Today, Tuesday, March 11, 2025, a couple of things are clear:

(1) Biden-appointed judges are doing everything they can to stand in the way of Trump’s presidency, just as Obama judges successfully did during his first term and are still doing now. (See, e.g., Judge Beryl Howell, a particularly pernicious Obama appointee.)

(2) There’s an increasingly strong likelihood that Biden was, as we all suspected, a mere puppet, so much so that he wasn’t even signing the orders and other official documents issuing from the Oval Office. Put the two together and it might be that, while some eggs cannot be unscrambled (e.g., Biden inviting Putin to invade Ukraine), clearing out illegitimate judges may be on the possible-to-do list.

Image by Grok.

Biden successfully appointed several judges to the federal bench during his term, starting with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who freely admits that she has no idea what a woman is. In the six weeks since Trump took office and undertook a series of initiatives to clean out the government and end antisemitic terrorism in America, these judges have worked overtime to stymie Trump. Here’s just a short list:

• Judge Angel Kelley blocked the NIH from capping at 15% the overhead costs grant recipients can spend.
• Judge Deborah Boardman blocked DOGE from accessing personnel records in the Department of Education.
• Judge Sparkle Sooknanan (who was not raised in America, under the American legal tradition), although she did not issue a ruling, said when hearing oral argument that she’s pretty sure that the president lacks the power to fire members of the Federal Labor Relations Board.
• Judge Amir Ali (who was not raised in America, under the American legal tradition) has made a name for himself blocking Trump administration actions regarding USAID.
• Judge Lauren King blocked an executive order that restricts federal funds from going to hospitals and healthcare clinics that surgically mutilate children in the name of so-called “transgenderism.”
• Judge Loren AliKhan blocked the Office of Management and Budget from putting on a temporary pause all grants, loans, and other assistance programs to review them for fraud or misuse.
• Judge Jamal Whitehead blocked Trump’s efforts to pause and reevaluate Biden’s refugee policies.
• Judge Ana Reyes, who is lesbian, signaled during a hearing her intention to block Trump’s order banning so-called “transgender” people from serving in the military. During the hearing, she effectively made the plaintiffs’ arguments for them, while abusing government counsel.
• And of course, there’s Ketanji Brown Jackson, a reliable leftist vote on the Supreme Court and, if oral argument is any indication, someone who has only a glancing knowledge of the constitution, the law, and even reality.

Each of these judges has concluded either that there is an independent bureaucratic fourth branch of government, unmentioned in the Constitution, that has power on par with the constitutional executive, or that Congress and/or the federal courts have managerial control over federal agencies and departments, effectively sidelining the constitutional executive. Joined by Obama era judges who espouse the same values, these judges are successfully putting myriad spokes in the wheels of everything Trump is doing to make the government lawful, efficient, and small.  

It’s important to consider how these judges gained their power. They did so because Biden nominated them. And Biden nominated them because the Constitution, at Art. II, Sec. 2, Cl. 2, gives to the elected president the sole power to “nominate...Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.”

(As an aside, the same clause gives the Senate the responsibility for consenting to these nominations. Leftist judges should note that the Constitution does not grant Congress the same power over terminating federal employees, other than judges who must be impeached. That loud omission makes clear that while the president needs oversight for hirings, he does not need that same oversight for firings.)

In other words, only the president can nominate judges. No one else can. But what if Biden did not actually nominate these judges? Well, that may open a very interesting door to advancing the Trump agenda.

The autopen scandal suggests that Biden did not, in fact, nominate any of the judges whom the Senate approved. Instead, they were nominated by nameless, faceless, unelected, and very much not-presidential handlers, all of whom worked in the shadows, far from the eyes of the American voters.

There’s a legal concept called “void ab initio,” which means something was legally meaningless from the moment it began. Anything flowing from the legally meaningless act is also meaningless and, therefore, invalid. I would argue that, if Biden did not nominate all these activist judges, their nominations were void ab initio, their confirmations were meaningless, and every one of their actions since taking the bench must be negated.