Voters have made it clear. They don’t want Republicans defying the courts. Republicans have made it clear they don’t care.
House passes President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
The House passed President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill.’ It will now move onto the Senate.
Federal judges keep issuing orders blocking some of President Trump’s actions – not because there is some judicial conspiracy to thwart him, but because he clearly doesn’t care about following the law.
In case after case, lawyers for the Trump administration play fast and loose with the facts, trying to game the system, to circumvent the authority of the judiciary, a co-equal branch of our government with the presidency and Congress. Judges have noticed. Some are getting fed up. Contempt of court is looming.
Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are trying to help him hobble those judges, slipping into the oxymoronically named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that passed in the U.S. House on May 22 a short provision that would hamper judges from enforcing “contempt citations for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining orders.”
Those are exactly the type of recent rulings that have so enraged Trump. And the bill doesn’t just stymy judges going forward. It would apply retroactively to rulings already in place.
Republicans want to make it harder to challenge Trump
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in the House by the narrowest of margins and now goes to the U.S. Senateis a budget package that offers tax cuts for the wealthy while ending Medicaid health insurance coverage for millions of low-income Americans and driving the country deeper into debt.
One paragraph, on pages 562 and 563 of the 1,116-page bill, raised alarms for reasons that have nothing to do with America’s budget or safety-net programs or debt. That paragraph invokes a federal rule for civil court proceduresrequiring anyone seeking an injunction or temporary restraining order to block an action by the Trump administration to post a financial bond.
Want to challenge Trump? Pay up, the provision said in a way that could make it financially prohibitive for Americans to contest Trump’s actions in court.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, called that “unprecedented.”
“The greatest impact will be in preventing enforcement of all existing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions if a bond has not been posted — and rarely were there bonds required,” Chemerinsky wrote me in an email.
The many components of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have received great scrutiny, but the restriction on legal challenges has received less.
“I think it has not received much attention because it is a provision of a large budget bill and because the implications are not obvious,” Chemerinsky wrote. “But it will make most existing court orders unenforceable.”
Vice President JD Vance knows better, but that’s not stopping him
Trump isn’t alone in raging against federal judges who insist that his administration follow the law. That disdain for judicial oversight trickles down through the ranks.
Vice President JD Vance, in a May 21 interview with the New York Timesrepeatedly said that federal judges should be “deferential” to Trump on matters involving immigration and deportation. And he was clearly offended by recent comments from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said federal courts should “check the excesses of Congress or the executive.”
That’s our vice president, a Yale Law School graduatechafing at the American government’s system of checks and balances.
Another Ivy League-trained lawyer, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauerrefused to commit to the Trump administration obeying federal appellate court rulings when he was questioned by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court justices on May 15. “We generally respect circuit precedent, but not necessarily in every case,” said Sauer, a Harvard Law School graduate.
Dan Bongino, a conspiracist podcaster named by Trump to be the FBI deputy director, used one of his last broadcasts in February to urge his new boss to just ignore federal judges who get in his way.
“Who’s going to arrest him?” Bongino scoffed on his podcast. “The marshals? You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? Department of Justice. That is under the executive branch. Donald Trump’s going to order his own arrest? This is ridiculous.”
Voters don’t like what Trump is doing. Republicans don’t care.
That’s the Trump theme running through all this: a taunt, a dare, a defiance of the law. That must certainly appeal to Trump’s most fervent supporters, but it’s not what the vast majority of Americans want.
A Marquette Law School Poll national surveyreleased on May 22 found that 79% of the 1,004 people asked said that Trump should obey federal court orders. And that number increased to 84% when asked about obeying Supreme Court rulings.
A survey in April from theAnnenberg Public Policy Centerat the University of Pennsylvania found that 69% of the 1,363 people asked said, “The president should follow a Supreme Court ruling, even if the president believes the ruling prevents him from protecting the country from a terrorist attack.”
The Pew Research Center, in another survey in Aprilfound that “just 14% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats say that if the Supreme Court rules an action by the administration illegal, itdoes nothave to follow the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
Trump doesn’t care about following the law, so he isn’t likely to care that the American people want him to do exactly that. He’s on the hunt for workarounds − legislative escape clauses to help him ignore judges and avoid responsibility.
The Senate, now mulling the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, should strike this very ugly provision. They can take a stand for the rule of law and America’s system of checks and balances that Republicans in the House tried to discard.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter:@Bychrisbennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter,Translating Politics, here.
