They’re already enshrined to the nation’s highest bench, but the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are clearly putting themselves on a pedestal—and are ready to rumble with any lower federal courts that they feel are getting too big for their britches—or robes. The fact that the justices feel the need to express their superiority is surprising given that, by definition, the lower courts must defer to them—they get to sit on a court literally called the Supreme Court, after all. But even more surprising is that the lower courts seem ready to fight back.

Take Justice Samuel Alito’s harsh words in the March 2025 USAID judgment that allowed the agency to release nearly $2 billion dollars in foreign aid funds that Trump sought to block. Alito dissented from that majority decision, which he wrote left him “stunned,” but saved his best bile for the lower court. In a strikingly-personal insult, he called the district court’s decision “self-aggrandizement,” seemingly just because the judge had dared disagree with Alito’s view that Trump’s presidential power is nearly unlimited.

The irony of a Supreme Court justice accusing a lower court of being self-aggrandizing seems lost on Alito’s conservative colleagues as

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