Who Shall Rule - Appointed, Unelected Federal Judges Or The President Elected By The People?

That's the real question: the Administrative State is fighting to continue its unconstitutional usurpation of power by seeking out judges to rule for it. Is the President obliged to obey their orders?

“WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge found Monday that the Trump administration hasn’t fully followed his order to unfreeze federal spending and told the White House to release billions of dollars in federal funding.

U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell became the first judge to find that the administration had not obeyed a court order. Federal money for things like early childhood education, pollution reduction and HIV prevention research has remained tied up even after his Jan. 31 order to blocking a planned halt on federal spending, he found.

McConnell ordered the Trump administration to “immediately take every step necessary” to follow his temporary restraining over halting its plans for a sweeping freeze of federal funding, the latest in a string of legal setbacks.

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The judge said his temporary restraining order also blocks the administration from cutting billions of dollars in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health.

“These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the (temporary restraining order),” he wrote. “The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country." https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-finds-trump-administration-hasn-180949677.html

Short answer - if he is obliged to obey the orders of these appointed judges, the unelected and unconstitutional Administrative State - exercising powers not enumerated in the Constitution, and reserved to the people or the States under the Tenth Amendment - wins. But this was never the intent of the Founders when they established a limited government with clearly enumerated and stated powers - and it was put in plain language by the Tenth Amendment in the original Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would not have been ratified.

“On Saturday, federal judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a sweeping, albeit temporary, restraining order barring employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing payment systems at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Here’s former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, writing at National Review:

Judge Paul Engelmayer has paused the access of the Department of Government Efficiency to what are described as “sensitive” (i.e., apparently not classified) Treasury records. DOGE, which is an overhaul of the U.S. Digital Service, is a temporary technology unit within the Executive Office of the President, established by a Trump executive order on January 20 and led by Elon Musk. Musk is a special government employee, as are members of the teams working under his direction. They are carrying out President Trump’s 18-month agenda (terminating July 4, 2026) to modernize federal technology and maximize government efficiency and productivity.

The stated concern of Judge Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, is that DOGE’s access to the sensitive records carries a high risk of improper disclosure or hacking. These concerns are echoed—coincidentally, I’m sure—in a New York Times op-ed today, jointly penned by five mostly Democratic former Treasury secretaries (Robert E. Rubin, Lawrence H. Summers, Timothy F. Geithner, Jacob J. Lew, and Janet Yellen). As they tell it, “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants,” an administrative “norm” they fear “has been upended” by Trump, Musk, and the “so-called” DOGE—“political actors [who] have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants.”

Indeed, Engelmayer’s order declares that only “civil servants” and not “political appointees” can access the payment systems. But the implication of that would be that President Trump has no authority to oversee the operations of the Treasury—which is, constitutionally, part of the executive branch and thus under the president’s authority. As McCarthy goes on to write, “So absurd is the notion that the chief executive is powerless to investigate how executive agencies execute their responsibilities that to state it is to refute it.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/the-courts-are-slowing-trump-down-not-necessarily-stopping-him/

My advice to President Trump is to ignore those orders and continue to act in accordance with the Tenth Amendment, and the original intent of the Constitution. Let the courts try to enforce their orders - what will they do, arrest the President? Or arrest those acting under his authority, which is the same thing? And such moves must be resisted, with force if need be, for what is at stake is the final restoration of Constitutional rule to the United States - or the establishment of unaccountable and unlimited administrative tyranny - the choice which has been so starkly presented. Matters are at a head, and the Constitution must be upheld, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.