Our Founders Fathers were geniuses. They built a system designed to stop power-hungry politicians from running wild, and they did it with a simple but brilliant idea: separation of powers. Central to this was keeping the nation’s checkbook exclusively in the hands of Congress, the people elected to represent us. This wasn’t just a suggestion—it was a non-negotiable firewall against tyranny.

But that firewall is only as strong as our will to defend it. When one branch of government gets too big for its britches and tries to steal the authority of another, the whole system wobbles. It’s particularly alarming when the judiciary, a branch that is supposed to be a neutral umpire, decides to grab a bat and start swinging for the fences. An unelected judge with a pen and a blank check is a nightmare scenario, and this week, that nightmare is coming true.

From ‘The Post Millennial’:

The Trump administration on Monday said that there would be partial funding of SNAP after two judges ruled that the administration had to continue to fund SNAP despite the government shutdown.

The partial funding will go forward, but it is not clear how much those getting benefits will receive.

“Per orders issued by the United States District Courts for the Districts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, FNS [Food and Nutrition Service] intends to deplete SNAP contingency funds completely and provide reduced SNAP benefits for November 2025,” the Department of Agriculture said in court documents.

Judges Attempt to Sidestep Congress

A government shutdown is, by definition, a mess. But it’s a legislative mess that requires a legislative solution. The answer is for Congress to do the job we sent them to Washington to do: negotiate, compromise, and pass a funding bill. The answer is not for some judge in Rhode Island to think he’s the Speaker of the House and start issuing spending decrees from the bench.

These activist judges are trying to fix a political standoff with a legal order, effectively making Congress irrelevant. By forcing the administration to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), they’ve given Democrats a free pass. Why bother negotiating in good faith when a friendly court will just give you what you want?

This is an absolutely chilling precedent. If judges can commandeer the Treasury during a shutdown, they are no longer neutral arbiters; they are political kingmakers. They are gutting the authority of the one branch of government that is directly accountable to the American people. And all this is happening while the Democrats who engineered this entire fiasco sit back and watch, having repeatedly blocked clean funding resolutions proposed by Republicans.

Democrats’ Shutdown Puts Administration in a ‘No-Win’ Bind

The reckless orders from the bench have shoved the Trump administration into what one USDA official perfectly described as a “no-win quandary.” The court demanded SNAP be funded, leaving the president with a truly impossible choice.

The administration, complying with the order, is now draining a $4.65 billion SNAP contingency fund—money that is supposed to be reserved for actual emergencies like hurricanes or floods, not for bailing out a dysfunctional Congress.

When asked why they didn’t tap into other sources of money, like tariff revenues, the administration’s answer revealed what real leadership looks like. A top USDA official laid it out plainly: taking that money would gut child nutrition programs. In his words, it would just “shift the problem to millions of America’s low income children that receive their meals at school.”

Think about that. Faced with an unconstitutional order from an overreaching court, President Trump and his team made the only moral and responsible decision they could: they chose to protect the school lunches of American kids.

This entire episode is about something much bigger than one program’s budget. It’s a battle for the integrity of our Constitution. The Founders gave the power of the purse to Congress alone, and for good reason. When we allow unelected judges to snatch that power away, we are chipping away at the foundation of our Republic. It is the duty of every American who values freedom to stand firm against this judicial tyranny.

Key Takeaways

• Activist judges are usurping Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.
• Democrat obstructionism created the crisis by refusing to fund the government.
• The Trump administration chose to protect child nutrition funds from the fallout.
• This judicial activism sets a dangerous precedent for future political disputes.

Sources: The Post Millennial, ABC News