A day before the well publicized ‘No Kings Day’ Protests on October 18, 2025, the federal courts ran out of money. Apparently they’ve been running on various reserve funds since the shutdown began. Congress is closed, though Democrats keep working. The House of Representatives was sent home by Speaker Johson, while Senate republicans presumably court political lobbyists and ‘do lunch.’ The federal courts will now be forced to shut down many functions, while increasing the backlog of cases. The US Supreme Court, manned by the same 6 corrupt republican judges who concocted a grant of near absolute immunity for Trump, will persevere in their ongoing ignoble fascist quest to crown the first American monarch. With federal court access cut off, the only government officials remaining would be the executive branch. And perhaps, that was the plan all along.
The question none dare ask
Was the republican sponsored government shutdown engineered to cripple the federal courts? Professor David Cay Johnston spoke to this theory on the Mark Thompson show as he asserted…”if there’s no access to the courts–there’s no functioning government.”
For those who are unfamiliar with David Cay Johnston’s vast body of work, his resume includes the following:
“Pulitzer Prize winning-investigative reporter. Author of four bestsellers and four other books. Former staff writer at The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury.”
“On faculty at Syracuse University College of Law for 15 years. Earlier adjunct teaching journalism at the University of Southern California and UCLA Extension. Co-founder of DCReport.org, a nonprofit and ad-free news service. Former president of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and board president of Investigative Post (Buffalo).”
To further quote from David Cay Johnston:
… “the courts are about to shut down. How convenient for Donald. If the courts shut down and his goons drag you off the street, where are you going to turn with a motion for habeas corpus, something by the way, Trump in a press conference, … in a meeting in the Oval Office the other day, apparently thought was a person … an indication of his mental decline … and one of the legal theories about invoking the Insurrection Act, a terribly written law that’s 200 years old is that, um, if there’s no access to the courts–there’s no functioning government.”
“So, don’t, you shouldn’t be surprised should Donald announce on Friday, Saturday, or somewhere in the very near future that he is invoking the Insurrection Act. The White House has already made it clear that they’re aware of the legal controversies over the nature of that law and their position is Congress has known since the end of the Civil War that this is a badly written law and they haven’t fixed it, therefore they must approve of the sloppy wording in this law. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, he can now put troops on the street against American citizens, he can arrest people, there’s no courts to hear habeas corpus motions, he can approve as he said–maximum force, I think that’s very clear, THAT MEANS SHOOTING AMERICANS, so, I’d, I’d be very worried.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) documents the dictators’ playbook, echoing Johnston’s point
Johnston’s analysis isn’t hyperbole. It’s based in history and fact. The Human Rights Watch Foundation (HRW) has spent the last 20 years documenting the strategies used by tyrants and formulated substantive counter strategies to dismantle those same tyrannical regimes. Founded by human rights champions such as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and human rights dissident Vaclav Havel; (HRW) has provided support for innovative programs actively fighting these tyrannical regimes. HRW published a piece in 2023 that articulated how dictators must shut down legitimate and independent courts. Titled: The Dictators Toolkit: Disguised Judicial Attacks, authors Venla Stang, Hannah Van Dijcke outlined the thinly disguised strategies used to defang independent courts. The piece explained how even “creeping authoritarian regimes” view independent judges as a dystopian nightmare positioned to nullify their tyrannical wet dreams from coming to fruition. Stang and Van Dijicke explained that while overt dictatorships either fire or arrest judges, (as the Turkish dictator did in 2016, arresting hundreds of judges); the tactics used by “creeping authoritarian regimes” are disguised as legitimate procedural complaints engineered to harass and intimidate. Such regimes are termed “hybrid authoritarian” as seen in Hungary, Bolivia, Kenya, and India. They constitute electoral fraud, while still flaunting the trappings of democratic legitimacy. (HRW) then outlined the following three strategies used to attack an independent judiciary.
Strategy #1: Changes to Judicial Tenure…
Sudden changes to judicial tenure is one method utilized to remove independent justices. It can involve forced early ‘retirements’ or blatantly stripping tenure. This tactic was used in Hungary and Bolivia. The Hungarian regime forced out some 300 judges in 2012 by lowering the mandatory retirement age. Even after the European Court of Justice declared the law to be incompatible with EU law, many of these judges were unable to reclaim their positions on the bench, having been replaced with Orban loyalists.
The Bolivian dictatorial regime went further. They enacted a law in 2010 which stripped Bolivian judges of tenure altogether. Due to this law, approximately 47% of Bolivian judges had temporary positions in 2022. This law is a violation of Principle 7 of the UN Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary.
Strategy #2: Judicial Transfers
This strategy speaks for itself. Independent jurists critical of an aspiring dictator are suddenly transferred to less influential court jurisdictions as a career punishment. India has a special penchant for this particular tool in the dictators’ handbook, which violates Principle 2 of the UN Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary. Principle 2 clearly states that members of the judiciary must have the power to decide matters “without any restrictions, improper influences, inducements, pressures, threats or interferences, direct or indirect, from any quarter for any reason.”
Finally, Strategy #3: Judicial Budget Cuts
The HRW piece reported how cutting judicial budgets also dismantles an independent judiciary. To quote: “Under the guise of financial responsibility and austerity measures, regimes often reduce the court’s operating budget or judges’ salaries or benefits so drastically that they are unable to properly exercise their checking function. Principle 7 of the UN Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary recognized that adequate resources are essential for the judiciary to perform properly.”
And doesn’t this last strategy look familiar? As David Cay Johnston noted, the present government shutdown is mighty convenient for Donald. You can see how this Republican sponsored shutdown plays in Trump’s favor. Now while the federal law requires those classified as ‘essential workers’ to remain on the job–without pay; what happens to the federal courts, the same federal courts that could theoretically put a halt to Trump’s assault on our democratic rights? This strategy looks suspiciously similar to the tactic noted by Human Rights Watch, (which cuts the budget of the Judiciary), thus crippling their work.
Federal ‘essential workers’ forced to work without pay
As stated above, federal workers classified as ‘essential’ are forced to work without pay during a government shutdown. They do receive compensatory reimbursement after the shutdown has ceased per The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 (Public Law 116-1), which includes back pay. Of course, this doesn’t help federal essential workers pay their rent or buy groceries right now. And while federal judges are required to continue working, they will reduce staff, thus rendering the court unable to fully meet their obligations. So, while the federal courts will remain ‘technically’ open, they will be essentially ‘shut down.’
And as David Cay Johnston said earlier; “How convenient for Donald.” But, Johnston’s not the only party concerned with this development.
The Brennan Center For Justice weighed in on this issue.
Now while Chief Judges in multiple federal districts have designated all court employees as ‘essential’; the work slowdown will grow exponentially. The present federal shutdown leaves multiple questions unanswered regarding the continued functioning of the federal courts. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote of this during a similar shutdown in 2019, as they explained that they will “operate under the terms of the Anti-Deficiency Act,” which authorized “essential work” to be continued once appropriations run out. The Brennan Center then explained that each individual federal court would have the authority to “determine for itself the staff necessary to “”support its mission critical work.”” The delays caused by the shutdown will reverberate throughout the entire system, and that ‘conveniently’ includes immigration courts. During the 2019 shutdown, the immigration courts were forced to postpone thousands of new cases, while facing a backlog of some 800,000 cases that never saw the light of day. And maybe that’s the point. Whether by a ‘happy fascist coincidence’ or by design, the court delays will, most likely, ramp up DOJ sponsored illegal deportations. We have already witnessed how the Trump DOJ under Pam Bondi demanded immigration judges drop cases before scheduled hearings. This DOJ demand wasn’t a function of staffing shortages. It was a sleazy tactic which allowed ICE to scoop up immigrants dutifully waiting to appear for their day in court. This isn’t the first time Bondi’s DOJ has labored to cripple the immigration courts. Back in February of 2025, the DOJ fired multiple immigration judges in spite of a massive backlog of cases.
One of the fired immigration judges, Kerry Doyle posted on LinkedIn, the following:
“This firing occurred despite the fact that the Immigration Court currently has in the neighborhood of 3.5 MILLION pending cases and DOJ is asking Congress for more money to hire more people at EOIR!” (It should be noted that EOIR refers to the Executive Office of Immigration Review). Doyle further alleged that the firings were ‘political.’ I would add that the firings were worse than ‘political’, but rather part of a plot to dismantle and further cripple an already understaffed immigration court. We have witnessed how immigrants who have followed the impossibly confusing maze of laws, are then summarily picked up by ICE and sent to prison camps without due process. Instead of hiring more judges, the Trump administration is pushing to hire more ICE agents. NBC News reporters Julia Ainsley, Aaron Gilchrist, Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Megan Lebowitz reported February 15, 2025 that the Trump administration ”has instead focused its efforts on hiring staff to aid in mass deportations, which Trump has promised will result in “millions and millions” of people being removed from the country.”
The DOJ scam of dropped cases
Once an immigration case is ‘dropped’ per DOJ attorney request, the migrants are then generally kidnapped by ICE without ever being afforded their ‘day in court.’ In this action the courts are complicit in denying due process rights, along with ICE and the Trump DOJ.
The American Immigration Council on ‘dropped’ cases
The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan group that advocates for actual justice in our broken and corrupt immigration system. The group has dubbed the federal immigration courts as the …”new cog in the deportation machine.” They provided data analysis that ”shows ICE shifting thousands of noncitizens from immigration court proceedings to expedited removal and immigration judges’ complicity with this tactic.”
The group proceeds to explain how this … “shift is particularly harmful for noncitizens who lack legal representation and knowledge of the intricacies of immigration law and procedure. It also raises concern that immigration courts and judges are becoming cogs in a deportation machine, rather than anything resembling neutral arbitrators of immigration law.” This strategy began May 20th, 2025 in concert with ICE then arresting the very immigrants who have ‘done the right thing’, and shown up for their court date. ICE then processes these immigrants with a policy known as “expedited removal” which provides far fewer (if any), due process safeguards.
Expedited removal scam
Once again, the American Immigration Council provided an explanation of this policy which grants the surface trappings of legality but is sorely lacking in legitimacy.
“Expedited removal is a process by which low-level immigration officers can summarily remove certain noncitizens from the United States without a hearing before an immigration judge. Undocumented immigrants placed in expedited removal proceedings are entitled to access the asylum system if they express fear of persecution, torture, or of returning to their home country.”
This ‘expedited removal’ policy has been in effect since 1996, instituted by the Clinton administration, as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Its present widespread abuse has made a mockery of any legitimate rule of law, as there are few checks on how ICE applies this arbitrary power. To add further insult to injury, those subjected to expedited removal …”generally have no right to challenge their deportation in federal court, thanks to jurisdiction-stripping provisions in the 1996 law which created the process. This means that even where an immigration officer acted unlawfully in issuing an order of expedited removal, a noncitizen is severely restricted in their ability to challenge that decision.”
Ironically, in 2020 the conservative majority on the Supreme Court upheld this law and ruled that this policy of ‘expedited removal’ did not violate habeas corpus or due process rights. Once again, this judicial stacked deck further compounds the insanely confusing maze of immigration rules making the idea of “coming here the right way” virtually impossible. With the present government shutdown, these courts will be unable to fulfill their duties, which grants ICE license to use this ‘expedited removal’ tactic. Court intervention has become a cruel joke.
Tying the coincidental issues together
Unfortunately, illegally attacking immigrants isn’t the only area where federal court action is rendered impotent by the shutdown. It is, however, the click bait guaranteed to garner the most media attention, and yet, there is a greater constitutional danger present, namely the extra-judicial seizure of unlimited executive power. Today it’s immigrants who are in the cross hairs of Trump’s illegitimate army. Tomorrow it could be anyone. Trump and his cabinet are already targeting the 1st amendment for future criminalization. In fact, the focus shouldn’t merely rest with Donald Trump. We need to hold his enablers criminally accountable. The fact that Trump is legislating via executive order should be a subject of criminal investigation. More specifically, the question must be asked; who is writing these executive orders that are dismantling the Constitution? Certainly not Trump. He’s not that prolific.
The American people have a right to know who is responsible for this flood of executive orders that has systematically turned the US Constitution into little more than discarded excrement flushed down Trump’s ugly gold toilets.
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