Over the past week, President Donald Trump's separation-of-powers standoff with Judge "Jeb" Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has continued to escalate. Boasberg doubled down on his earlier "temporary restraining order" blocking Trump's invocation of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to expedite the deportation of Tren de Aragua criminal thugs, while Trump's Department of Justice lawyers defended the administration's legal position before an ideologically mixed three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As of this writing, the D.C. Circuit ruling is still pending.

Boasberg is, of course, hardly the only federal judge who has taken it upon himself to unilaterally bring an entire Trump administration program to a halt. Whether it is USAID funding, DOGE access, or White House executive orders on everything from birthright citizenship to DEI to gender ideology, the lower courts have been in a veritable frenzy to stop the early MAGA 2.0 Trump agenda in its tracks. In doing so, the judiciary has picked up right where it left off the first time around—back during Trump's first term, when lower courts issued 64 so-called "nationwide injunctions" against the administration. The first 44 presidents in American history, combined, didn't face that many "nationwide injunctions!"

As it is often said, we have indeed reached a constitutional crisis in this country—but the perpetrators of the crisis and those taking us to the constitutional brink, as I argued in an UnHerd essay last month, are the lower-court judges themselves. And the ball is now squarely in the court of the two political branches—Congress and the executive branch—to see what, if anything, they will do about it. All available checks and balances, and all remedial options, must be on the table: from judicial impeachment to legislative abolition of "nationwide injunctions" to aggressive jurisdiction-stripping legislation, and more. It is well past time for aggressive action from this Republican-led Congress, acting in tandem with the Republican-led White House.

In 2015, Justice Antonin Scalia concluded his searing dissent in the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, by stating: "With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the 'reasoned judgment' of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence." In 2025, Congress and the president, working together, have many tools at their joint disposal to rein in an out-of-control judiciary. It's time they act on it and remind the judiciary of its own ultimate "impotence."

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