Liberal Judges Declare Themselves President
Rogue federal judges are no longer content trying to thwart President Donald Trump’s agenda with absurd rulings and nationwide injunctions—now they are actually trying to appoint personnel to the executive branch against the chief executive’s wishes.
The latest incident happened in upstate New York, where federal judges swore in a prosecutor of their choosing as U.S. attorney. Within hours, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche responded with the constitutional equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper, posting “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired.”
At issue is a basic but consequential question: Who has the authority to decide who enforces federal law—the president elected by the American people, or unelected judges?
Obviously, under Article II of the Constitution, the president appoints executive officers—including U.S. attorneys—with the advice and consent of the Senate. Prosecutors answer to the president, who may remove them at will.
There is, however, a narrow statutory workaround that liberal judges are now exploiting. When a U.S. attorney’s term expires and the Senate hasn’t confirmed a successor, the attorney general can appoint an interim replacement for 120 days. If the Senate still hasn’t acted after that window, district court judges may appoint someone to fill the vacancy.
Notice the word may. And notice the context – this is supposed to be a temporary stopgap, not a judicial coup.
What’s happening now is not some innocent procedural housekeeping. It’s a coordinated effort by radical judges to block President Trump from installing prosecutors who will carry out the administration’s law-enforcement priorities.
In New Jersey, when former U.S. Attorney Alina Habba’s temporary tenure expired, federal judges declined to extend it and instead appointed her subordinate to the role. Attorney General Pam Bondi responded by firing the judges’ pick and reinstalling Habba as acting U.S. attorney. The matter ping-ponged through the courts for months until Habba finally withdrew in frustration.
Similar fights have erupted in Nevada, California, New Mexico, and Virginia. In the Eastern District of Virginia, when liberal judges disqualified then–U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, they automatically invalidated prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James—two of the most enthusiastic anti-Trump witch-hunters who have persecuted the president and his supporters with glee. Those dismissals are now on appeal.
In each case, the pattern is the same: judges flexing a rarely used appointment power in ways that conveniently frustrate the elected president’s agenda.
But wait – don’t Republicans control the Senate? Why are Trump’s picks getting held up in a GOP-controlled body, thereby enabling leftist judges to undermine the President?
The answer is an obscure and archaic tradition known as the “blue slip.”
For more than a century, the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked home-state senators to approve nominees for U.S. attorney and federal district court positions by returning a literal blue slip – basically, a form signifying the senator’s approval. If a senator withholds it, the committee traditionally won’t move forward with the nomination.
Thus, a single senator can stall a presidential nominee simply by refusing to turn in a piece of paperwork. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer can effectively block President Trump’s U.S. attorney nominees for New York, Elizabeth Warren could block nominees for Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders could block them for Vermont, and so on.
But blue slips are not in the Constitution. They’re not required by statute. They’re not even a formal Senate rule. They are a courtesy – a relic of a more genteel era when lawmakers still pretended to play fair.
Guess which party stopped the niceties a long time ago and started using the blue slip as a partisan cudgel?
When President Trump nominates U.S. attorneys in blue states, Democrat senators routinely withhold their blue slips, even though Republicans never employed that tactic when Biden or Obama were in office. Democrats don’t argue the nominee is unqualified or debate the merits. They simply refuse to cooperate.
And what do Republican senators do in response?
They keep honoring the blue slip tradition, as if everyone was still playing by the same set of rules.
Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the House. Yet left-wing judges are appointing federal prosecutors because GOP senators are naively preserving a courtesy rule that Democrats have seized and transformed into a unilateral veto.
If the roles were reversed and a Democrat president were being blocked by Republican blue slips, does anyone believe Senate Democrats would cling to this antique tradition out of institutional reverence?
Please. They would abolish it before lunch.
President Trump has called for ending the practice, which he says is “making it impossible” to get his appointees approved in Democrat states. “It is shocking that Republicans, under Senator Chuck Grassley, allow this scam to continue,” he said.
He is absolutely right. The Constitution gives the Senate an advice and consent role – not the power to create a shadow veto for the opposition party.
If a senator objects to a nominee, fine. Hold a hearing and vote no. But allowing Democrat senators to stall nominations indefinitely is sabotaging President Trump’s agenda, because it empowers liberal judges to appoint people who reject the President’s priorities on crime, border enforcement, and corruption.
Then, when that prosecutor declines to pursue cases against legitimate criminals, the same media outlets that spent years shrieking about “threats to democracy” suddenly discover the joy of judicial dictators ruling by fiat.
The Founders did not design a system in which federal judges staff the executive branch just because senators are nostalgic for bygone etiquette. They designed a system in which the president appoints executive officers, the Senate votes them up or down, and the voters hold everyone accountable during the next election.
What we have now is something far more perverse – and the problem isn’t just rogue judges. It’s Republican senators who lack the nerve to wield the authority that the American people gave them.
If Republicans want to preserve the constitutional separation of powers, they need to start acting like it. End the blue slip veto for President Trump’s nominees. Hold hearings. Take votes. Confirm or reject – but decide.
Otherwise, the next time a federal court swears in a prosecutor over the president’s objection, we can skip the outrage. We’ll know exactly how it happened and who’s responsible.
