A staggering 92% of the judges who blocked President Donald Trump’s policies during his first term were appointed by Democrats — and Republicans say it’s not just coincidence. According to Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), this is the product of a calculated legal resistance effort to derail Trump’s agenda through the courts.

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week, McClintock cited findings from the Harvard Law Review, which analyzed the 64 nationwide injunctions that hampered the Trump administration between 2017 and 2021. The verdict? Nearly all of them came from Democrat-appointed judges.

“That at least suggests a rather partisan tilt to all of this, and it’s not being done even-handedly,” McClintock said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich didn’t mince words: “This is clearly a judicial coup d’état.” He argued that a rogue bench of partisan judges is now functioning as a political arm of the Democratic Party — one determined to stop Trump from implementing the reforms Americans voted for.

“You don’t have this many judges issuing this many nationwide injunctions, all of them coming from the same political ideological background, and just assume it’s all random,” Gingrich said. “This is a clear effort to stop the scale of change that President Trump represents.”

Republicans are increasingly sounding the alarm over how the judiciary — once a neutral arbiter of the law — is being weaponized to kneecap executive authority when it aligns with conservative policy.

This concern isn’t theoretical. Trump’s second term is already facing roadblocks from the same predictable corners of the bench:

• Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, is now under fire from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who filed Articles of Impeachment after Boasberg tried to block Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport dangerous gang members.
• Four federal judges have moved to stop Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to illegal aliens. Two were appointed by Democrats.
• Judge Amy Berman Jackson, appointed by Obama, is attempting to preserve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a bloated agency Trump is seeking to dismantle.
• Judge Matthew Kennelly, a Clinton appointee, is blocking Trump’s push to eliminate DEI programs inside federal agencies.
• Just in the past month, Biden-appointed Judge Loren AliKhan and Obama-appointed Judge John McConnell both stopped Trump from freezing taxpayer-funded grants to NGOs, many of which actively oppose his immigration policies.
• Most recently, Judge Brian Murphy, another Biden appointee, ruled against Trump’s effort to fast-track deportations of foreign criminals and gang suspects, citing that some were being returned to countries that aren’t technically their nation of origin — a delay critics say puts Americans at risk.

The cumulative effect of these rulings has created what many on the right are calling a shadow veto power — one where individual judges can override the will of the electorate with a single pen stroke.

Gingrich believes the solution is clear: “The judiciary should not have the power to paralyze a duly elected president from fulfilling their mandate.” Calls are now growing for Congress to restrict the use of nationwide injunctions by single district judges and to revisit the role of the federal bench in policymaking.

As Trump moves swiftly to enforce his America First policies in his second term, it’s evident that his biggest battle may not be with Congress or the media — but with the entrenched judicial resistance determined to preserve the status quo at any cost.