My wife was raised in the Texas Baptist Children's Home, where her parents were caretakers and auxiliary parents for ten other kids besides their own. Betsy's "brothers and sisters" were actually wards of the state, dependent mostly on the kindness of others – but also receiving a steady diet of Christian love in those austere, uplifting surroundings. She still remembers Bobby, an eight-year-old boy who, on his first Sunday at the ranch, was taken to church alongside everyone else in his new family. There was awed silence as the choir took their places up front, a swish of black-robed majesty punctuated by Bobby’s stage-whisper, "WOW, lookit all them judges!" In an instant, the giggles and grins shared between underage inmates showed their common experience as children who had already learned some of life's hardest lessons, in circumstances where courtrooms were far more familiar than choir lofts.

But that was 1950’s Texas. Today in our more enlightened era, President Trump is finding that today’s judges have become the un-ordained ministers of our new civic religion. Somehow, new laws, new interpretations or maybe just law-school revisionism convey upon judicial authorities a litany of new responsibilities. The expanded dispensations include gay rights, transexual liberties, government control over homeschooling and a whole host of thorny issues surrounding parental rights over minor children. Ever since Roe versus Wade a half-century ago, America’s courts have become the preferred battlefield for advocates of social change – often seeking victories denied elsewhere by prevailing political realities. So it is today - as Democrats intent upon resisting Trump’s win last November increasingly shop their cases before sympathetic judges.

As you may have seen this week, the latest engagement on the frontiers of justice brought President Trump into a nasty confrontation with Judge James Boasberg, a well-regarded district court judge in Washington DC. The bizarre case involved two planeloads of illegal immigrant being deported to El Salvador last weekend. Ignoring the well-known axiom that “hard cases make bad law,” the judge was somehow persuaded to issue a turn-around order for both planes; his order was not only unenforceable but also prompted a furious response by President Trump calling for the judge’s impeachment. As NBC News was quick to point out, however,

“The federal judge at odds with the White House over its immigration enforcement…is a bipartisan appointee whose three-decade career in Washington, D.C., has included cases that have favored Trump.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge-targeted-trump-impeachment-bipartisan-appointee-three-de-rcna196954

Welcome to our brave new world, where even judges with cross-my-heart judicial temperaments wind up in shouting matches with presidents. Everything in Donald Trump’s agenda is aimed at discovering and if possible, reversing at least two decades of judicial excess. Slowly at first but now with increasing speed, we are beginning to reap that long overdue whirlwind. It is as if the zebras referring NFL games were allowed - or even required - to call the penalties on the field, to judge the intent of both plays and players - and even to advance the ball themselves if "fairness" somehow was at issue. Just how long would the NFL exist if such a regime were in-place? A better question: How long can this country endure a regimen of roughly 600 federal judges – spectacularly unqualified in everything except jurisprudence - who are allowed to roam so freely beyond their writ?

It is one thing to have judicial independence, quite another to have three separate but equal branches of government: but something else again to recognize the leavening effects of American history and common sense. Having separated the Government’s powers into those co-equal branches in Articles I and II, the Constitution succinctly outlines in Article III: “The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” It is clear that the three separate branches were to act in accord with the Constitution’s basic objectives, including to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice (and) insure domestic tranquility.”

Rather than lecturing President Trump for his immoderate comments on the poor but plucky persona of Judge Boasberg, Chief Justice Roberts might better concern himself with sweeping up his own porch. Certain judges under his immediate control – even whole circuits sometimes - now find it convenient to put personal or political agendas ahead of their duties to the American people. Isn’t it about time, Mr. Chief Justice, that you called them to account before we are forced to do it for you?

Colonel (Ret.) Kenneth Allard rose from a Vietnam-era draftee to become a West Point professor, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst