of the judges because they’d been the king’s judges. They had imposed things on people. They didn’t represent the people. ”
Drawing on historical examples, Gingrich mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s strong opposition to judicial supremacy.
“The fact is when Lincoln talks about government of the people, by the people and for the people, he was strongly opposed to any sense of judicial supremacy. And in fact, in his first inaugural, faced with Chief Justice [Roger B.] Taney, who had just introduced him, Lincoln gave a stern lecture that the Supreme Court had gone too far and that it was wrong,” Gingrich said.
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Gingrich used this anecdote to illustrate a long-standing American tradition of resisting judicial overreach. This tradition, he said, began to erode in the late 1950s.
“There’s a long tradition here, which has only been broken really starting in the late 1950s with this crazy idea that lawyers and judges are superior to the rest of us, and they get to define everything,” Gingrich added.
When President Trump took office on Jan. 20, he immediately enacted several executive orders to restrict illegal immigration and declared Mexican drug cartels, TdA, and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations. Reports have emerged of TdA members overtaking apartment complexes in Aurora, Colo. and being involved in kidnapping and murder cases.
Democratic states and unions have repeatedly challenged the Trump administration’s policies by filing lawsuits, resulting in several judges issuing nationwide injunctions that delay these measures. In response, Republican legislators are now proposing new laws that would restrict district judges from imposing nationwide injunctions on specific executive actions.
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