WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday accused media outlets of “fearmongering the American people into believing there is a constitutional crisis taking place here at the White House.”
Instead, she claimed the real constitutional crisis isn’t the many executive actions President Donald Trump has taken on everything from birthright citizenship to federal funding but the country’s judicial branch. U.S. District Courts and judges have ordered a dozen temporary injunctions over the past two weeks blocking Trump’s executive actions, a standard practice in major legal disputes involving the federal government.
She said liberal courts and judges are abusing their power to block what she called “President Trump’s basic executive authority. We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law.”
Judges have so far issued temporary injunctions pausing Trump’s executive orders to revoke universal birthright citizenship and to withhold federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities that do not help with immigration enforcement. They have also paused Trump’s federal funding freeze, forced administrative leave for at least 2,000 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development and effort to permit access to Treasury Department records by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given far-reaching powers by Trump to shrink the federal government, has posted on social media that judges who rule against the administration should be impeached.
“A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” Musk wrote about the judge in the Treasury Department case. Vice President JD Vance said Sunday on X, “ If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Several of the lawsuits have been filed on behalf of state’s attorneys general, but others have been filed on behalf of labor unions, advocacy groups and federal workers.
With Republicans controlling the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, media outlets have covered criticisms and questions from Democrats, legal experts and other critics on whether the constutional checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judiciary branches are functioning properly, as Congress falls in line with Trump's agenda. A 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump during his first term, looms over the debate.
The other long-standing check on the presidency, the Congress, is Republican-controlled and has largely gone along with Trump's unilateral actions, including his firing of government watchdogs.
“This is part of a larger concerted effort by Democrat activists and nothing more than a continuation of the weaponization of justice against President Trump,” Leavitt said.
She said the judges’ injunctions are an abuse of the rule of law and an attempt to thwart the will of the American people. Trump on Tuesday said he would comply with court rulings, but suggested he would consider some kind of response to the judges and called their actions a “violation.”
“It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges because that’s very serious, I think it’s a very serious violation," Trump said.
Leavitt said the Trump administration believes it will be vindicated and that the many executive orders Trump has signed will be deemed constitutional and within the law.
“As the president clearly stated in the Oval Office yesterday, we will comply with the law in the courts, but we will also continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure President Trump’s policies can be enacted.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
