Democrats, lacking popular support, resort to judge-shopping and more lawfare

When I hear Democrats whine about a duly elected president being a “threat to democracy,” I can’t help but think about a line from “Fight for Your Right” by the Beastie Boys: “Your pops caught you smoking, and he says, ‘No way!’ That hypocrite smokes two packs a day!”

In other words, it’s a bit ridiculous for someone with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth to demand that you refrain from doing the same thing. And this is about as hypocritical as what Democrats are doing when they decry threats to democracy.

When Democrats said democracy would be in peril if President Trump won, they neglected to add that they themselves would be the ones creating that peril under a second Trump presidency.

Think what you will of Trump’s policies — and I like them — he won. He gets to implement as many of them as he can. There is ample precedent for this. Former President Barack Obama made liberal use of his magic “pen and phone” to bypass Congress and create laws on his own — remember the Dreamers? Former President Biden openly mocked the Supreme Court’s ruling on his student loan forgiveness plan while bragging that he would circumvent it. In that light, the allegation is hilarious that Trump is somehow endangering the republic by doing what is clearly within his power.

Democrats, however, will grasp for whatever they can with novel legal theories — for example, that the commander in chief of our military cannot bar from the armed services patients suffering from gender dysphoria and “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from [their] sex.”

Of course, this judge didn’t just decree this out of nowhere. Democrats deliberately forum-shopped their case for a judge who would block a military order to force the services to take permanently medicalized patients — people who have put themselves in a position where they need lifelong care and, in the case of those who actually undergo sex-change surgeries, “personal time” to ensure that certain deliberately-created and desired wounds do not heal. 

No matter what you think of the transgender issue, Trump’s order properly recognized that this was anathema to military readiness. Those in this category cannot be deployed. Enlisted troops and their gender dysphoria cannot dictate the terms under which they will serve, lest the entire structure of the military collapse upon itself. 

Such judge-shopping involves the filing of almost identical lawsuits in legal districts across the country. The idea is to maximize the chances that at least one liberal judge will be assigned the case somewhere and can impose a nationwide injunction, at which point all the other cases can be dropped. This strategy is allowing the left to stymie nearly everything Trump does, including actions he specifically promised on the campaign trail.

In this way, the left-wing industrial complex hopes to block the mostly-popular agenda of a president they already tried unsuccessfully to sue into oblivion, throw off the presidential ballot and imprison for the rest of his natural life. 

No one is surprised that Trump is rounding up criminals and gang members for deportation. He spent an entire campaign promising these deportations, and it is one of his most popular acts in office so far. Yet the party constantly warning of a “threat to democracy” has launched countless lawsuits to keep these violent gang members and child rapists inside the U.S. as long as possible, and at least to cause the maximum expense and delay in expelling them.

Most disturbingly, these litigious liberals can always find judges willing to give them what they want — a nationwide injunction preventing Trump from implementing his policies. These champions of democracy hope to slow-walk their cases as far into Trump’s presidency as possible, effectively giving themselves and their unelected, dark-money-funded shadow groups an extra-constitutional veto power. All they have to do is outlast the administration and hope their party wins the next election.

“Hypocrite” isn’t a strong enough word to describe what Democrats have been doing. But what else can you call people who scream, “This is what democracy looks like!” while preventing all debate by shouting down everyone they disagree with.

Sure, I guess it’s better than setting a Tesla dealership on fire, but that’s a pretty low bar for these frauds to clear.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).