Quote:

---

Well, @EdWhelanEPPC
, the “or else” is obvious. At some point, if this keeps up, we are going to have an executive branch who is not going to allow itself to be dictated to by a (largely Democrat) politicized judicial branch that is ignoring both procedural and substantive rules in order to thwart the will of the elected executive.

I don’t want it to happen. I think Donald Trump should continue to play along with this charade and work through the appeals, despite the impact on his agenda. But if it keeps going like this, there will be a decision point and the judiciary will come out the loser.

There’s no moral obligation to assume that the (often poorly reasoned and contrary to law) decisions of Art III judges are somehow more righteous than the agenda of the elected executive. The age of defaulting to the integrity of institutions is over. Why do you assume that the judiciary is right, as opposed to the executive? Simply because some district court judges said so? The idea that the default must be that the judiciary is acting “competently and lawfully,” as you put it, is ridiculous. You and I have both been in court enough not to believe that.

The key (and essential) check and balance of the executive to the judiciary is the unwritten one – the President can say “No,” and the judiciary can lump it. That’s not preferable. That’s not what anyone wants. That should be a worst case scenario when all other options are gone. But the judiciary cannot be unchecked, and it cannot become a super authority, as it has in other countries, to suppress the express will of the people again and again and again in favor of its own preferences, masking its results-oriented politics in the cloak of the law.

I guess the real question is yours, except addressed to the judiciary following the executive saying, "No more.”

"Or else what, Chief Justice Roberts?"

---