Chief Justice John Roberts made headlines this week — in a refreshingly nuanced and low-keyed manner increasingly antithetical to the way we have become accustomed to headlines being made in Washington D.C. — with a statement obliquely in response to calls by President Donald Trump to impeach federal Judge James Boasberg, who issued a temporary restraining order Saturday to block the administration from deporting 250 Venezuelans it identified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Said Justice Roberts: “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Now, Justice Roberts is absolutely correct in his assessment; however righteous, popular and necessary the administration’s order deporting these thugs is (and it is all three), at the very least it is bumping up against new legal ground, and this administration ought to be held to as strict an adherence to the Constitution and the system it provides for as its supporters had clamored for the previous administration to be held to. Granted, as much of an admirer as I am of Justice Roberts, his proclamation would have been better received had it also included a line or two admonishing with equal fervor the judicial adventurism exhibited by D.C. federal district Judge Amir Ali in the USAID case.

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It periodically strikes me I could devote every one of my columns to reflection on the phenomenon of political paradox — less charitably called hypocrisy. It seems even the longest-held principles can be unceremoniously abandoned if embraced by the other side.

The most obvious current examples are the relatively new positions adopted by Republicans on free trade and foreign policy. Of course, if you reach back far enough, both isolationism and protectionism have been more associated with the right — both Smoot and Hawley were Republicans. But conservatism is never (supposed to be) shackled inflexibly to ideology, but beholden rather to the guidance of Edmund Burke, who instructed gradual change was necessary for any society to survive, but also that rash, radical change is the ultimate enemy of order and good governance.

Republican evolution on these issues was of the gradual, measured sort that learned from mistakes — like Smoot-Hawley. Their reversal has been as rash and knee-jerk as the upheavals of the French Revolution that so repulsed Burke.

Of course, the corollary to this is it applies true in reverse — that the Democrats have responded with an equal and opposite reaction. I once wrote perhaps President Trump’s greatest achievement will go down as getting liberal Democrats to think nasty things about Russia. Honestly, if Trump tomorrow proclaimed his unequivocal support for partial-birth abortion, I would bet a healthy amount a good chunk of the MAGA world would instantly take to social media to praise the president’s hard-nosed pragmatism. And just as many erstwhile feminist Democrats would all of a sudden sound like Jerry Falwell on the issue.

This illustrates what may be the greatest frustration for Democrats in Washington these days. On one hand, they want desperately to push back on President Trump and his agenda. On the other hand, they run into a difficulty in that so many of the things they ostensibly oppose are issues or practices until yesterday they championed. This leaves them with not much of a polemical argument to make, aside from “Trump.” Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, said in an interview back in 2019 “of course” he would use tariffs — just, er, “differently” than Trump. Because, reasons.

Democrats are absolutely appalled by the ambitious use of executive power — unless it is power wielded by a Democrat in pursuit of the welfare state. They call it a constitutional crisis, official treachery on the order of blowing up Mount Rushmore for the president to circumvent the courts in pursuit of his agenda. They forget (or do they?) how regularly President Joe Biden did the same (student loan forgiveness, as one example), or New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s repeated calls for the Biden administration to defy federal court rulings. In a Twitter/X post following a ruling in which Justice Samuel Alito explicitly expressed “doubts (the Biden administration) would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections” AOC replied, in part, “The court is a political entity currently engaged in overreach and abuse of power. In our system of checks and balances, SCOTUS’s reckless behavior warrants a check from the leg + executive branches. This is not unprecedented, it’s how our system is designed to avert tyranny.” Sounds not dissimilar from what President Trump is now saying, and just as wrong-headed.

The Democrats are in an increasingly uncomfortable position on many issues, not just now having to support hawkish foreign policy, defend “Big Pharma” from President Trump’s HHS Secretary, and oppose labor on tariffs, but also to defend institutions they decried less than a year ago. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who made one of the only good decisions in his 25 years in the Senate last week by accepting the Republican CR to keep the government open, ignited an internecine war within his party, with several Democrats castigating him for not using the filibuster — the abolition of which was a Democratic priority six months ago. Among those were none other than AOC, whose name is being bandied about for a party leadership position.

The paradoxes pile up.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.