If the Marshals Go Rogue, Courts Have Other Ways to Enforce their Orders
16th March 2025
Democracy Docket, a Voice of the Crust.
One of the most alarming developments in the second Trump administration is agencies’ apparent defiance of court orders barring them from implementing illegal executive orders. As agencies including the State Department have ignored, evaded or slow-walked judicial decrees, courts have issued increasingly stronger warnings that compliance with their orders is not optional, and litigants have urged them to hold the responsible government officials in contempt of court.
Alarming indeed, to the Usual Suspects. Proglodytes have been stuffing partisan judges onto the Federal courts for decades, and know whom to depend on when things require a bit of undemocratic action. If this fails them, they’re back to persuasion, and democracy, in both of which they have proven incompetent.
Yet the prospect of holding executive branch officials in contempt threatens a fresh constitutional crisis.
Only to those who think that judges get to have everything they want, and that elected officials (whose job it is) must bend the knee.
As Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky argues, “the hard truth for those looking to the courts to rein in the Trump administration is that the Constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings — it is the executive branch that ultimately enforces judicial orders.”
As President Andrew Jackson once reputedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Neither the Federal government nor the government of the State of Georgia enforced that decision, and it had no effect.
Courts depend for their effectiveness on the popular appreciation that their decisions are just. When, as with Trump, their decisions are patently partisan and not rooted in either law or justice, they’re going to find themselves on a very windy ledge, ith no friendly hand available. Hence this author’s frantic grasping for some way, any way, to permit the partisan judiciary to have its way other than through the branch of government entitled by the Constitution and empowered by that Democrat bugaboo, the election that they could not steal.