Democrat Party leaders invited an Atlantic reporter to tell the world their current political strategy is to use U.S. courts to reject the consequences of losing a presidential election. “The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working,” say Michael Scherer’s Sept. 2 headline and subhed, is “Lawsuits, lawsuits, and more lawsuits.”
The vast majority of the nearly 400 lawsuits filed against the second Trump administration in its first seven months, Scherer reports, did not organically arise from American needs and on-the-ground realities. No, they were pre-planned in advance, and plaintiff cutouts recruited from Democrat constituencies including activist groups and labor unions. These lawsuits are cut-and-paste operations designed to deny American voters the results of electing a Republican president, using complicit blue-state judges who care nothing for the rule of law or Constitution.
“This backbone of the Trump resistance has as much in common with political organizing and investigative reporting as it does with legal theory,” Scherer writes, unashamedly describing the lawsuits as overt political operations created years in advance of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. “… Attorneys general would represent states, advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and the ACLU would focus on their areas of expertise, and the unions would gather stories from their members and identify plaintiffs who could show harm. Atop this infrastructure, new organizations took shape, bringing in tens of millions of dollars to pay for it all.”
This article recalls the infamous Time article by Molly Ball describing how a similar — and surely overlapping — constellation of well-funded leftist groups and politicians “fortifi[ed]” the 2020 election with lawsuits and other efforts pushing unreliable voting methods.
Courts Overturning Elections
The truth is, Democrats as a party no longer respect election results, a key component of self-government. They have moved on from respecting Americans’ individual sovereignty to dominating us by any means necessary.
Courts have thus become an essential component of Democrats’ election-denial political strategy, simply because hundreds are eagerly cooperating with this scheme. Why do the hard but fair political work of getting major measures through Congress when you can simply run your policy preferences through unelected courts willing to commandeer the entire nation at the flick of a computer keyboard?
As Scherer writes, this strategy has been extremely successful:
Since Inauguration Day, executive orders have been defanged or blocked, agency closures delayed, government-employee firings reversed. Deportation flights have been delayed, law firms have freed themselves from Trump’s retaliation, and foreign students have won the ability to continue studying at U.S. universities. Courts have forced the president to restore cut services and spending to AmeriCorps, the U.S. African Development Foundation, the CDC, and other agencies. They have upended an effort by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to make it more difficult to release unaccompanied minors from government custody and forced Trump to pay for foreign-aid bills he had hoped to stiff-arm. A federal appeals court ruled Friday that many of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, setting up a likely hearing by the Supreme Court.
Using courts to effectively enact legislation is very similar to the timeworn leftist trick of using administrative agencies to do the same. Both venues can simply wait out the tenure of elected officials such as a president. Like agency rulemaking, court cases can easily take more than the four years a presidential term lasts to reach their terminus. So much for elected control of government! Court behavior like this makes elections a mere facade.
Running all major political decisions through courts and elected officials acquiescing to the un-American idea that courts must have the last word on every political question effectively neuters American self-rule. It’s the end of democracy, as usual pushed hardest by those claiming they’re democracy’s champions.
Meet the Shadow Presidency: Unelected Judges
Some of these court cases are complicated, but most of them are not. Most are at core about prohibiting elected, civilian control of the U.S. government. For example, most of the lawsuits about immigration attempt to prohibit the president from actually following the law and deporting people ineligible for entering U.S. soil. And of course the president has obvious constitutionally granted direct power over executive agencies. Why call it the “executive branch” if it is not in fact controlled by the executive?
Many of these lawsuits are nothing more than attempts to insert Democrat-appointed judges into the office of the presidency to supercede the policies of the person voters chose to place there in the last election. It’s flatly un-American and un-democratic.
What’s the point of voting for a president if he’s just an ornamental figurehead? What’s the point of voting for members of Congress if they hardly ever pass any laws, or if when they do pass “laws” they are mostly vague delegations of lawmaking powers to unelected agencies that largely thwart the Constitution and the will of the people? What’s the point of voting for a president or Congress — or anyone at all — if the courts will just swoop in and rewrite any legislation they do pass at the behest of oligarch-funded lawfare?
“[Norm] Eisen, who has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration, explained that he wanted to try the case in the court of law and the court of public opinion,” Scherer writes.
Look, the proper American venue for assessing public opinion on policy choices is elections. And the most recent election is over. Voters chose Donald Trump to be president. They have weighed in on what policies they want by electing him to the office that frivolous lawsuits in dictatorial courts are preventing him from using.
The appropriate time to consult voters is not in hundreds of courts they didn’t elect or via a poll of grossly biased Democrat mouthpieces who call themselves journalists, it’s at the next election season. And in between elections, elected officials have to have a chance to actually govern, or there is again no reason to have an election at all.
Astroturf Plaintiffs with Free High-Priced Lawyers
Scherer again reinforces that these lawfare efforts are a transparent election-influence operation, not an effort to defend plaintiffs whose cases arose organically: “the ultimate score will not be recorded on just the appellate docket or in the list of injunctions that are left to stand. Organizers are tracking Trump’s approval ratings, as well, anticipating the effect the legal efforts could have on the 2026 midterm elections.”
The entire effort is astroturf, from top to bottom. It’s the wealthy attempting to massage election outcomes through teams of high-priced lawyers, cultivated plaintiffs, media influence operations, and complicit judges rather than genuinely persuading Americans that a certain candidate will deliver on their priorities.
The Atlantic article openly shows Democrat strategists treating “reporters” as part of their in-house PR team. Scherer publicly discloses he was invited to join conference calls between Democrat strategists who clearly have no worries he might learn or disclose anything that damages their brand.
Given that corporate reporters might as well be on Democrat payrolls, it’s no surprise Democrats like their odds in cherry-picked court venues and the “court of public opinion” manipulated and misrepresented by a lying media class. But, again, those are thankfully not the institutions with lawful control over U.S. public policy.
The constitutional institutions for governing Americans are those populated with individuals we elect. Those are exactly the institutions this entire Democrat lawfare strategy seeks to sideline.
Neutering Elections To Save Democracy
Rather than show any shame at the public revelation of their massive, coordinated attempts to block and overturn election results, Democrats shamelessly trumpet their efforts to erase the power of elections as something Americans should celebrate. One of the reasons Democrats can be this brazen is the lack of rebuke and restraint from institutions that should defend their honor and the Constitution.
It shouldn’t just be Trump complaining about the use of courts to subvert elections, it should also be Congress and the Supreme Court taking decisive action to stop this. Courts lose legitimacy when they are correctly and increasingly seen as mere political instruments rather than trustworthy guardians of the American governance system that relies on elections to legitimize its power.
The extent to which federal courts continue to act as unelected superlegislatures is exactly the extent to which Americans will despise and increasingly disregard them. Refusing to check this lawfare decisively will only expand our current constitutional crisis rather than abating it.