“I Understand You Hate Trump” – Hawley Destroys Radical Dem Professor for Calling Trump LAWLESS
The Hypocrisy of the Universal Injunction: When Legal Principles Become Political Weapons
The recent Senate hearing was not a sober exploration of legal precedent; it was a brutal, necessary public dissection of how political animus has thoroughly poisoned the judicial review process. Senator Josh Hawley, in a calm but devastating interrogation, cornered a prominent Democratic law professor, forcing her to confront a double standard so glaring it threatens to dismantle the rule of law entirely. The core issue—the use of nationwide or universal injunctions—was revealed to be not a matter of legal philosophy, but a cynical political tool, switched on or off depending on which party occupies the White House.
The tension hinged on a single, damning piece of evidence: the professor’s own past words. When the Biden administration was subject to a nationwide injunction—specifically regarding the FDA’s rules on the abortion pill mifepristone—the professor denounced the move as a “travesty for principles of democracy, notions of judicial impartiality, and the rule of law.” She had identified the exact danger: a single, unelected judge binding the entire nation and parties not even before the court.
Yet, when confronted with the vast number of similar nationwide injunctions leveled against the Trump administration, her principled outrage vanished. The travesty transformed into a necessary act of judicial constraint. Hawley repeatedly demanded a single legal principle to explain this stunning reversal. The response was a floundering attempt at evasion, pivoting from the irrelevance of Marbury v. Madison to vague references of “prudential consideration,” a term Hawley accurately translated as “political.”
The witness’s final, desperate justification was the most damaging: the claim that the former President was “engaged in much more lawless activity than other presidents.” This is the intellectual surrender of a legal scholar who has abandoned the law for partisan activism. It suggests that if you dislike a President enough—if you perceive them as uniquely “lawless”—then the legal system’s fundamental constraints and principles of consistency can simply be jettisoned. This is not jurisprudence; it is a rationale for a judicial coup.
Hawley’s argument was relentless and simple: principles must be constant. A system cannot survive when a remedy—which was virtually unheard of before the 1960s, and exploded in use against one specific administration—is a “travesty” one day and a necessity the next. The professor’s silence in the face of the question, “What is the principle?” spoke volumes. The principle, as laid out by her own hypocrisy, is merely the desired political outcome. When the injunction restricts a Republican, it is “warranted and called for.” When it restricts a Democrat, it is a catastrophe for democracy.
This is the very essence of politicization in the courts. It erodes public faith and turns judges into what the witness herself once decried: “politicians in robes.” The true travesty is not the injunction itself, but the willingness of legal elites to wield such a power selectively. By refusing to commit to ending nationwide injunctions for all—a remedy that binds non-parties and was historically alien to American law—the witness made it clear that she was not fighting for the rule of law, but for the ability to bind her political opponents, specifically the former President.
The survival of the American legal system depends on the neutral application of rules. When the Supreme Court itself has warned against judges acting as “roving commissions” to set national policy, and yet one side of the political aisle celebrates this exact behavior when it suits them, we are teetering on a dangerous precipice. Hawley’s closing point stands as a chilling warning: a legal system built on the premise that one party deserves “no holds barred” treatment while the other is protected by a shield of “principles” is a system that cannot, and should not, endure. The demand for a consistent, non-partisan standard for injunctions is not a defense of a politician; it is a desperate attempt to save the integrity of the courts from those who would use them as a mere extension of their political will. The failure to offer that standard in the hearing confirms that, for many in the legal and political elite, the result is paramount, and the rule of law is purely optional.
