Ever since Donald Trump took office, federal judges have undertaken a concerted effort to suspend the power of the Executive Branch, unlike anything else that’s ever happened in this country. The words “judicial coup” do not begin to describe what’s been going on. In every case — whether they’re blocking the Trump administration from deleting trans propaganda on federal websites, or from terminating federal employees, or from deploying the National Guard — these individual, unelected federal judges have determined that the president of the United States had somehow overstepped his authority under the Constitution.
This is obviously an unsustainable situation. If judges are going to overturn every single significant decision the president makes, then the judges have effectively become president. Eventually, something has to give. That’s why a lot of commentators, myself included, have called on the White House to simply ignore these rulings. Other than impeaching and removing judges — which is impossible, given that Democrats have too many votes in the Senate — ignoring courts that go rogue seems like the only real option. Andrew Jackson did it before, and Donald Trump (who happens to be a big fan of Andrew Jackson) can do it again.
But there is actually one additional approach that the Trump administration could take, before we decide to simply do away with the court system altogether. And based on recent reports, it looks like the White House is seriously considering this particular route. I’m talking about invoking the Insurrection Act, the federal law that permits the president to federalize the National Guard and deploy U.S. troops for law enforcement purposes in U.S. cities.
When the Insurrection Act is discussed in the press, of course, it’s described as the mother of all power grabs. Democrats pretend it hasn’t been invoked more than two dozen times in this country’s history, most recently to suppress the L.A. riots. They don’t want to talk about the fact that several presidents — including some of their heroes, like JFK and FDR — all invoked the law, mainly to enforce racial integration.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Republicans point out, correctly, that the Insurrection Act is necessary to put down lawlessness in cities like Portland and Chicago — lawlessness that’s reached almost comical levels of absurdity, as police supervisors have made it clear that their officers should not assist federal agents who are being actively attacked.
Here’s audio from the Chicago police scanner, to give just one example.
Dispatchers told officers not to assist federal agents who were being surrounded by a mob. Listen:
PLAY THE TAPE.
STOP protecting criminals:
“They were requesting the police—we’re not sending.”
Not only did Chicago’s leaders refuse to send support to federal law enforcement officers in danger, now they’re lying about it.
Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/7hz1dZOv1B
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 7, 2025
Credit: @DHSgov/X.com
“They were requesting the police—we’re not sending.” That’s the decision that’s been made by local law enforcement in Chicago (or, more accurately, by the Democrats who run the city). It is an admission — which they also put in writing, by the way — that local police are unable or unwilling to maintain law and order. That is, and has always been, a valid justification for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in the U.S. military. I don’t need to recount all of the scenes of violence and anarchy because you’ve probably seen hours of it at this point.
🚨 JUST IN: COUNTLESS anti-ICE “protestors” have now taken over the streets of Chicago
Maybe CHICAGO should be the next city I visit to expose 🤔 pic.twitter.com/ucucexyOSq
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) October 9, 2025
Credit: @nicksortor/X.com
ICE officers are being shot at. They’re being ambushed on the streets, run off the road, boxed in, pelted with objects, and so on. Rioters are blocking federal vehicles on the roadways. Mobs are parading through the streets, preventing people from going where they need to be. The mayor of Chicago, meanwhile, is establishing “ICE-free-zones,” in a clear effort to interfere with federal law enforcement:
🚨 Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson just announced he signed an executive order creating “ICE Free Zones” to ban ICE agents from city property.
This is SICK. He is aiding and abetting criminal illegal immigrant killers, rapists, traffickers, and gang bangers. pic.twitter.com/LaMbxaqePP
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 6, 2025
Credit: @RapidResponse47/X.com
The red line has always been: state and local governments can decide not to actively assist federal officials, but they can’t decide to actively interfere with federal officials, either. That’s how federalism works. It’s how our whole constitutional system works. But the city of Chicago, and many other cities, have decided to break this covenant. They aren’t hiding their intentions. As a result, no reasonable person can deny what’s happening or that the Insurrection Act is the only available remedy to stop the mayhem, as many conservatives have said.
But there is one other major benefit of invoking the Insurrection Act, which a lot of people aren’t talking about. It would finally force federal judges to openly declare their rebellion against the Executive Branch. The Chicago Police Department has just explicitly declared its own rebellion, as you just heard. And if a single federal judge tries to stand in the way of Donald Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, then the judiciary would be doing the exact same thing. The judges couldn’t hide behind legalese or strained interpretations of the law in order to justify their fraudulent decisions. If they attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act, the only way they can do it is by admitting that they’re waging open warfare on a duly elected branch of government.
Here’s why. The Insurrection Act, by design, leaves no room for judges or lawmakers to intervene. The law is based on the president’s constitutional authority to act as commander-in-chief of the military, as well as his responsibility to ensure domestic security.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states, “[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
And with the Insurrection Act, Congress awarded the president the unilateral authority to decide when an insurrection exists, and how to deal with it.
You can pull up the law and read it for yourself. Here’s the relevant portion.
Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.
That’s it. There are no qualifiers. There’s no provision that the president’s declaration of insurrection has to be “reasonable” in the eyes of Congress, or anyone else. There’s no provision that puts a time limit on the president’s authority. There isn’t even a definition of the word “insurrection.” It’s completely up to the president.
If you’re a blue-haired professor at Berkeley Law School, you might hyperventilate about this. Surely, you might say, there have to be “checks and balances” somewhere. But actually, no, there don’t have to be checks and balances. At some point, one branch of government has to be supreme over the others. There’s no way to avoid that. It’s as inevitable as the laws of physics. And the Founders understood that. Yes, they created an intricate system of government, in which the three branches of government serve as a “check” on each other’s power. That’s the ideal situation. That’s how things should work. But the Founders also understood that, if things break down, and one branch of government decides to “check” another branch into oblivion in an attempt to destroy the entire country and our democratic system of government, then there has to be a failsafe. There has to be a “break glass in case of emergency” type of safeguard. And the Insurrection Act — which again, is based very closely on the Constitutional text — is that safeguard. The Insurrection Act says, if things get really, really bad, then the elected president of the United States — who has more of a democratic mandate than any court, or any lawmaker in Congress — can use the military to restore order.
To be clear, undoubtedly, Left-wing judges would try to issue injunctions anyway. I’m not denying that. But the point is that, like the Chicago police department, they’d have to be very, very transparent about what they were doing. The Insurrection Act doesn’t give them any room to weasel out of it. They’d have to state, essentially, that they don’t care about the Constitution, or laws passed by Congress, and that they’re declaring open warfare against the Executive Branch.
Additionally, many of these judges — and all of the Left — are on the record already stating that January 6 was an “insurrection.” Several courts, including the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado, attempted to kick Trump off the ballot in the last election, on the theory that he had committed an “insurrection.” So they’ve already gone out of their way to declare, in no uncertain terms, that a group of old ladies wandering around the Capitol for a few hours constitutes an “insurrection.” Their standard is that, if a few windows are broken, and someone sits on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and steals her lectern, then an “insurrection” has taken place.
If that’s the standard, then there is no conceivable way, morally or logically, to argue that cities like Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles aren’t in a state of open insurrection against the United States. If a mob loitering inside the Capitol for a few hours counts as an “insurrection,” then coordinated and violent attacks on law enforcement, endorsed by state and local officials, certainly qualify as well. They have boxed themselves into this corner. There’s no way around it.
That’s why the arguments from the Left are growing increasingly frantic and incoherent. On social media at the moment, various left-wing figures are doing their best to stoke outrage because they suspect a declaration of insurrection is coming.
Here’s Robert Reich, for example. Watch:
Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to punish anyone who opposes him, and he’s following a four point plan to do it.
Here’s what you need to know about it — and some thoughts on how to respond. pic.twitter.com/QZZOSM4aON
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 8, 2025
Credit: @RBReich/X.com
This is what their argument is going to be. They’re claiming that Trump wants to round up his political opponents and anyone else he doesn’t like. Of course, that’s precisely what Joe Biden’s administration did. They jailed every Trump aide — and ultimately Trump himself — in order to prevent a democratic election from taking place. And Joe Biden didn’t need the Insurrection Act to do any of that.
What people like Robert Reich won’t do, even though it would solve the whole problem, is admit what they’re really interested in. In the first Trump administration, the argument from the Left was that he “put kids in cages” and “separated families” or whatever. That argument never made any sense — families are separated all the time when the parents commit crimes — but it’s what they went with. This time around, their argument is even more tenuous. They’re saying that ICE agents are the modern-day Gestapo because they’re rounding up illegal aliens while wearing masks and making lawful arrests in public places. They say ICE is arresting “American citizens,” even though there isn’t a single case of ICE deporting an actual American citizen, anywhere. (There is a case of an illegal alien taking her children with her, as she was deported, which is obviously a completely different scenario.)
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What’s really going on here, although no one on the Left wants to say it, is that the Democrat Party demands open borders. They do not want any federal immigration enforcement of any kind. That is their platform. But they never say it out loud, explicitly, because they understand how unconvincing and unpopular it is. So Leftist judges hide behind various legalese, while Democrat activists make outlandish claims with no basis in fact. That’s what they’re forced to do. That’s what’s been happening for the last 10 months.
As a result, we have arrived at the absolute limit of “checks and balances” in our system of government. And if the courts and local governments want to keep pushing things, they will rapidly find out that, under our Constitution, they will lose any one-on-one battle with the Executive Branch. That is how our Constitution was structured. It’s how the Insurrection Act was structured. In an ideal situation, of course, this failsafe wouldn’t be necessary. We shouldn’t have to rely on a final line of defense like this. But at the moment, we do. Democrats are daring the administration to invoke the constitutional response to their lawlessness and depravity. In response, the administration has no other choice but to follow the guidance of the Founders and send in the military to quell an insurrection that has rapidly spiraled out of control.