There’s a famous quote on the subject of judicial power — that is, real judicial power, and not just the imagined kind that we’ve grown accustomed to accepting in a legalistic society.
It comes courtesy — though we’re told it’s an apocryphal quotation — of Andrew Jackson, our 7th president.
Jackson was informed of the Supreme Court’s decision in an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, which involved a complicated set of circumstances by which a missionary to the Cherokee Nation was imprisoned for violating a state law that he claimed was non-binding on sovereign Indian territory. Without bogging the reader down in details, Chief Justice John Marshall’s majority ruling in the case was quite inconvenient for Jackson, who was president at the time, and he was rather unfriendly to the prospect of having to wade in and impose on the state of Georgia.
And so, the quote goes, and whether apocryphal or not it almost surely conveys Jackson’s sentiments, “Justice Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Meaning that without the assent of the executive branch to execute the decisions handed down by the judicial branch, the latter has no power.
As Stalin said in a far less esoteric discussion of political power, “How many divisions has the pope?”
One of the hallmarks of our system of checks and balances is that the various players on the governmental stage have to — or should have to — be somewhat careful of overstepping their bounds and going too far into the territory of other players, or else the stage tilts quite rapidly against them.
And that’s very clearly what is happening now as left-wing federal district judges around the country are attempting to stop President Trump and his team, including Elon Musk and his DOGE computer geniuses, from conducting the most detailed and consequential audit of federal government spending America has ever seen.
David Catron’s piece here at The American Spectator yesterday is a pretty good summation of the political effects of the audit…
The good news is that, despite the astroturfed rallies in favor of USAID, and the hypocritical Democrat outrage about the “dangerous influence” of billionaires in politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing precisely what the voters want them to do — dismantling the deep state. Neither of these men give a damn what the pundits of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal write about them. Indeed, the only way people like Maggie Haberman or Peggy Noonan will be remembered 50 years from now is if they are granted interviews with Trump or Musk. The voters made their choice and they know Democrat caterwauling and corporate media propaganda are, to coin a phrase, simply sound and fury signifying nothing.
And there’s a fascinating piece that went up as an X article over the weekend by one of Musk’s DOGE prodigies which outlined the scope of the technological revolution their AI algorithms and fractal computing, leveraging data centers and advanced database queries, has initiated to the ancient system of opaque bureaucracy the Deep State has relied on to steal the public blind for most of our republic’s history…
While career bureaucrats prepared orientation packets and welcome memos, DOGE’s team was already deep inside the payment systems. No committees. No approvals. No red tape. Just four coders with unprecedented access and algorithms ready to run.
“The beautiful thing about payment systems,” noted a transition official watching their screens, “is that they don’t lie. You can spin policy all day long, but money leaves a trail.”
That trail led to staggering discoveries. Programs marked as independent revealed coordinated funding streams. Grants labeled as humanitarian aid showed curious detours through complex networks. Black budgets once shrouded in secrecy began to unravel under algorithmic scrutiny.
By 6 AM, Treasury’s career officials began arriving for work. They found systems they thought impenetrable already mapped. Networks they believed hidden already exposed. Power structures built over decades revealed in hours.
Their traditional defenses — slow-walking decisions, leaking damaging stories, stonewalling requests — proved useless against an opponent moving faster than their systems could react. By the time they drafted their first memo objecting to this breach, three more systems had already been mapped.
The revolution has already begun. The Left, which has thrown up every defense in its arsenal — staged photo ops, screechy protests, cries of racism and fascism, and now lawfare — in order to stave off an audit of the federal government…
Let’s stop right here and make sure everyone understands that what is happening is an audit of the federal government.
This is a very different kind of audit because it’s leveraging the kind of technology and computing power that only the very top end of the tech and AI industry even fully understands much less is able to utilize. As such, its effectiveness is an order of magnitude stronger than anything the world has yet seen.
But at the end of the day, all Musk and DOGE are doing at this point is auditing what the government is doing with your money. And that audit is finding how utterly rancid and septic the federal government’s management of your tax dollar truly is. It’s legacy upon legacy of institutional corruption hidden under layer upon layer of chummy networks of contractors and nongovernmental organizations married to agencies and programs stacked so deeply that mere mortals would take years to uncover it all.
But with the most powerful AI and data tools available to Elon Musk, that labyrinth of graft and fraud and disgrace is now laid bare.
This will change the nature of government in ways that require a total reexamination to even begin to contemplate. Virtually everything you think you know about how bureaucracies operate, or how the executive branch would interact with the legislative and judicial branches, for example, is probably wrong in this new reality.
And it’s too much for the Democrats to process.
All of their tools are useless when the public is now able to see what those tools have been put to work defending. A protest to save USAID, for example, which is wasting your tax dollars on payments to terrorists and trans comic books for Peruvians will actually do more harm than good. (RELATED: Foreign Aid Reform: USAID Has a History of Funding Terrorists and Anti-American Organizations)
They’ve been doing more harm than good to their cause since Trump was inaugurated. And in the meantime, Trump is using a firehose to dissolve the edifice of the Deep State, with Musk and DOGE serving as the nozzle.
Against this, it’s lawfare that appears the only remotely legitimate form of opposition — and even that doesn’t look very promising.
Take, for example, someone named Paul A. Engelmayer, an Obama-appointed federal district judge in the legal sinkhole of New York City, who somehow ruled over the weekend that the nation’s chief executive is not legally authorized to investigate the nation’s finances…
A federal judge early Saturday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk’s government efficiency team from accessing government systems used to process trillions of dollars in payments, citing a risk that sensitive information could be improperly disclosed.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan issued the order after a coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 19 U.S. states filed a lawsuit late Friday arguing Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has no legal power to access the U.S. Department of Treasury systems.
The ruling also applied to other political appointees of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Hours after it was issued, Musk called it “absolutely insane!” in a post on his social media platform X. The billionaire said the Treasury Department and DOGE had agreed to require all outgoing government payments to include a rationale in the form of a comment and to have a categorization code.
Musk also said that a do-not-pay list of entities that should not receive government payments should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
The changes, Musk said on X, were “obvious and necessary” and being implemented by government employees, and not by anyone from DOGE.
The lawsuit said Musk and his team could disrupt federal funding for health clinics, preschools, climate initiatives, and other programs, and that Trump could use the information to further his political agenda.
DOGE’s access to the system also “poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the States and their residents in peril,” the state attorneys general said. They sought a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, said the states’ claims were “particularly strong” and warranted him acting on their request for emergency relief pending a further hearing before another judge on February 14.
To call this insane, as Musk did, is accurate. But it’s insufficient.
What is a better characterization is that this is an outrage. An affront not only to democracy — because as Catron noted, the public is squarely behind Trump’s effort to give our constipated federal government the fiscal enema it has needed for decades — but to the rule of law.
A judicial order based not on law but on politics isn’t just nugatory. It’s obscene. It cannot be tolerated.
And it certainly cannot be enforced.
The key lesson of the Worcester case, or at least one of the most important lessons, is that the judicial branch only has power to the extent that it rests its decisions in reality and within definable limits of its power. When Jackson refused to enforce the Worcester decision against the state of Georgia, it forced the parties involved to come to a workable solution. Certainly, the Cherokee were not pleased with that solution, but on the other hand, American law was not made to service the claims of those denying its jurisdiction over them.
Consider this madness, however — this is a federal district judge attempting to deny the president, through his appointed representatives, the authority to carry out an audit of the executive branch’s finances.
Engelmayer isn’t John Marshall. He’s, by comparison, the Delta Smelt of the federal judicial ecosystem. And he seeks to limit the constitutional authority of a duly-elected president of the United States?
As the Brits might say, the very cheek!
Trump, in his interview with Bret Baier on Sunday, indicated he wouldn’t be abiding by Engelmayer’s order. Nor should he; it’s illegitimate. But it shouldn’t end there. Simply winning this little battle against a petty tyrant in a black robe only invites more abuse by other ambitious gremlins.
Instead, Engelmayer needs to be made an example of, which is to say he ought to be impeached by Congress.
Someone should bring a bill of impeachment against him and the House Judiciary Committee should take it up posthaste.
Will 67 votes be found in the Senate to remove him? Unlikely. Does it really matter? No.
It’s expensive to be impeached by Congress. That process is a punishment in its own right. It involves the hiring of an attorney and thousands of man-hours for a legal and public-relations defense which will drag on for months. Most Americans of anything but elite means would find themselves financially broken by such a process, with the expenses running into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
And the cheeky Paul A. Engelmayer, having fooled around with the duly-elected and quite popular president of the United States, in the commission of duties the American public strongly supports and in fact is desperate for the completion of, should be made to find out just how expensive, inconvenient and unpleasant a judicial impeachment can be.
This isn’t even a hard call. It’s easy. In fact, most of the dilatory and disruptive legacy tactics on which the Democrats are leaning only have value and impact because Republicans allow them to.
But we’re in a very different new age in which the GOP, thanks to Trump’s force of personality showing the way, has begun to understand it doesn’t have to bow to those tactics.
Let’s hope that new understanding is visited on Paul A. Engelmayer and the rest of those corrupt Obama, Clinton, and Biden judges who stand forth to protect Deep State corruption from the onslaught of advanced technology and the seething outrage of a victimized public.
Enforce it, Judge Engelmayer, if you can. But beware of what might be enforced on you.
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