NBC News reported shocking interviews with a dozen federal court judges who hid behind anonymity to attack the Supreme Court for overturning their anti-Trump decisions, accusing the conservative dominated Supreme Court of undermining the judiciary.
Seated from left are Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito and Elena Kagan.
Standing from left are Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
This is the latest in an ongoing battle this year between anti-Trump Resistance judges on the federal bench using their rulings to enact their preferred policies and the Supreme Court trying to rein them in under constitutional order.
With Republicans holding the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrat activists are using their allies on the federal bench to obstruct and delay actions by the Trump administration to aggressively reform the government and rollback decades of entrenched liberal policies.
The attack by the anonymous judges comes the same week as one federal judge went on the record to criticize the Supreme Court in a footnote to a ruling, rejecting recent comments by Justice Neil Gorsuch accusing lower court judges of defying the Supreme Court.
In July, Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a complaint against resistance Judge James ‘Jeb’ Boasberg over comments he made in March to Chief Justice John Roberts questioning whether President Donald Trump would obey court orders.
Excerpt from the NBC News report Lawrence Hurley:
EXCLUSIVE:
Federal judges tell NBC News the Supreme Court has got to do a better job of explaining emergency rulings, with frequent decisions in favor of Trump at least appearing to validate harsh criticism of the judiciary at a time of rising threats: pic.twitter.com/hVRwY90CvX
— Lawrence Hurley (@lawrencehurley) September 4, 2025
Federal judges are frustrated with the Supreme Court for increasingly overturning lower court rulings involving the Trump administration with little or no explanation, with some worried the practice is undermining the judiciary at a sensitive time.
Some judges believe the Supreme Court, and in particular Chief Justice John Roberts, could be doing more to defend the integrity of their work as President Donald Trump and his allies harshly criticize those who rule against him and as violent threats against judges are on the rise.
In rare interviews with NBC News, a dozen federal judges — appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country — pointed to a pattern they say has recently emerged:
Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.
And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation.
…The Supreme Court, a second judge said, is effectively assisting the Trump administration in “undermining the lower courts,” leaving district and appeals court judges “thrown under the bus.”
Much more at this link to the NBC News report, including a judge who blames the Supreme Court for death threats, saying they are afraid to answer their door.
MSNBC reported on the federal judge who clapped back at Justice Gorsuch (excerpt):
A federal judge’s ruling for Harvard on Wednesday was significant in rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to exert financial control over the educational institution. But just as notable was a footnote in the ruling that directly called out Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch for his criticism of lower court judges.
“The Court is mindful of Justice Gorsuch’s comments in his opinion in APHA and fully agrees that this Court is not free to ‘defy’ Supreme Court decisions,” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs wrote in the ninth footnote of her 84-page ruling. “APHA” refers to the high court’s shadow docket decision last month in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association, in which the majority backed the Trump administration’s bid to cut NIH research grants.
The NIH case divided the justices to such an extent that five of them wrote separate opinions. Joined by fellow Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh, Gorsuch’s separate opinion cited multiple recent cases in which he said lower court judges bucked clear high court precedent. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” he wrote, lamenting that his court’s interventions “should have been unnecessary.”
He concluded that the phenomenon, as he saw it, underscored “a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress.’” He was quoting a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that warned of “anarchy” if lower court judges don’t follow high court precedent.
…Burroughs took a different approach in the Harvard case. The Obama appointee in Massachusetts turned the mirror back toward the justices in Washington, where, she wrote in her footnote, the high court’s recent emergency rulings on grant terminations “have not been models of clarity” and “have left many issues unresolved.”
She acknowledged that, like lower court judges, the justices are doing their best to resolve complex issues quickly. “Given this, however,” she wrote, it’s “unhelpful and unnecessary to criticize district courts for ‘defy[ing]’ the Supreme Court when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”
Read Justice Gorsuch on the lower courts’ judicial insurrectionism https://t.co/q2I3uXZXNv pic.twitter.com/mtkb0E9iDe
— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) August 22, 2025
The July misconduct complaint against Boasberg was based on reporting by the Federalist’s Margot Cleveland.
The @FDRLST reporting gets results. Our senior legal correspondent @ProfMJCleveland broke the explosive news about Judge Boasberg’s inappropriate comments at the Judicial Conference, which led to this complaint. https://t.co/Uv1GuRscov
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 29, 2025
Federal judge James Boasberg advised Chief Justice John Roberts and some two dozen other judges that his D.C. colleagues were “concern[ed] that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis,” according to a memorandum obtained exclusively by The Federalist. That Judge Boasberg and his fellow D.C. District Court judges would discuss how a named Defendant in numerous pending lawsuits might respond to an adverse ruling is shocking. Equally outrageous is those judges’ clear disregard for the presumption of regularity — a presumption that requires a court to presume public officials properly discharged their official duties.
During the week of March 11, 2025, members of the Judicial Conference met in Washington, D.C., for the first of its two regular meetings. As the U.S. Court’s webpage explains, “[t]he Judicial Conference of the United States is the national policymaking body for the federal courts.”
…In a memorandum obtained exclusively by The Federalist, a member of the Judicial Conference summarized the March meeting, including a “working breakfast” at which Justice Roberts spoke. According to the memorandum, “District of the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg next raised his colleagues’ concerns that the Administration would disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis.”
“Chief Justice Roberts expressed hope that would not happen and in turn no constitutional crisis would materialize,” according to the memorandum. The summary of the working breakfast added that Chief Justice Roberts noted that “his interactions with the President have been civil and respectful, such as the President thanking him at the state of the union address for administering the oath.”
Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) reacted, “Activist judges are so out of control that they don’t even respect the Supreme Court. Why again can’t we impeach them or do anything to hold them accountable?”
Activist judges are so out of control that they don’t even respect the Supreme Court.
Why again can’t we impeach them or do anything to hold them accountable? pic.twitter.com/VGEFeDwfuk
— Rep. Eli Crane (@RepEliCrane) September 4, 2025
The post Rebellion: Anonymous Federal Judges Accuse Supreme Court of ‘Undermining Judicial System’ by Overturning Their Anti-Trump Rulings appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.