'Cringed so hard': Legal expert aghast as Trump holds justices up as trophies

Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig took issue with the dissent written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the case involving nationwide injunctions against executive orders from President Donald Trump.

Honig told a CNN panel that he doesn't think that this is a Democrat vs. Republican issue. President Joe Biden's administration made the same argument in the court that the Trump administration did, he noted.

"What this is, though, is a seismic shift in power as between the presidency and the courts. It means that district courts — that's our federal trial-level courts — there's 600 or so district court judges around the country, can no longer, generally speaking, ban some sort of presidential action, block a presidential action for the whole country. However, the notion that this is the end ... I'm looking at Justice Jackson here in her dissent. 'This is our collective demise. The constitutional republic will be no more.' That's overstated."

The nation has survived more than 200 years without nationwide injunctions, he noted. They only began happening in the 2000s with George W. Bush's administration.

"It's going to give rise to chaos and uncertainty. It's going to be messy and ugly, but it's not going to end our constitutional republic," he said.

The other panelists began talking about the politicization of the Supreme Court," alleging that it hasn't been like this since the Warren Court during the 1950s and 1960s.

New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni said she found it "bizarre" to see a president in the press briefing room thanking the justices.

"I mean, they're a separate branch of government. They don't work for him. It was just a strange moment to me," she said.

"I cringed so hard when he did it," Honig agreed. "And he's done it before. And I guarantee you the justices hate that, right?"

The panel recalled Trump thanking Chief Justice John Roberts when he saw him at the first address before the joint session of Congress. When Trump had Justice Brett Kavanaugh sworn in, the conservative justices attended the event, and he thanked them there as well.

See the clip below or at the link here.