patrick.net

And lawfare is, after all, the Democrats’ favorite tool. So reduced court authority reduces opportunities for lawfare, benefitting conservatives most.

The fight is only starting. Congress holds power to define court jurisdictions and set rules like Issa’s bills limits on injunctions. There is a lot they could do, since only the Supreme Court is explicitly defined in the Constitution’s third Article.

“The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

Congress controls the other courts. Congress can reshape them, reduce their jurisdictions, or even abolish them entirely if it wants (though it’d be political dynamite and practically unworkable). In other words, only SCOTUS is constitutionally immortal. The rest are legislative houseplants. Congress can water them, or not.

And they are thinking about the weed problem hard.

Surely you know the old joke: “What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?” (Answer: “a good start!”). There’s a reason why lawyers are so broadly despised. Law is humanity’s instrument for creating order out of the terror and chaos of nature, where anything goes. The result of law theoretically, is a civil society, where only the good, true, and right things can go.

These days, lawyers are hard at work to replace civilized order with the terror and chaos of nature — which is to say, the seeking of raw power: this is what I can do to you! That primal despotism is the motivating engine of the Democratic Party in its terminal phase, a feral, power-seeking monster. It was why, in case you hadn’t noticed, the essential drive of Woke politics was the sadistic pleasure it took in exacting its endless punishments — cancellation, personal ruin, censorship — not correcting alleged injustices against marginalized minorities. And that tells you, by the way, exactly why the J-6 defendants were treated so harshly by the likes of Judge James Boasberg, Tanya Chutkan, and their colleagues of the DC federal district.

Any lawyer or judge's power ends at the barrel of a gun.

In yet more good news yesterday, and probably not coincidentally, Politico ran a story headlined, “Appeals Court clears the way for Musk, DOGE to resume cuts to USAID.”

Earlier this month, Maryland District Judge Theodore Chuang (Obama appointee) had coughed up a preliminary injunction forbidding anybody —DOGE, Elon Musk, or even Marco Rubio— from working on USAID. Yesterday, a three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit (Trump, Bush, Clinton) ruled 3-0 to toss Judge Chuang’s injunction and ordered that DOGE can keep on cutting while the lawsuit continues.

There isn’t much left to cut.

The court’s decision explained, “While defendants’ role and actions related to USAID are not conventional, unconventional does not necessarily equal unconstitutional.” For those of you following my primer on injunctions, as I predicted, the appeals court found the plaintiffs failed to prove the two hardest elements: they failed to prove a likelihood of success on the merits and failed to prove any irreparable harm.

“To the extent these alleged harms are cognizable damages at all,” the Court explained, “most can be remedied by money damages. Generally, injuries that can be cured by monetary relief, by law, are not irreparable.”

Then, for good measure, the Court briefly considered the government’s case. It did find irreparable harm— for DOGE. “The district court has, based on alleged injuries from a handful of plaintiffs, issued injunctive orders that dictate and restrict a separate branch of government. Unlike the harm alleged by plaintiffs, this harm cannot be remedied by monetary damages. It truly is irreparable.”

That was the shot heard ‘round the world’s courtrooms: District judges enjoining the President are causing irreparable harm.

Finally, warming to its theme, the order added several more refreshing comments about district courts minding their own business. I bet this language will soon begin appearing in all the government’s briefs:

Last, as to the public interest, the public certainly has an interest in ensuring the
government is acting constitutionally. However, the public also has an interest in judges
wielding power only when so authorized. That authorization limits us to deciding cases
and controversies, not political disputes. Cases and controversies involve actual injuries to
actual parties, not injuries that are speculative and extend beyond the parties in this case.
Courts must be wary of stretching to find harm at the preliminary injunction stage when
the record does not support it.

In short, the Trump Agenda sprang forward yesterday like greased lightning. Alas, the lawfare beatings threaten to continue until morale improves. “Supporters of the agency,” WaPo said, meaning grifters and deep-staters, “promised further litigation over the new cuts announced Friday.” Meaning, further litigation in friendlier circuits.

But USAID is already closed, disbanded, and its offices given away. They salted the USAID field.

French Court Bars National Rally Leader Marine Le Pen from Office for 5 Years After Embezzlement Conviction

Le Pen accused the prosecution of attempting to orchestrate her political death, stating, 'It's clear the prosecutor's only goal is to drive Marine Le Pen out of political life.'

From Trump to Le Pen: Lawfare and the New World Order

In 2016, when Donald J. Trump did the unthinkable and beat Hillary Clinton—a woman so ensconced in the halls of Davosian power she might as well have been issued a United Nations passport—the architects of the so-called "Rules-Based International Order" felt a tremor under their polished marble floors. For decades, this Order—an alliance of bureaucrats, multinationals, intelligence agencies, and supranational institutions—had operated under the conceit that history had ended, that global governance would henceforth supersede national sovereignty. Trump's triumph threatened their theology.
To these globalist mandarins, Trump’s insurgency was not merely electoral; it was heretical. He dared to question NATO’s utility, scorned open borders, mocked climate pieties, and—worst of all—promised to put America, not Brussels or Beijing, first. The idea that a nation might chart its own course, free from the guidance of transnational scolds, was an offense that had to be punished—not just to stop Trump, but to send a warning across the world: challenge the Order, and you will be destroyed.
By 2021, the game plan emerged with Orwellian clarity. Four separate prosecutions, nearly a hundred felony charges, and a cumulative sentence that would make Methuselah wince—Donald Trump was to be entombed under a legal avalanche. Not because he was uniquely corrupt, but because he was uniquely defiant. The United States, long a beacon of liberty, now took a page from banana republics, substituting ballots for subpoenas.
But while America’s progressive elite failed to jail Trump (at least so far), they succeeded in unleashing a new form of political warfare across the globe: lawfare as an instrument of regime preservation. The message was clear. Oppose the globalist consensus, and your name will appear on a docket.
Take Marine Le Pen. For years, the French nationalist leader has been the bête noire of Brussels. Her real crime? Proposing that the French—not the European Commission—should determine France’s future. After leading in the polls for the 2027 presidency, she was slapped with a conveniently timed conviction for misallocating parliamentary staff funds—a technicality so esoteric it wouldn’t pass muster in a Texas HOA dispute. On March 27, 2025, a Paris court sentenced Le Pen to a two-year suspended prison term, a fine of €20,000, and—most damningly—a two-year ban on holding public office. This means she is barred from running in the next presidential election. The case, involving €330,000 in alleged misuse of European Parliament funds, was initiated in 2016—conveniently revived just as she surged in the polls. The timing? Not coincidental.
It is worth noting that over a dozen of her National Rally party colleagues were convicted in the same case. The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) referred the case, and the court’s decision—issued without the benefit of a jury—ignored the fact that similar cases in other EU member states have been quietly dropped or settled with modest fines. But Le Pen is not just another MEP. She is a threat to the supranational project. And in this brave new Europe, heresy against Brussels is prosecuted with greater vigor than Islamist incitement.
Germany—poster child for post-nationalist virtue—has declared open season on its own populists. Björn Höcke, a provincial voice for the AfD, faces trial for hate speech over the phrase “Everything for the Fatherland.” Frauke Petry, a former AfD leader, was convicted for perjury over statements about party finances. Meanwhile, the AfD itself is under intelligence surveillance, with whispers of a ban floating through the Bundestag. The crime? National identity.
In Romania, Călin Georgescu—a nationalist outsider—won the first round of the presidential election in November 2024, only to have the result annulled by a court citing “Russian interference.” The evidence? Nonexistent. But he was quickly arrested and charged with “communicating false information” and promoting fascism, rendering him ineligible. Democracy, you see, must be defended—even from the voters.
From South America to Eastern Europe, the same pattern unfolds. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was imprisoned for crossing his country's own border 'illegally' and later slapped with new charges conveniently extending his sentence. In Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk and former President Petro Poroshenko were charged with treason—one for allegedly sharing secrets, the other for buying coal from the wrong region. In both cases, opposition became sedition.
Even celebrity isn't a shield. Ireland’s Conor McGregor, a household name and political aspirant, is on the verge of facing hate speech charges if he dares mount a campaign. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, faces a blizzard of indictments designed to ensure his banishment from politics. Venezuela’s María Corina Machado, banned for fifteen years over a decade-old “infraction,” was erased from the ballot despite winning her primary in a landslide.
In Turkey, Israel, and Austria, the mechanisms vary but the objective remains: judicial leverage against ideological dissent. On March 19, 2025, Turkish authorities arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu—widely considered the leading opposition candidate to President Erdoğan—on charges of corruption and alleged links to the PKK. Critics widely view the arrest as politically orchestrated. Protests erupted nationwide, and nearly 1,900 citizens were detained in the ensuing crackdown. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, former Prime Minister Imran Khan was sentenced to 14 years in prison in early 2025 on corruption charges. His arrest followed a series of legal cases aimed at neutralizing his return to power. Numerous leaders from his party were also jailed or barred from running, effectively sidelining the populist movement ahead of national elections. The fig leaf of legality provides plausible deniability. But only those opposing the Order ever seem to find themselves in the dock.
What was once called democracy has become a curated simulation—democracy if and only if it produces the correct result. This is why the Biden precedent matters. By criminalizing a former U.S. president, he handed moral license to governments from Paris to Tbilisi to Caracas to do the same.
What links all these cases is not the gravity of the crimes—many are trivial, others ambiguous, a few outright fabricated—but the profile of the accused. They are nationalists. Populists. Skeptics of global technocracy. Opponents of forever wars, mass migration, and carbon commandments. For these sins, they must be disqualified. If not by voters, then by judges.
Democracy, in the globalist mind, is too important to be left to the people.
So yes, Trump was the first domino—but he will not be the last. The globalist establishment may wrap itself in the language of liberal democracy, but its actions betray a creeping authoritarianism cloaked in process. The ballot box is now guarded by the gavel. And in this brave new order, the only crime is dissent.

@elonmusk

When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents.

This is their standard playbook throughout the world.

Le Pen was convicted alongside eight other members of the Rassemblement national/Front national, and twelve parliamentary aides. She did not personally embezzle funds or enrich herself from EU coffers. Rather, prosecutors accuse her of directing aides to undertake work for her party while they were receiving salaries from the European Parliament. They claim this happened between 2004 and 2016, and that Le Pen and her associates misappropriated over four million Euros in this way. While nobody doubts the substance of the accusations, what Le Pen did was far from unusual and the sentence just seems ridiculous to me. Many European parliamentary representatives have used staff paid from parliamentary budgets for party projects – including Franziska Brantner, the present co-chair of German Green Party. Until recently this was a common practice, and even now the distinction between party and parliamentary work is not always easy to maintain, and both routinely and deliberately blurred.

Yes, this is obviously a gross abuse of both the justice system and electoral system in France.

embezzlement sounds like a crime and worse like a self-serving crime of moral turpitude whereby a politician stole from the people. this is why they are choosing to thus name this claim.

but let’s have a look at what really happened:

le pen was "convicted" of using money allocated by the euro parliament to pay for parliamentary assistants. there is nothing improper about that. this is, in fact, what the funds were for. at issue is whether those PA's worked sufficiently on EU-related legislative work as opposed to domestic work. this issue dates from 2004-2016, over a decade old, so hardly new news. the timing itself speaks volumes.

how this is being called “embezzlement” with a straight face is beyond me. this is literally a worker classification/how did you spend you time issue. calling it "embezzlement" is ridiculous. it makes it sound like she ran off with the money. clearly, that’s the point and many of the “media” stories on this are long on emotion and accusation and desperately short on context. ...

i’m sure it had nothing to do with this:




... note that she's the only one they seem to have "investigated." care to wager than basically no french parliamentary leaders could have survived a similar audit similarly applied?

the evidence is already legion:

pierre lellouche, a lawyer and former deputy of the french national assembly, appeared on CNEWS to point out that the current prime minister, François Bayrou, faced the same charge and suffered no consequences.

“Then, last but not least, there is the case of (François) Bayrou, the current prime minister, who has been prosecuted for exactly the same thing, i.e., for abuses of party funding declared as parliamentary assistants in Europe, at the EU parliament. Bayrou emerged from this affair without being in the least concerned. In fact, the public prosecutor’s office has once again referred the matter to the courts, but even so, we’re dealing with a double standard here. It’s a bit surprising.”

is this ringing any bells? perhaps bells around the handing of emails and information or servers and documents?

this is a ridiculous and targeted piece of trumped up lawfare that has become alarmingly common in the US and EU alike. if we don't like you, we arrest you. the selectivity and uneven standards are the key feature of this system.

it’s 1000% deliberate. ...

this is a coup.

it’s the judiciary taking over elections and presidencies, tying opponents in knots and taking them off the board, allowing havoc to be wreaked by one set of activists while arresting all others and sentencing them to real, hard gulag time.

French Court Bars National Rally Leader Marine Le Pen from Office for 5 Years After Embezzlement Conviction

Marine Le Pen Responds to Court Banning Her from Running for President: ‘Millions of French People Have Been Silenced’

In a chilling glimpse of how the U.S. 2024 presidential election could have panned out, French leader Marine Le Pen has been banned from running for president in France by a weaponized court.

Le Pen, head of France’s right-wing National Rally Party and the main rival of liberal French President Emmanuel Macron, reacted to the ruling in a new interview with TF1.

The court accused Le Pen and others in her party of misusing $4.9 million of European Union (EU) funds.

The funds were designated to aid legislators in the European Parliament.

However, the court ruled that Le Pen used the funds to pay party staffers uninvolved in work for the EU parliament.

By convicting Le Pen guilty of the charges, the judges barred the National Rally Party leader from running in the 2027 French presidential election.

She is now banned from running for public office for five years.

“I perfectly understood that the court president was explaining that she was issuing a political ruling,” Le Pen stated.

“The magistrate made it very clear that enforcing the temporary sentence barring me from seeking public office rendered my appeal void and would prevent me from running and getting elected, she said, in the presidential election.

“There are millions of French people who are outraged, outraged to an unbelievable extent when they see that, in France, the country of human rights, judges were implementing practices that we thought were typical of authoritarian regimes,” she continued.

“I think the judges got it wrong,” she said.

“I think they chose to ignore all of the explanations that were given because, in the very first hours of this trial, I had understood that the court was biased against us.

“I did not think the magistrates would go this far against our democratic process and interfere this much with the choice of the French.

“Let’s be clear: I have been silenced but it’s the voice of millions of French people that have been silenced as we speak tonight.”

“I’m a fighter,” she declared.

“I’m not going to let myself be eliminated like that.

“I’m going to pursue every avenue of recourse that I can,” she vowed.

“There’s a small path; it may be narrow, but it does exist.

“In fact, I’m going to ask, in the clearest possible way, for the appeal decision to be handed down enabling me to consider running in the presidential election.

“I will always stand by the French.

“Millions of French people believe in me.

“Millions of French people put their trust in me.

“And I’ve come to tell them, ‘I have been fighting for you for 30 years, and I’ve been fighting injustice for thirty years. And so I’m going to keep doing it. And I will do it all the way.’”

Trump Tells Supreme Court His Presidential Authority Is Under Attack from Activist Federal Judges

President Donald Trump’s administration has issued a plea to the Supreme Court as activist federal judges across the country seek to undermine the authority of the White House.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration told the high court that the president’s authority to protect the nation is under siege from lower court rulings.

White House lawyers used a final brief in a high-stakes deportation case to accuse federal judges of imperiling the executive branch’s core powers.

The brief was the last fling before Supreme Court justices are slated to rule on Trump’s use of a 1798 immigration law to deport Venezuelan nationals.

In the filing, Trump admin lawyers outlined what they call a pattern of judicial overreach.

It comes as Trump is under mounting attacks from Democrat-aligned federal judges seeking to undermine the president’s agenda.

In the Wednesday filing, U.S. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said:

“A single district court cannot broadly disable the President from discharging his most fundamental duties, regardless of the order’s label, and irrespective of its duration.”

‘Should Have Recused Himself’: Legal Experts Sound Alarm On Obama-Appointed Judge Blocking Trump’s Deportations

As U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg continues to be a thorn in the side of the Trump administration’s effort to deport gangbangers, legal experts have begun to raise questions about his handling of the case.

The Obama-appointed judge in March blocked President Donald Trump from using wartime authorities to send suspected Tren de Aragua gangbangers to a mega-prison in El Salvador, prompting incredible pushback from the president himself. As the challenge to the deportations play out in court, some legal experts have argued Boasberg should recuse himself from the case entirely, while others say he appears to be “making policy from the bench.”

Critics have pointed to the fact that Boasberg’s daughter, Katharine Boasberg, works for an organization whose founder openly celebrated her father’s decision to halt the deportations.

“Under Canon 3 (C) (1) of the ‘Code of Conduct for United States Judges’ it states that judges must disqualify themselves from a case ‘in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned,'” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Given that his daughter works directly for an organization that supports illegal aliens, opposes deportation of aliens, and has voiced its support for Boasberg’s action in this very case, the impartiality of his judgment is obviously open to be reasonably questioned.”