President Donald Trump publicly called on Republican lawmakers to pass legislation to rein in “rogue judges” and slammed jurists as “criminals” who hurt the country with their rulings.
“The time has also come for Republicans to pass a tough new crime bill that imposes harsh penalties for dangerous repeat offenders, cracks down on rogue judges,” Trump said Wednesday night at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington. “We got rogue judges that are criminals. They’re criminals. What they do to our country, the decisions that they hand down and hurt our country.”
Trump spoke less than two weeks after Chief Justice John Roberts called for an end to “hostility” against federal judges.
“Personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop,” Roberts said at a Rice University event, without mentioning Trump by name.
Trump, in his remarks, pointed to recent court decisions he disliked, including the Feb. 20 US Supreme Court ruling striking down Trump’s global tariffs. He criticized the justices for not including “one little sentence” to shield the federal government from having to refund duties already paid.
He said two of the justices he appointed “sicken me because they’re bad for our country,” in an apparent reference to how Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett voted in the tariffs case.
Trump has kept up with steady criticism of the Supreme Court since the tariff decision, complaining in a March 15 social media post that the Supreme Court is “completely inept and embarrassing.”
In his appearance Wednesday, Trump also slammed a federal district court judge’s approval a $2.8 billion settlement last year that paved the way for college athletes to be paid for their name, image, and likeness.
Trump said the decision, appearing to refer to one by Senior Judge Claudia Wilken of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was a “horrible decision” that “destroyed college sports.”
“A judge who knew nothing about sports, a female, I believe, not that that matters. I have to put that preface in there. A female, I believe, who knew nothing about sports, totally upended all of sports,” Trump said.
Threats against federal judges have heightened in recent years. Federal authorities logged 564 threats to federal judges last fiscal year, up from 509 the year prior, according to data from the US Marshals Service.
Federal judges have also described receiving unsolicited pizza deliveries to their personal residences, a signal the sender knows where the judge lives. Some deliveries have been sent in the name of Daniel Anderl, the son of a New Jersey federal judge who was killed in 2020 by a disgruntled attorney posing as a delivery driver.
House Republicans passed legislation last year to limit the authority of federal trial judges to block policies nationwide. However, efforts to curb the judiciary’s power are unlikely to gain traction in the narrowly divided Senate, where bills need the support of at least 60 senators to move forward.
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