Does Trump have the political capital to tell SCOTUS no on USAID ruling?

On Wednesday, March 5, SCOTUS in a 5-4 vote ruled to reject the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court order requiring nearly $2 billion in USAID funds to be unfrozen. Conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the Democrat wing of the Supreme Court, tipping the scale against President Trump.

Steve Deace wasn’t surprised by Barrett’s vote.

“She’s been a colossal disappointment from her very first year on the Supreme Court when she voted almost 70% of the time with the left-wing side of the court,” he says.

However, it was Justice John Roberts who angered him the most.

“John Roberts just spanked a lower court last week … for thinking it had the jurisdiction to do something it doesn’t have the jurisdiction to do,” Deace says. “He wrote a scathing rebuke of this. … How in the Sam Hill does John Roberts issue that opinion last week and then side with this one?”

Regardless of how disappointing the SCOTUS ruling was, Deace always knew that the MAGA agenda could only enjoy smooth sailing for so long.

At the beginning of Trump’s term, he predicted that we would “eventually get to a point, March or April, where the president has kind of exhausted how many shots at the Death Star he can take.”

This ruling indicates that that has happened.

“It’s ship-to-ship combat now. We’re kind of getting into that stage of this fight now, and the empire is going to strike back,” he says.

Deace thinks that President Trump has the political capital to win this fight.

Lower court judges, like U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who issued the original order demanding USAID funds be unfrozen, were “taught day one of law school that a court determines its own jurisdiction,” says Deace. “There’s no jurisdiction here — none.”

If we continue “letting a bunch of unelected people claim power and jurisdiction they don’t have,” the MAGA mandate will continue to be stifled.

“Now it’s time to DOGE the courts,” he says. “This is the time to say, ‘Stick it where the sun don’t shine, we’re not doing it,’ and teach civics to the American people like you’re teaching budget to them right now through DOGE.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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