Donald Trump and his supporters on Wednesday continued to ramp up their criticism of judges who they say have stymied the Republican U.S. president’s second-term agenda, with billionaire ally Elon Musk calling for “an immediate wave of judicial impeachments.”
Those statements came a day after federal courts forced U.S. agencies to restore health-related websites taken down in response to one of Trump’s executive orders and declined to lift a judge’s order barring the administration from freezing federal funding.
Those and other legal setbacks have prompted Trump, key members of his administration and Musk to attack judges who have blocked major pieces of his agenda, in some cases arguing judges have no power to intrude on the president’s authority.
Such comments have fueled concerns about whether the Trump administration would abide by court rulings. The American Bar Association on Tuesday condemned such comments, saying they presented “serious risks to our constitutional framework.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a press briefing on Wednesday accused judges of “abusing their power” and said the “real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch.”
She said the administration would “comply with the law in the courts, but we will also continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure President Trump’s policies can be enacted.”
Trump in his first term appointed a near-record 234 judges and pushed the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary overall to the right.
In a social media post earlier on Wednesday, Trump repeated Musk’s unsubstantiated claims that his Department of Government Efficiency, a team focused on reducing the size of the government, had found “massive” amounts of fraud and waste.
Yet “even knowing this, a highly political, activist Judge wants us to immediately make payment, anyway,” Trump said.
His post appeared to be a reference to Providence, Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge John McConnell, who on Monday found Trump’s administration had defied an earlier ruling he issued at the behest of Democratic-led states by continuing to withhold billions of dollars in frozen federal grant funding.
CHECKS AND BALANCES
The U.S. Department of Justice quickly asked a federal appeals court to lift McConnell’s Monday order enforcing his earlier decision unfreezing the funding, but the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to on Tuesday.
Democratic lawmakers and even some members of Trump’s Republican Party in Congress have come to the defense of the judges. Federal judges, who are appointed for life, have the authority to decide the constitutionality of federal laws and resolve cases involving federal laws and policies.
They can only be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors and must be convicted by the Senate to be removed.
Only 15 judges have ever been impeached, and only eight have been convicted by the Senate, most recently in 2010.
“Thuggery toward judges is not the way courts work in rule-of-law countries,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote on Tuesday in response to one of Musk’s posts on his social media platform X.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News the Justice Department would keep defending Trump’s policies in court and appeal rulings from “outrageous, overzealous, unconstitutional judges trying to control federal spending.”
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, on X called McConnell, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, a “scammer,” and described a different judge in Washington who ruled against the administration as “evil” and someone who should be fired.
“There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one,” Musk said.
The Washington-based jurist is U.S. District Judge John Bates, who on Tuesday issued an order requiring the restoration of various government health websites that were scrubbed in response to an executive order requiring the removal of “gender ideology extremism.”
Bates, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush, had in a different case delivered one of the rare wins for the administration when he on Friday declined to block DOGE from the U.S. Department of Labor’s systems.
McConnell declined to comment. Bates did not respond to a request for comment. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the judiciary’s administrative arm, declined to comment.
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