President Trump downplayed Chief Justice John Roberts’s statement Tuesday in defense of the judiciary, but the President had better be careful. The White House strategy of bashing judges and jamming the Supreme Court could backfire in spectacular fashion.

Guessing the thinking at the High Court is a fraught exercise. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Chief Justice in his nearly two decades at the Court it’s that he hates being dragged into political fights. He prizes the reputation of the Court as a neutral arbiter of the law and protector of the Constitution.

Yet on Tuesday the Chief had little choice but to speak up for the judiciary after Trump called for the impeachment of district court Judge James Boasberg. As the judiciary’s top man, the Chief has to defend the third branch of government from marauding by the political branches. The Chief’s statement released by the Court was a matter-of-fact summary of the law, but we’ll bet he was none too pleased with being drawn into the fray.

Trump told Fox News the next day that his Administration would never defy a court order, which we hope is true. But a day later he was taunting the High Court again on Truth Social over lower-court rulings.

“It is our goal to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and such a high aspiration can never be done if Radical and Highly Partisan Judges are allowed to stand in the way of JUSTICE,” Trump wrote. “If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!”

The Chief knows, and our readers should expect, that this is only the beginning of a tough period for the Court. Trump, guided by aides Russ Vought and Stephen Miller, is deliberately pushing the boundaries of the law to achieve their policy goals. They are inviting legal challenges, often deliberately, that they hope will make it to the High Court and vindicate their views.

Some of these legal projects coincide with long-time themes of the Chief and some of his fellow Justices. As James Taranto writes nearby, the Chief has made a cause of restoring the proper understanding of executive power under the Constitution. The Chief wrote the landmark majority opinions that upheld Trump’s travel ban in the first term and partial presidential immunity in 2024.

This project now means cleaning up such constitutional anomalies as Humphrey’s Executor (1935), which said a President couldn’t fire members of an independent agency without legal cause. Trump’s firings of Federal Trade Commissioners and a National Labor Relations Board member seem likely to make it to the High Court.

But other Trump priorities will be closer calls, especially regarding the Court’s so-called emergency docket. That’s when the government wants the Justices to weigh in at an early stage of a case, say, to uphold or overturn a lower-court injunction or ruling. This is why Trump and the MAGA media are howling at Chief Justice Roberts to overrule Judge Boasberg on the expulsion of Venezuelan gang members under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act.

Yet the more Trump berates the Chief, the more the Chief will look like he’s bending to political pressure if the Court does rule in emergency fashion. The Chief hates being put in this position, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett has made clear she thinks the Court should use the emergency docket sparingly.

Trump may find the more he speaks up the more the Court resists his demands. This isn’t unlike his berating of the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. This can make it harder for the Fed to cut lest it look vulnerable to political pressure.

All the more so if the Justices perceive that Trump is encouraging the MAGA-verse to attack the judiciary. Some Trump loyalists are already blaming the Chief for Judge Boasberg. They say he and Justice Barrett should have sent a stronger message to lower courts by overruling a lower-court decision on dispersing $2 billion in USAID funds. We thought the four dissenters on that case were right, but beating up the other Justices won’t make them more likely to go along on the next one.

Trump might also think about whether he wants another Supreme Court appointment or two. Clarence Thomas is 76 and Samuel Alito turns 75 on April 1. Both will face a choice of whether to resign during the Trump Presidency or risk another election cycle.

Neither one is likely to resign if he lacks confidence in Trump’s judgment about who might be his successor. They have too much respect for the law, and the Court, to resign if they think Trump will nominate a results-first, law-second legal hack.

The irony of Trump’s judicial taunts is that he has a Supreme Court more favorable to his claimed constitutional views than any President in memory. Three of the Justices were his choices, and all were good ones. He’s more likely to get the results he wants if he trusts their judgment.

The Wall Street Journal