Presidents Should Not Ignore Court Rulings
Vice President J.D. Vance believes presidents can ignore the courts in some situations. Are we heading for a constitutional crisis?
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia, so the story goes, President Andrew Jackson responded by declaring that "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
That's probably not a direct quote—it didn't appear until more than 20 years after Jackson supposedly spoke it—but the sentiment it captures is fairly accurate. Jackson plainly did not agree with the court's ruling in that case, which dealt with how states could legally interact with Native American tribes, but the matter was resolved when the state of Georgia repealed the law that triggered the legal battle in the first place.
Jackson's quote, apocryphal as it may be, retains a place in American presidential history not because of the specifics of that case—but because of the vibes it projects. It exposes an unsettling conundrum at the center of the American experiment in self-government: Can the courts serve their constitutional role as a check on executive power if the president simply says "no"?
That's a thought experiment that some conservatives seem dangerously eager to test out. In recent days, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others in Trump's inner circle have publicly floated the idea that judges should not have the power to review executive branch actions or to block actions judged to violate existing laws or the Constitution. Neither has offered a challenge as pointed as the one Jackson supposedly did, but some legal scholars are spooked about the possibility of a constitutional crisis.
All this started on Saturday, when U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered the Trump administration to prevent Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing payment systems within the U.S. Treasury.
In response, Trump said on Sunday that "no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision." Vance fleshed out that idea in a post on X, arguing that "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."
"If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal," Vance wrote. "If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal."
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has taken the argument a step farther. In a post on X, Miller said "a lone unelected district judge" cannot "assume decision-making control over the entire executive branch." Later, he wrote that "if a district court judge wants control over the entire executive branch…he should run for president."
Trump, Vance, and Miller have a First Amendment right to disagree with a judge's ruling and to criticize what they see as the implications of that ruling, of course. Those criticisms might even have legal merit. Indeed, under the U.S. Supreme Court's "political question doctrine," the entire judiciary system is generally expected to steer clear of making policy decisions or otherwise infringing on the powers vested in the executive and legislative branches. It's certainly fair to argue that Engelmayer may have violated that doctrine with his ruling on Saturday.
But there is a difference between disagreeing with a judge's ruling and questioning whether the judicial system as a whole has the authority to decide such things. Anyone who believes a judge's ruling is wrong is free to appeal that decision to a higher court. The final decision still rests in the judicial branch.
Some recent developments are calling into question whether the Trump administration will continue to recognize that. On Monday, a different federal judge said the Trump administration was defying his January 29 order telling the Trump administration to unfreeze some federal funds. In cases dealing with funding freezes for the National Institute of Health and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Trump administration has also been accused of ignoring court orders.
It's worth noting that Trump is also openly defying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling unrelated to the DOGE-led attempts at cutting and reorganizing the executive branch. Last month, the high court upheld a federal law requiring that the social media site TikTok must be sold or banned. Rather than complying, Trump ordered the Justice Department to simply not enforce the law for 75 days. (Yes, that's a stupid law, but the president does not have the authority to disobey Congress and the courts just because lawmakers do something stupid.)
"The new Trump administration may be heading in the direction of disobeying court orders that go against it," writes Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University, in a post for The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog. "If they do so and get away with it, there are likely to be dire consequences for our constitutional system. An administration not bound by court orders is ultimately not bound by the Constitution and the laws, either."
It would be easier to take a charitable interpretation—that is, that Trump and his allies are merely registering their disagreement rather than engaging in open defiance—if Vance, in particular, did not have a well-established track record of advocating for such defiance.
During a podcast interview in 2021, for example, Vance invoked Jackson's infamous words while answering a question about how a future Republican administration should take on the administrative state. "When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
"That scenario, if it came to pass, would be a bona fide constitutional crisis," wrote Reason's Stephanie Slade at the time.
Vance has made versions of that same argument in other contexts. In 2022, he told ABC News that the president could simply ignore "illegitimate" court rulings, even if they came from the Supreme Court. Asked by Politico last year about his comments on that 2021 podcast interview, Vance confirmed that he believed presidents should defy court orders that deal with the executive branch. Here's his whole response, which is useful for understanding what seems to be the prevailing view within the so-called New Right:
"For me, this is not a limited-government thing — this is a democracy thing. Like, you need the bureaucracy to be responsive to the elected branches of government," he said. "The counterargument is, you know, 'Aren't you promoting a constitutional crisis?' And my response is no — I'm recognizing a constitutional crisis. If the elected president says, 'I get to control the staff of my own government,' and the Supreme Court steps in and says, 'You're not allowed to do that' — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It's not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can't control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what's actually going on."
We're not yet quite in the scenario Vance outlined in that interview, but we're getting closer. Trump's attorneys are now following the proper course of action and appealing some of these cases. It seems almost certain that the Supreme Court will have to step in at some point—either to tell lower courts that the political question doctrine limits their ability to check Trump's power over executive branch programs and payrolls, or to tell Trump the opposite.
If the latter, what will the president do? The fact that it's an open question is worrying enough.
"Refusing to follow a court order crosses a very clear, very dangerous line," warns Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank housed at New York University's law school. "If Trump refuses to follow court orders, especially from the Supreme Court, we will have tipped from chaos into dire crisis."
