In June, a federal judge, William G. Young, of the Massachusetts District Court, rejected the Trump administration’s plan to cancel millions of dollars in grants to the National Institutes of Health focused on health problems of African Americans, women and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Young deemed the funding cut discriminatory, “void and illegal,” The New York Times reported. Over an almost half-century career, the judge said, he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this … I would be blind not to call it out.”

However, earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court put Young’s ruling on hold. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch accused him of subverting the court’s will by not deferring to an earlier ruling that voided another decision that temporarily blocked canceling of grants to the Department of Education.

“Lower-court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions but they are never free to defy them,” Gorsuch wrote. “When this court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.”

Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, is 84 and was confirmed as a federal judge, The Times pointed out, before either Kavanaugh or Gorsuch had started law school. “I have served in judicial office now for 47 years. Never before this administration has any judge in any higher court thought to suggest that this court had defied the precedent of a higher court – that was never my intention,” Young stated.

The judge could have pointed out also that, Kavanaugh, at his Senate confirmation hearing, faced accusations of sexual misconduct, including by university professor Christine

Blasey Ford and former classmate Deborah Ramirez. Also, that Gorsuch was nominated after then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked for nearly a year President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to succeed the late Antonin Scalia.

A different perspective on some of the court’s rulings has been coming from the three liberal Justices, especially the latest appointee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, incidentally, while being born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Cutler Bay and attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School.

In August, Jackson dubbed the conservative Justices, in the words of HuffPost, “merely a bunch of partisan hacks,” in her dissent on the case of the NIH grants. She added that, in “a broader sense,” the ruling “is of a piece with this court’s recent tendencies” that “when the judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the court was opting instead “to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious government action as difficult as possible.” She claimed that there were now two rules: “no fixed rules” and “this administration always wins.”

Speaking in July at a function hosted by the Indianapolis Bar Association, Jackson said, in answer to a question, that what keeps her up at nights is “the state of our democracy. I’m really very interested in getting people to focus and to invest and to pay attention to what is happening in our country and in our government.” HuffPost noted that she did not expand on her answer.

On one occasion when she was the only dissenter on an emergency order permitting the administration to proceed with mass firing of civil servants, Brown declared that “this court sees fit to step in now and release the president’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation” She wrote a dissent on the 6-3 majority ruling to limit nationwide injunctions imposed by judges to block the president’s executive order ending birthright citizenship in some cases. “I have no doubt,” she wrote, “that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends.”

Young is not the only federal judge concerned over the high court’s rulings. NBC News reported that, in “rare interviews,” 10 of them, appointed by both parties, criticized its handling of cases involving President Donald Trump and called on it to explain its rulings better, “with some urging Chief Justice John Roberts to do more to defend the judiciary against external criticism.”

Also, the administration is ignoring “one in three major judicial rulings against it,” NBC News reported, citing a Washington Post analysis of 165 cases filed against the administration that showed that it resisted court orders “in at least 57 of those cases.”

NPR reported that, by mid-March, 127 lawsuits had been filed against the administration, citing a database maintained at New York University. “The cases challenge an enormous range of subjects — from the president’s national security powers to the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees at the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, and agencies created by Congress that are supposed to be independent,” NPR reported.

Checking any possible presidential excesses is not just a matter for the judiciary but also for the Congress. However, this co-equal branch of government is currently controlled by Republicans and has been showing unusual deference to the president, including cases in which he is freezing or canceling funds which Congress approved.

It cannot be a case of an overwhelming political mandate to drastically upend the federal bureaucracy, for example, even if that were a justification. Trump won by 1.5 percent of the popular vote. In the Senate, Republicans hold 53 of the 100 seats, Democrats have 45 and two Independents vote with them, for a total of 53-47. In the House of Representatives, Republicans have 219 seats and Democrats 213, with three seats vacant in the 435-seat chamber.

As for the Supreme Court, where constitutional questions are settled, six of the nine Justices were nominated by three Republican presidents: Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush), Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito (George W. Bush), and Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

There is, therefore, little that Democrats can do to rein in perceived excesses of the institutional triumvirate, unless they win the 2025 midterm election and take control of Congress. Individual states are trying to assert independence from the federal government but they are hamstrung by the high court’s granting almost unlimited immunity for the president, which, for example, provides cover for him to deploy troops to cities to curb crimes, bypassing state authority, and invoke “national security” and “national emergency” to justify some actions.

But there is resistance, from several Democratic state attorneys general, The Nation magazine reported, the most prominent being New York’s Letitia James, whom Trump belittles at every opportunity, as well as California’s Rob Bonta, Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, New Jersey’s Matt Platkin and Illinois’ Kwame Raoul. They are among at least 23 state AGs, who, The Nation reported, sometimes act collectively as the Progressive State Leaders Committee. Even individually, some of them have a lot of power at their disposal. For example, Bonta’s California office has 5,400 employees, including 1,100 lawyers, and James’ 2,200-person staff includes 800 lawyers.

Bonta, who sued Trump more than 120 times in his first term, told The Hill that he and his colleagues wrote briefs in advance of the president’s orders so their officials “just need to cross the Ts, dot the Is, and press print and file it.”

James told The Nation that the AGs began to focus on a possible second Trump presidency even before the 2024 election. “It was not the outcome that we expected but it was something that we had to prepare for nonetheless. And so we analyzed Project 2025 based on subject matter,” she said, referring to the conservative blueprint for governance. “We looked at jurisdiction, we looked at standing, we looked at past practices, we looked at who had been active in certain areas, and we decided to assign our staffs different responsibilities based on possible cases. And we started preparing complaints and briefs.”

The Nation noted that the group does not always win but that “they often delay and complicate Trump’s agenda, and they are establishing a legal record for eventually upending it. Just as important, they are taking the fight to Trump and the administration with a boldness that is often missing on Capitol Hill.”