Checks and balances, or Judicial activism? Examining the Judicial overreach of 2025
By Easton Martin | January 13, 2026
In Federalist No. 51, James Madison argued that the great difficulty of government is first enabling it to control the governed, and then obliging it to control itself. He envisioned a system where ambition must be made to counteract ambition. However, throughout 2025 and continuing into the new year, it seems this ambition has morphed into something Madison would find unrecognizable. We are seeing a pattern of performative defiance by federal judges aimed at systematically halting the executive branch agenda.
Madison’s primary check was intended to be the Legislature, which he called the most powerful branch. The Judiciary was supposed to be the least dangerous, possessing neither force nor will, but merely judgment. Yet, since early 2025, single district judges have frequently issued nationwide injunctions on everything from immigration parole programs to federal funding freezes.
These are not acts of judgment but of will, a performative attempt by unelected officials to act as a super legislator. When one judge in a single district can veto a policy for 330 million people, they create what Madison warned against: a will independent of the society itself. This disrupts the primary control of the government, which is its dependence on the people who elected the President to carry out those very policies.
Madison believed the interior structure of government would keep each part in its proper place. In 2026, that structure is bending under the weight of judicial activism. Plaintiffs now shop for specific judges known for their opposition to the administration, turning the court into a political weapon.
In the landmark June 2025 case Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court finally intervened. It ruled that the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not grant lower courts the power to issue injunctions broader than what is needed for the specific parties involved. This was a classic Madisonian correction. One branch, the High Court, checked the overreach of another, the lower courts.
If Madison were observing today, he might see these defiant rulings as proof that the personal motives of judges are indeed active. However, he would likely be alarmed that the Legislative branch has become a bystander. By allowing the courts to become the primary battlefield for policy, the double security of our republic is weakened. Performative defiance may feel like a check, but if it bypasses the will of the people and the authority of the law, it risks becoming the very usurpation Madison wrote to prevent.
