Last month, in an opinion piece at The New York Times, Adrian Vermeule decried the lack of accountability and corruption in a judicial system that allows activist judges to openly defy the Supreme Court. It is both an acute problem and a symptom of a much larger and deeper problem.
If you go through the landmark political triumphs of the liberal left, it quickly becomes apparent that very few of them were accomplished through electoral victories or the ordinary operations of the legislative process. Instead, the left moved the goal posts through judicial fiat and by legislating from the bench, as far back as the Warren Court.
As Vermeule points out, the progressives preemptively attacked Trump for the alleged crime of not respecting the sanctity of the impartial institutions of society.
Since President Trump returned to the presidency for a second term, legal scholars and political writers have wrestled with a particular preoccupation: What if he defies court orders? […]
The issue of defying court orders is still with us—but it has taken a twist. Now the defiance is coming from inside the judicial branch itself, in the form of a lower-court mutiny against the Supreme Court. District Court judges, and in some cases even appellate courts, have either defied orders of the court outright or engaged in malicious compliance and evasion of those orders, in transparent bad faith.
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