There’s only one person in the entire United States government on whom the Constitution lays the obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That is the president. As for the other branches, in the Congress, legislative power is divided among 535 individuals. In the judiciary there are some 800 active Article III judges. So it’s hard to see a basis to second-guess the president on faithful enforcement of the laws of the United States.

Yet federal judges, especially of the liberal stripe, seem unable to resist peering over the presidential shoulder. Feature the dispute over Mr. Trump’s so-called roving raids by immigration officers at Los Angeles. A federal district judge had found these raids were “likely unconstitutional” because the federales were “were detaining people without probable cause at car washes, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots based on stereotypes,” Politico reports.

Mr. Trump appealed this limit on his ability to enforce the immigration laws to the Supreme Court in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. Today by six to three the Nine put on hold, for now, the district judge’s restriction until the case is resolved by the riders of the Ninth Circuit. The high court’s ruling marks a vindication of presidential power, but the objections marked in a dissent by the three liberal justices are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring with today’s ruling, cites federal law to back Mr. Trump’s “roving” ICE raids. Immigration officers have authority to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States,” he writes. Officers “may briefly detain” people “for questioning” based on “a reasonable suspicion” of being an alien. He finds “common sense” justifies the Trump ICE policy.

The scale of the illegal migration crisis, too, Justice Kavanaugh finds, with “at least 15 million people” estimated to be living here without a legal basis, bolsters Mr. Trump’s approach. Yet Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by her liberal colleagues, frets, “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.” 

Justice Sotomayor’s complaint reflects the view of the lower court judge who reckoned that the criteria used by ICE agents to identify illegals “seem no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.” From high atop her judicial steed, Justice Sotomayor avers: “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.” These liberal justices, it seems, want to substitute their policies for the president’s.

That impulse springs from some other cairn than the Constitution. The Framers assigned the president alone the duty of enforcing the law. “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” Hamilton wrote. A puissant president, per Arthur Schlesinger after Watergate, had “enabled the American republic to meet the great crises.” He said “the answer to the runaway presidency is not the messenger-boy presidency.”

To those who balk at the “roving” ICE raids, Chief Justice Roberts offers insight in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The President’s political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the Executive Branch,” he said. It reflects the Framers’ “constitutional strategy,” he wrote: “Divide power everywhere except for the Presidency, and render the President directly accountable to the people through regular elections.”