Democratic Rep. Jayapal: Activist judge vetos are 'critical' to your constitutional rights

The House Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to rein in abuses of power by activist lower court judges, but not without some pushback.

The bill, which passed the committee 14-6, would prohibit lower court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions like the ones used to stymie President Trump’s policies to suspend immigration from high-risk countries. In turn, this would stop activists from getting de facto judicial vetoes via “judge-shopping” in favorable federal circuits.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who has been building her national brand on the far Left for some time now, took issue with the measure, arguing to Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., that nationwide injunctions are important to protecting people’s rights.

Here’s the exchange:

What Jayapal wants us to believe is that these injunctions, which effectively give a single public official the power to undermine the will of the president or Congress with the bang of a gavel, are “critical” to the defense of our inalienable rights.

She says that she does not agree with every nationwide injunction ever issued and tries to make the matter apolitical. One can only wonder, however, how “critical” she might find them if the ratio of progressive activists to constitutionalists in the lower courts were reversed.

It may be tempting to view the never-ending sabotage of the president’s agenda from faraway courtrooms in the Ninth Circuit and elsewhere as a victory for the checks and balances built into our federal system. But they aren’t. In fact, according to Professor Samuel Bray, this particular legal remedy “didn’t exist for the first 170 years of the federal courts” and “no change in legal authority made it possible—no amendment, no statute, no big case.”

As Conservative Review senior editor Daniel Horowitz points out, the commonly understood role of the judicial branch as having a final, de facto veto power over all legislation and executive policy was not the intention of the Framers. The concept of a “council of revision” was originally rejected at the Constitutional Convention, but the judiciary has been grabbing this power for years while Congress looked the other way.

So now, not only do we accept veto power that not even the Supreme Court was intended to have, but we are supposed to allow that same power to every single activist lower court judge with an axe to grind, because twisting the system in such a way is “critical … to protecting your constitutional rights.”

And if you believe that, boy, do I have some exciting bridge-related real estate investment opportunities for you.

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