Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough delivered a blistering takedown of MAGA diehards complaining about judicial pushback to President Donald Trump’s deportation policies, saying, “This is what happens in Madisonian democracy!”
The Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order over the weekend to halt the deportation of 250 alleged Venezuelan gang members on a flight to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, claiming that the ruling no longer applied as the plane was over international waters.
The decision, considered to be a defiance of judicial authority, has set the stage for an upcoming constitutional battle. Trump got the ball rolling Tuesday morning by calling for the dismissal of the “Radical Left Lunatic Judge” on Truth Social.
Opening his show with a heated monologue earlier Tuesday morning, Scarborough excoriated pro-MAGA “bloggers” who said the judge’s order was a defiance of the president’s authority. Those who choose to object to the judge’s decision either don’t know their history or are willfully ignoring it and the Constitution, he said.
Looking directly at the camera, Scarborough deliberately spoke slowly and said: “A member of the Trump administration just said he doesn’t care what a judge thinks. News flash from James Madison: You don’t really have that choice!
“You know, the thing is, I hear a lot of people being shocked—‘How could a federal judge do this? Well, Donald Trump won by 1.5 percent and how could’—well, for bloggers, I’ll say this slowly: This is what happens in Madisonian democracy. Federal judges do have the power to question the authority of a presidential action. And then, as some Republican senators, I think John Kennedy from Louisiana, said, you know, that’s why God created the appellate courts.”
Scarborough added: “But just, again, for our blogging friends—do people still blog? I really don’t know. Do people blog? Do they? So for our blogging viewers I am going to talk a little more slowly than usual so they’ll understand it—this happens under America’s Constitution.
“It happened to Barack Obama, a guy who won a massive landslide. Biggest landslide win, I think, that we’ve seen since Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama’s DAPA program was actually stopped by a single federal judge in Texas. He appealed it, and it went up to the Supreme Court, and the court ultimately ruled against the Obama administration.
“You also have Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates being stopped in 2021 by a single federal judge—guess where—in the state of Texas. You also had Barack Obama’s gender policy stopped by a single federal judge in the state of Texas. And that got appealed. And you had George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretap program getting stopped by a single federal judge back in 2007.
“And now what happened after that? What happens under our Constitution? They get appealed. And sometimes the judges follow the lower federal court judges, and sometimes they don’t.”
Scarborough continued: “But every time I hear somebody go: ‘Oh my God, Donald Trump got elected by one and a half percentage points, how in the world could anybody stop a president who got elected by everybody.’ Well, when he got elected, he was elected to lead one of three parts of our government, three separate and equal co-branches. So this is just what happens.
“This happens every year! And the fact that people in the Trump administration and the fact that supporters are acting shocked that a federal judge could do this, just means they either don’t know history, or they’re ignoring history. And no, administration officials don’t have the choice to say, ‘I’m not going to listen to what judges say.’”
Elsewhere on the show, Morning Joe pundit and former Sen. Claire McCaskill said that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were the only two on the bench who weren’t “lost on MAGA island” and have demonstrated a willingness to fight back against the Trump administration’s “Big Government overreach.”
