The Court That Answers to No One

That's a strong claim — that the federal judiciary "answers to no one." Walk me through it.

We're taught in school that we have three branches and they check each other. Right? That's the civics-class picture. The president can be impeached. Members of Congress face the voters every two years, every six years — they can be expelled, defeated, indicted, run out of town. The executive bureaucracy has inspectors general, it has FOIA, it has oversight hearings, the whole apparatus of daylight. Imperfect, all of it. But the channels exist, and they get used. People lose their jobs. People go to prison.

Now ask the simple question about the third branch. The one nobody asks. Who judges the judges?

The answer, by design, is other judges. Here's how it actually works. Under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980, when a citizen files a complaint against a federal judge for misconduct, that complaint doesn't go to some independent body. It's handled inside the judiciary itself — reviewed by the chief judge of the circuit, then by a committee of judges, then by the judicial council of the circuit, which is, you guessed it, made up of judges. Judges investigating judges. Judges judging judges. Judges disciplining judges. And listen to this — the discipline they're even permitted to hand out stops well short of removal. They can censure. They can reprimand. They can ask a judge to stop taking new cases for a while. They cannot remove an Article III judge. Nobody in that process can. Only impeachment removes a federal judge, and the impeachment of a federal judge is so rare it's practically a theoretical event.

And here's the part most people don't know — the part that, when I explain it, stops people cold. The Justices of the Supreme Court are not even covered by that statute. You got that? The nine most powerful judges in the country — the ones whose decisions are final, unappealable, the last word on everything — sit entirely outside the formal misconduct machinery that governs every other federal judge in America. In recent years, under public pressure, they adopted a written code of conduct of their own. But it's a code they wrote for themselves, by themselves, with no outside enforcement attached to it. It's an honor system at the very top of American power.

There is no check there. What you're looking at is a closed shop.

Critics would say the system works — that bad judges are rare, and the process catches the ones who aren't.

Then let's not take my word for it. Let's not take theirs either. Let's look at the Court's own examination of itself. Follow the evidence.

In 2006 the Chief Justice appointed a committee, led by Justice Stephen Breyer — and I want you to notice, Breyer was a liberal, not some right-wing critic with an axe to grind — to study how the judiciary was handling misconduct complaints under that 1980 Act. The Breyer Committee did the work. They looked hard at the high-visibility cases — the ones with real public attention, real stakes, the ones the country actually watches. And they reported back. The committee concluded that on those high-profile complaints — the ones that matter most — the courts mishandled a meaningful share of them, on the order of roughly a third. And the committee's own report didn't soft-pedal it. It described that rate in stark terms — as far too high.

Now sit with that for a second. This isn't an outside agitator. This isn't a partisan trying to score points. This isn't me. This is the judiciary studying itself, grading its own homework with its own red pen — and concluding that in the cases that matter most, the ones where the public is actually watching, it falls short at a rate it could not defend. Roughly one in three of its most important accountability cases, mishandled, by its own measure.

Now imagine any other institution in American life saying that out loud. Imagine a police department, a bank, a hospital, the Pentagon announcing: "We investigated ourselves, and we found that we mishandle about a third of our most important accountability cases." And then in the same breath proposing that nothing fundamental should change. We would never accept it. Not for a second. We accept it from the federal courts for one reason and one reason only: because the federal courts have wrapped themselves in a robe and told us not to look.

And the people sense this. They can't always cite you the statute. They can't name you the committee. But they feel the absence. They feel that there's no door, no lever, no recourse. And they are right to feel it.

You wanted to spend most of this conversation on one man — Chief Justice John Roberts. Why him?

Because if you want to understand a system, you study the person who sits at the very top of it. And you study how he got there. Follow the man and you'll understand the machine. John Roberts is not an accident. He is the single most complete product of the federal judicial-legal establishment alive today. His career is the system, compressed into one biography. You couldn't build a more perfect specimen in a laboratory.

That is a decades-long escalator ride straight up the inside of the institution, and the man never once stepped off it. Clerk, Justice Department, White House, Solicitor General's office, the elite Washington bar, the D.C. Circuit, the Court itself. There is hardly a single chamber of the federal legal power structure that John Roberts has not lived inside of. And here's what I learned in a lifetime studying how people rise inside closed institutions: you do not climb like that by challenging the institution. Nobody hands you that ladder for making trouble. You climb like that by embodying it. By being exactly what it wants to promote.

And now he doesn't just sit on the Court — he runs the administrative machinery too.

This is the piece almost nobody outside the legal world understands, and it is the crux of the whole thing. By statute — it's right there in the law, 28 U.S.C. § 331 — the Chief Justice chairs the Judicial Conference of the United States. Now, what is the Judicial Conference? It's the policy-making body for the entire federal court system. It oversees the administration of the federal courts. And it sits atop the very self-discipline apparatus we were just talking about — the whole machinery by which judges judge judges.

So follow the logic with me. John Roberts presides over the Supreme Court, which is the final, unappealable word on what the Constitution means. And John Roberts also chairs the body that makes policy for, and helps administer, the self-governing machinery of the entire federal judiciary. So the man at the apex of judicial power is the same man at the apex of judicial self-governance. That is the single most concentrated, least-accountable seat in the entire American government — and I'd wager almost no voter in this country could even tell you the name of the man who sits in it.

And I want to be careful here, and fair, because the documented facts are striking enough that I don't need to exaggerate a single one of them. I publish under my own name and I take the incoming fire, so I weigh my words. I am not accusing John Roberts of a crime. I'm not saying he broke a law. I'm not calling him a criminal — that's not my claim and I won't let anyone put it in my mouth. What I'm saying — as the conclusion I draw from a lifetime of studying closed systems — is that to me he embodies and presides over an unaccountability problem. He is the human face of a branch that has placed itself beyond the ordinary reach of the people. And whether he sought that seat or merely inherited it, that's where he sits, and that's the office I intend to make this country look at.

There's an irony in his record that you keep coming back to — and you say it's the whole reason you're running.

It's a profound irony. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is the spine of everything I'm telling you, so listen carefully.

As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, John Roberts spent his formation arguing that the courts had too much power. That's documented. That's real history, not my opinion. He wrote a whole series of memos — numerous memos, by the documentary record, it's in the National Archives — opposing the 1982 expansion of the Voting Rights Act. And in describing the kind of court-ordered remedy at issue, he characterized it, by the record of his writings, as among the most intrusive interferences imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.

The most intrusive interference imaginable — by federal courts. Sit with that, and then think about where the man who wrote it ended up. The young John Roberts was an articulate, forceful critic of federal courts reaching too far — into decisions he believed belonged to the states, to localities, to the people and their elected representatives. He wasn't alone in it. In those same early-1980s years he wrote in defense of what was then called court-stripping — a serious legislative push to use the power of Congress to limit the federal courts' jurisdiction over the hot questions of the day, abortion, busing, school prayer. To pull those fights out of the courts and back to the elected branches and the people. The young John Roberts, in his twenties, was a skeptic of judicial overreach. He wanted to curb the courts. He wanted to use the legislature to rein them in.

And then? Then he spent the next forty years climbing to the very top of the institution he had warned about — and today he is its chief defender and its chief administrator both. The young man who wanted to take power away from the courts became the king of the courts. The reformer became the proprietor. And that's not an insult I'm hurling at the man — it's the most honest thing I can say about how power works. I watched it play out in boardroom after boardroom. These institutions take the people most articulate about their dangers, the sharpest critics, the ones who see the rot — and they absorb them. They promote them. They make them comfortable. And the critic becomes the custodian. The watchdog becomes the wall.

So here is why I'm running. I'm going to Congress to finish what young John Roberts started. To use the legislature to check the courts — the very thing he believed in before the institution swallowed him. I want to take up the cause the young man held, and carry it against the king the old man became. The words Roberts wrote when he was young read like a warning about the office he holds now. I intend to make Washington read them back to him.

Let's talk about a case you say is misunderstood — Dobbs. But you don't come at it the way most conservatives do.

No, I don't, and people are sometimes surprised by it. I bring up Dobbs not to relitigate abortion — I bring it up because it tells you exactly who John Roberts is as an institutional actor. It X-rays the man. And it complicates the lazy caricatures on both sides.

Here are the facts. In the 2022 Dobbs decision, the one that overturned Roe v. Wade, John Roberts did not join the majority's full reasoning. He concurred in the judgment only. What he actually wanted was narrower. He wanted to uphold the Mississippi law — the fifteen-week ban that was actually in front of the Court — without taking the further step of fully overturning Roe. And he warned, in his own words, that the majority's decision to overrule Roe outright was — and this is his phrase — "a serious jolt to the legal system."

Now read that the way I read it. That is not the voice of a man asking first: "What does the Constitution actually require here?" That is the voice of an institutionalist asking a different question: "How do I protect the Court?" How do I draw the least fire? How do I preserve the Court's standing, its prestige, its reputation? How do I avoid the jolt? His instinct — again and again, across his whole record — is to manage the institution's exposure. To shield the brand.

And I want voters to see that clearly, because I think it's the same instinct that runs through everything he does. The priority isn't the Constitution. The priority is the preservation and the prestige of the Court itself — the institution is the client. And notice — this is me attacking him from the right, not the left. I'm not saying he went too far. I'm saying that even when the right answer was in front of him, his first reflex was to protect the building rather than to follow the principle. That is precisely the mindset of a branch that has come to treat its own survival and its own reputation as the highest law in the land. Higher than the Constitution it's sworn to.

And then there's a lawsuit. People hear "someone sued the Chief Justice" and assume something you don't mean. Be precise.

I'll be exactly precise, because precision is the entire point, and I will not have anyone putting false words in my mouth. I've spent my whole life being careful about claims, because when you make a charge under your own name, you'd better be able to stand behind every syllable.

In 2025, the America First Legal Foundation — and pay attention to who that is, it's a group founded by Stephen Miller, who is right now one of the most powerful officials in the Trump White House — filed suit against Chief Justice John Roberts, along with the head of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Their argument was striking: they contended that the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office — the very bodies the Chief Justice chairs and oversees — function in a way that should make them subject to the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA. In plain English: they went to court arguing that the courts' own internal machinery should be opened up and shown to the public.

And the case was dismissed. And here's the detail I want everyone to hold onto — it was dismissed by a Trump-appointed federal judge, Trevor McFadden, who rejected the theory.

Now let me be crystal clear about what I am and am not saying, because the difference is everything and the lawyers will pounce on the slightest sloppiness. I am not saying "Trump sued Roberts." That is false. I will not say it. That's the conspiracy lane and I won't drive in it. What I am saying is true and documented and on the public record: a prominent legal group, founded by one of the most powerful people in Trump's own White House, took the Chief Justice into federal court over whether his administrative apparatus should be open to public transparency — and a judge appointed by President Trump threw it out.

So here's the lesson. When people tell me this whole concern about the judiciary is some left-wing crusade, I tell them — look again. Look at who brought that suit. The pressure to pry open the judiciary's machinery is coming from the right, from the heart of this administration. And in that instance the suit was dismissed and the question quietly went away. The system closed back up over it. That's the whole tell — even Trump's own side knocked on the door, and the door didn't open.

You're a conservative arguing courts have too much power. But in 2024, courts tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. Doesn't that cut against you?

It cuts for me. It's the cleanest illustration I have of the whole argument, so I'm glad you asked it.

Think back. In 2023 and 2024, courts and state officials in several states — Colorado, Maine, Illinois — tried to strike Donald Trump from the ballot entirely. Reached for a clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and tried to use it to take the leading candidate for President of the United States off the ballot — to remove that choice from the hands of the voters before a single vote was cast. Unelected officials, in robes and in offices, trying to decide for the American people who they were allowed to vote for.

And what happened? It didn't hold. The effort collapsed. And the people elected Donald Trump anyway. The voters had the last word, the way they're supposed to.

So here's the lesson, and it's the core of everything I believe. The judges and the officials reached too far into the most sacred decision a free people make — who governs them. And the thing that checked that overreach was not another court. It wasn't a cleverer judge. It was the people. The voters were the check. The ballot box was the check. The real, ultimate guardrail against an overreaching judiciary has never been the judiciary policing itself. It has always been a free people who refuse to surrender their choices to anyone in a robe. The courts and officials have done so much damage to this country, reached so far into so many decisions that were never theirs to make, that it was hard to even get Donald Trump elected. And he got elected anyway. That's the people taking their power back. That's exactly what I want more of.

You've made the case against the institution and the man at its top. Now the public — the polls.

The public has already reached its verdict. The elites just haven't accepted it yet. Trust and approval of the Supreme Court — measured by Gallup and others, year after year — has fallen to historic lows. Not a dip. Not a bad season. Among the lowest levels ever recorded since these organizations began measuring it at all.

And what's the reflex of official Washington when they see that number? To scold the public. To wag a finger and say the people just don't understand the Court, they've been misled, they're letting partisanship cloud their respect for a sacred institution. And I reject that completely. The people are seeing clearly — maybe for the first time in a generation. They're looking at a branch that decides the most consequential questions in their lives — one they did not elect, that they cannot remove, that polices itself, that grades its own homework, and that exempts its own highest members from even that thin self-policing — and they are concluding that something here is badly wrong. And they're dead right. The people are upset, and they should be. Their instinct is sound. Their anger is earned. It is information.

The people are right to be uneasy about the Supreme Court, and right to ask hard questions of the Chief Justice who presides over it. Not because of any one ruling they happen to dislike. It's because the structure has been allowed to drift into unaccountability, and he sits at the very top of that structure, and to me he has used the power of his office to extend the principle of unaccountability rather than to check it. When trust falls, that is not a public-relations problem to be smoothed over with better speeches. It's a true signal. The instrument is working. It's telling you the patient is sick.

Defenders will say an unaccountable Court is precisely what protects rights from the mob — that judicial independence is the feature, not the bug.

And I believe in judicial independence. Let me say that first and clearly, because the establishment loves to pretend that anyone who wants accountability must be against independence. That's a trick. Independence and unaccountability are not the same thing, and they blur them on purpose, because the confusion protects them.

Independence means a judge can rule without fear of being fired for an unpopular decision. I want that. I'll defend that. Accountability means something completely different: when a judge engages in actual misconduct, or when the institution drifts outside its constitutional banks, there is a real mechanism to answer for it. Not a theoretical one. Not a purely self-administered one inside the same club. A real one. And you can have both. We used to understand that you must have both. What we have built instead is independence without accountability. And independence without accountability isn't a feature of the system. It's the disease eating it.

This is where you reach back into history — to "judicial supremacy," and to a case every schoolchild learns: Marbury v. Madison.

Because the assumption underneath everything — that the Supreme Court is the single, final, unquestionable arbiter of what the Constitution means, full stop — is itself a contested idea. It is not settled. It was never settled. It is contested. This is my reading of the history, my interpretation, not holy writ. But the interpretation is sound, and Americans have been taught a flattened, sanded-down version of their own founding.

So let's go to Marbury. Everybody invokes it. Almost nobody reads it.

Here is my argument, plainly. Look at what the case was actually about. Marbury sues Madison because Madison won't deliver his commission to be a judge. And Madison says no. That was all that Marbury v. Madison was about, at its core — a man who wanted a commission, and an official who denied it. Marshall, as I read it, had no business reaching beyond the dispute in front of him. The honest holding was narrow and simple: Marbury doesn't get his commission, and Madison may deny it. That should have been the end of it. Marbury loses.

But Marshall didn't stop there. He used that small dispute as a vehicle to smuggle in something enormous — the assertion that the Court itself holds the supreme, final power to declare what the Constitution means and to strike down the acts of the elected branches. Everything outside of "Marbury loses" was Marshall reaching for a power the case did not require and the Constitution did not plainly hand him. That's the original sin. The whole towering edifice of judicial supremacy was built on a single opinion that claimed far more than the dispute in front of it ever needed.

And I'm not alone in reading it that way — that's the part the establishment doesn't want you to know.

Thomas Jefferson was scathing about exactly this. He warned against letting the courts make the Constitution "a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please." A thing of wax. That's a Founder sounding the alarm against the very concentration of power we now live under as if it were the natural order. And Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, in the gravest hour the Republic ever faced, wrestled openly with the Dred Scott decision — and warned that if the people surrendered every great question to the Court, then "the people will have ceased to be their own rulers." That's not a fringe figure muttering in a corner. That's Lincoln. That's Jefferson. Two of the greatest figures this country ever produced, both saying out loud that unquestioned judicial supremacy and genuine self-government are in tension.

So when someone tells me the Court's word is final and beyond all challenge by its nature — I say, that is a tradition in American thought. But it is not the only tradition, and it is not the one the best of our Founders held. I offer that as my interpretation of history — but it's an interpretation with Jefferson and Lincoln standing in it with me. And I'll stand on that ground all day long.

Why should conservatives in particular care? Many like the current Court just fine.

Because conservatives, of all people on earth, are supposed to understand the danger of unchecked power. That's the whole inheritance. We don't trust power, because power concentrates and abuses — every time, in every age, under every flag. And so we build structures to limit it, to divide it, to force it to answer. Madison. The separation of powers. Federalism. Enumerated limits. That's our patrimony.

And yet too many conservatives have carved out one exception — the judiciary — because they happen to like the recent results. They like the box scores. And that is a fatal mistake, and I say so as a conservative, to conservatives. Power that you celebrate when your team holds it is power your opponents will hold tomorrow. That's a certainty. An unaccountable Court that pleases you this decade is an unaccountable Court that will appall you the next — and you will have spent your credibility defending the unaccountability instead of the principle. A conservative who only wants checks on the power he dislikes is no conservative at all. He's just a partisan who happens to admire a particular robe today.

The consistent, honest conservative position is that no branch answers to no one. Not the presidency. Not the Congress. And not the courts. Especially not the courts — because they've quietly arranged things so they're the hardest of all to check. If you believe in limited government, you cannot make a shrine out of the one institution that has placed itself beyond limits.

The Founders gave us this structure. Do you fault them for it?

Here's where I part company with the way it's taught. We talk about the Founders "designing" three branches like it was some careful blueprint, every piece fitted into place. As I read the history, that's not what happened with the courts. The federal judiciary wasn't really designed at all. It got put into the Constitution almost as an afterthought — they put judges in it, and the truth is a lot of those men didn't even want federal judges and had no clear idea what the thing was for. The document itself, at that stage, was a draft. Congress didn't know what to do with it. They sent it out to the states half-formed, and the states pushed back so hard that the pushback is how we got the Bill of Rights in the first place.

So this wasn't handed down off a mountain. It was improvised — stitched together and shoved out the door, a fait accompli nobody fully thought through. And it stayed a confused, dangerous, half-built thing for a long, long time. The whole arrangement was a mess — and in a lot of ways it's the same mess we're still living with today — because the one job they never finished was writing the limits on the courts the way they wrote limits on everybody else.

That's the whole problem in a sentence. They wrote restraints on the president. They wrote restraints on the Congress. The courts they left blank. And here's what they got backwards: of the three, the courts are the one branch that most needed the leash — because the courts are the one branch we can never vote out. A bad president, a bad congressman, we throw out at the ballot box every couple of years. A federal judge sits for life and answers to no election. So the one power that most needed written limits got the least. I'm not faulting some wise design — there wasn't one. I'm trying to finish a job they never did. Two and a half centuries late, but better late than never.

So why you, and why now?

Because nobody inside the system is ever going to fix the system. That's the lesson of decades fighting fraud, and it never once failed me. The call is never going to come from inside the house. The people who benefit from a closed, unaccountable arrangement do not reform it. They manage the criticism. They wait it out. They co-opt the reformers — the young Voting Rights critic who grew up to be the institution's chief steward. That's not a one-off. That's the mechanism.

I'm 72 years old. I came to this country as a Cuban refugee with nothing in my pockets. And I know — not from a book, from my own family's flight — exactly what it means when a government curdles into a closed circle that answers only to itself. We fled one of those. I went to Wharton, I earned my MBA at Harvard, and then I spent my entire career doing the one thing the powerful cannot abide: publishing the truth about them under my own name and refusing to be intimidated into silence. I took down dozens of frauds in a row with a pad, a pen, a phone, no friends, and no capital. I was never bought, for a simple reason — I had no master to buy me. I funded my own work. And I will fund my own campaign. That's the whole point of an outsider — you can only truly check a closed system if you owe that system absolutely nothing.

You're challenging the incumbent, Randy Fine, who carries President Trump's endorsement. How do you square that with your admiration for the President?

Let me be very clear, because this matters to me and I won't be coy about it. I have deep respect for President Trump. Deep loyalty. He has done more to break open the closed circles of Washington than anyone of my lifetime, and on the courts — on the question of who really governs, the people or the unelected — he and I are on the same side of the line. So nothing I say here is a word against him. Not one.

The endorsement of the incumbent in this race was a mistake — the kind of out-of-town call made on bad advice from the people around him, the courtiers, not a fault of the President himself. You know the old picture: the good czar, surrounded by bad boyars. The boyars whisper, they get a call wrong, and the blame doesn't belong to the czar. I have complete confidence that President Trump, who reads the people better than any man in politics, will come to see this race clearly in time. So I'm not going to spend one minute attacking him. My fight is with an unaccountable judiciary and with an incumbent who isn't the man this district needs. It is not, and never will be, with President Trump.

Concretely — what would you actually do?

Congress is not powerless over the courts. It has simply chosen not to act. It's let the muscle go slack. Article III itself hands Congress real authority over the structure, the jurisdiction, and the administration of the federal courts — and I would use every bit of it. This is where I finish what the young Roberts started.

A closing word.

I spent my whole life arguing that institutions everyone insisted were sound were rotten — and then standing behind the proof under my own name when it cost me dearly. That's my résumé. That's the only credential I'm running on. And I'm telling you now, after weighing it the way I weighed every fraud I ever exposed: to me the federal judiciary has become the least accountable institution in the whole of American government — and the man who sits at the very top of it embodies and presides over that condition. The people already sense it. Their collapsing trust is not ignorance, and it is not partisanship. It is recognition. They are upset, and they are right to be.

I am not asking anyone to hate a judge. This isn't about a man, it's about a principle, and the principle is older than any of us. In a free country, no one answers to no one. Not the president. Not the Congress. And not the Court. I've spent decades living that principle against people who held far more power than I ever did, and I never blinked. I'd be honored to spend the next chapter of my life living it inside the Congress of the United States — and finishing the fight that a young John Roberts, before the institution swallowed him whole, once believed in too.