Activist Judges Thought They Had Power… Until Congress Said ‘Hold My Beer

by Jeff Childers

The Trump Team fooled everybody, including me. As last week’s various lawsuits sprouted restraining orders like early buds emerging all over the willow trees in springtime, most commenters expected Trump to take a necessary pause for defensive retrenchment. Surely, we all thought, it would take Trump’s anti-bureaucrats some time to clear the judicial logjam. But all of us were wrong.

A brief pause to clear past the TROs wasn’t Trump’s strategy at all. No pauses! Instead, yesterday Trump tripled down, jamming the battle tank’s accelerator into overdrive and smashing ahead in a whole different direction. His new battlefield banner unfurled yesterday afternoon in the form of one executive order plus three separate press conferences, which together sent a just-relaxing Deep State enemy racing for the bunkers with its trousers still half off.

It was a simultaneous coordinated assault, deployed with consummate skill in a single afternoon. It was all happening at once. We will start with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his incredible comments. The New York Times covered the story in a haplessly hysterical headline, “Johnson ‘Wholeheartedly’ Agrees With Trump’s Spending Cuts, Undermining Congress.”

 
Undermining Congress! The Times was vexed because Speaker Johnson told reporters he agreed that the President could unilaterally withhold congressionally authorized payments, if they are wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. The Speaker explained, “There’s a presupposition in America that the commander-in-chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.” Johnson also pointed out that DOGE workers were better able to make decisions on government funding than members of Congress, since “the agencies have hidden some of this from us.”

A tearful Times was clearly experiencing the “anger” stage of denial, as it raged over its despair that Congress and the President weren’t getting into a highly public budget fight after all. Johnson’s express agreement only helped Trump, both in the court of public opinion as well as the court of far-left judicial activists.

But that bit of welcome agreement was the least interesting thing Johnson said.

First, Johnson confronted the Democrats’ new “constitutional crisis” narrative, and encouragingly, vaccine mandates made an appearance. The Speaker explained:

The Democratic party is in a completely different place right now. There’s no identified leader of the party. They don’t have a clear vision. They just seem rudderless. In hopes of finding themselves, they’ve latched onto this new shiny object called ‘the rule of law.’ We’d like to welcome them to the concept.

It would be more admirable if they hadn’t spent the last four years with their heads buried in the sand while Biden literally trampled over the rule of law without objection.

In fact, many Democrats cheered that lawlessness, like when the Biden Administration unconstitutionally forced the middle class to pay the student loans of doctors and lawyers. They illegally mandated that private companies implement vaccine requirements. They radically rewrote Title IX to undermine women’s rights. Those things were actually illegal. The Democratic party cheered it on; they didn’t oppose it at all.

CLIP: Speaker Johnson defends DOGE and sarcastically mocks Democrats as insincere (1:48).

I can’t believe I’m noting this as an aside, but as you can see, with vaccine mandates having been included in Johnson’s list, the reckoning is still coming. But set that aside. We have bigger whales to fry today.

Johnson continued. He didn’t just accept DOGE, he endorsed it:

I met with Elon yesterday to get an update. To me, it is very exciting what they’re able to do. What Elon and the DOGE effort are doing right now is what Congress has been unable to do in recent years, because the agencies have hidden some of this from us.

DOGE is uncovering things that we’ve known intuitively have been there, but we couldn’t prove it. Now, the proof is being provided. And no one can argue the counter to that. So stay tuned—there’s a lot more to come.

The courts should take a step back and allow these processes to play out. DOGE is is making sure that your tax dollars are spent in the way they were intended to be spent.

CLIP: Johnson explains how DOGE actually HELPS Congress be a good steward rather than ‘frustrating’ authorized spending, enraging the New York Times (1:32).

With me so far? It was very bad news for the permanent bureaucracy that DOGE and Congress are on the same team. It would have been so much better for them had Congress taken umbrage over the Executive refusing to make payment they’d authorized. But it got so much better.

Then Johnson delivered the coup de grâce, the single sentence revealing a ghastly Sword of Damocles dangling on a gossamer thread right above the Deep State’s masked head, and a critical puzzle piece dropped into what we perceive in the strategic brilliance of Trump’s de-Swamping order of operations. Johnson said:

We have a $36 trillion dollar federal debt. We have got to get ahold of these things. You’re going to see it reflected in the reconciliation package that comes forward, you’re going to see it reflected in the appropriations as we go forward, and you’re going to see it in these efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

And we think the final number on that is going to be substantial and a game changer in Washington.

The clear threat was in Johnson’s final sentence. A game-changer in Washington. DOGE isn’t the weapon, it’s just the canary in the limestone mine. Now that Congress knows where the waste is —like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Department of Education, DEI spending, the Treasury, Social Security, and the rest— legislators are working up a budget bill to nuke the Deep State from orbit.

It’s wonky, but this is very important. The fact Johnson announced a budget bill is critical. Bills related to reconciling the budget can be passed using a process called ‘budget reconciliation,’ which avoids the Senate filibuster and can be approved with a simple majority. In other words, it’s the Deep State’s worst nightmare: first, DOGE identified the bureaucratic bloat, and so now Republicans in Congress have a viable legislative path to cut the guts out of the bloated, mutant Swamp whale.

 
Now we see that the DOGE data dumps have always been paving the way for this— the Congressional reconciliation bill. If Congress does the cutting, it will instantly cure all the alleged ills the Democrats and their captive judges have been complaining about. They howled that Trump was “overriding Congress” by stopping payments and so forth. But Congress is about to stop them.

And who knows what other goodies Republicans might stick in the reconciliation package.

I would bet a week’s salary that USAID, for example, is a dead duck, a spent force, a walking corpse. With DOGE’s data exposing where the transgender Operatic bodies were buried, Congress now has a fact-based justification for deep, tectonic cuts.

In other words, like a covid jab heart attack, the Deep State is suddenly and unexpectedly facing a whole new existential fight that arose right behind it— in Congress.

The Swamp thought DOGE was the main battle group, but it was only a reconnaissance force. Surprise! They wasted weeks trying to block, discredit, and contain DOGE, believing it was the real fight—but they were wrong. DOGE was never the main attack. DOGE was just scouting the battlefield, mapping the enemy’s weaknesses, and exposing vulnerabilities.

 
By shifting the battlefield to a budget reconciliation bill, Trump has neutralized the courts as any significant factor. Unlike executive actions, a budget bill passed through reconciliation is almost untouchable by judicial review. The only real challenges are procedural, which is a Senate issue, not a judicial one.

The Left thought they had Trump boxed in with lawsuits. Instead, they’ve spent weeks planning and fighting over emergency injunctions that will soon be completely irrelevant. The Deep State was preparing for trench warfare in front of judges, but Congress is unleashing a drone hellscape from their rear.

Trump tricked them all. The same activist judges siding against him using Congress as an excuse, must now twist into legal pretzels somehow arguing that neither Congress nor the Executive hold the power of the purse, which is even less constitutionally plausible. In other words, Trump tricked the judges into committing to a Congressional-powers argument, which becomes moot when Congress does it.

Checkmate.

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