Trump-Appointed Judge’s ‘Originalist’ Claim Is Absurd

During her confirmation hearing to become a federal judge in July 2020, Aileen Cannon, like virtually every GOP nominee, described herself as an “originalist.” Originalists claim to be paragons of judicial restraint, devoted to limiting the scope of their rulings, thereby not veering into the role assigned to the democratically elected branches of government to make laws and decide political and social policy. But Judge Cannon’s recent ruling in Donald Trump’s case against the United States government—ordering the partial shutdown of an investigation into the purloining of national security materials by the former president who appointed her—demonstrates that conservative jurisprudence has devolved into a brazen power grab, at direct odds with our democratic system of government, and the constitutional separation of powers.

Cannon's order may ultimately be voided; but the fact that she issued it will remain as a stark warning about just how far Trump judges and other similarly minded GOP nominees—hundreds of whom have been installed, at all levels of the federal judiciary—are willing to engage in the very judicial “activism” they claim to abhor to serve radically anti-democratic goals.