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“President Trump said Tuesday he would abide by court rulings if they blocked parts of his agenda amid uproar over comments from some allies about defying the legal system. ‘I always abide by the courts and then I’ll have to appeal it,’ Trump said when asked if he would comply with court orders if they blocked his agenda…
“Trump’s comments come as Democrats and some legal experts have sounded the alarm after Vice President Vance and top Trump adviser Elon Musk in recent days suggested judges don’t have jurisdiction to stop the president from exercising his authority. ‘If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal,’ Vance wrote on X, which Musk owns. ‘Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.’” The Hill
“Trump and his supporters on Wednesday continued to ramp up their criticism of judges who they say have stymied the Republican U.S. president's second-term agenda, with billionaire ally Elon Musk calling for ‘an immediate wave of judicial impeachments.’ Those statements came a day after federal courts forced U.S. agencies to restore health-related websites taken down in response to one of Trump's executive orders and declined to lift a judge's order barring the administration from freezing federal funding.” Reuters
The left argues that Trump’s behavior is dangerous, and worries that he may not abide by adverse court decisions.
“Trump has tried to declare a constitutional right — birthright citizenship — unconstitutional. He has ignored the fact that Congress set up government institutions, like the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as he tries to weaken or shut them down. He froze federal spending. He’s fired watchdogs ignoring laws on the books about that. On Monday, a judge found he’s ignored at least one court order to stop doing some of this…
“There are very few guardrails left if the United States has a president willing to break the law and a Congress unwilling or unable to react.”
Amber Phillips, Washington Post
“One of the things that is the most concerning about the freezing of federal funds is that it appears to be predicated on the view that the President is not bound by the decisions that Congress makes to appropriate money to fund government programs or agencies. And that position effectively turns Congress into an advisory body…
“That’s a rejection of a basic premise of the Constitution, and you might even call it a suspension of the Constitution, because it treats Congress not as a coequal branch with powers that the executive must abide by but as a body that issues suggestions to the executive branch.”
Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker
“In 2021, [Vance] said that Trump, if restored to office, should fire ‘every single midlevel bureaucrat’ and ‘civil servant’ — ‘and 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.’’ ‘We are in a late Republican period,’ Vance elaborated (referring to the Roman Republic). ‘We’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.’…
“[This is] a dangerous road to go down, because — as Vance’s apocryphal Jackson quote indicates — judges don’t actually have power to force the administration into compliance. A willing, voluntary respect for the rule of law holds the constitutional system together.”
Andrew Prokop, Vox
“[Trump and his acolytes] are flirting with disregard of judicial commands by a president for the first time in the country’s history. Andrew Jackson, historical legends aside, didn’t do it: He probably never said ‘John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,’ and in any event, the case in question was against the state of Georgia, and the Supreme Court never ordered him to do anything…
“Abraham Lincoln didn’t do it: He exercised extreme emergency powers that had been understood to inhere in the presidency since the beginning of the republic, rooted in the Founders’ veneration of John Locke. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Al Gore all didn’t do it… The saber-rattling from Trump, Vance, and Musk does not yet amount to a constitutional crisis, nor does the DOJ pushback in the courts… But we are at the very beginning of [this] administration.”
Harry Litman, New Republic
The right argues that Trump’s behavior is within presidential norms, and is critical of the courts blocking his agenda.
The right argues that Trump’s behavior is within presidential norms, and is critical of the courts blocking his agenda.
“Despite Trump repeating that he ‘will abide by the courts’ while appealing opposing decisions, NPR insisted that Trump’s circle has indicated it is ‘willing to ignore court orders and defy judicial authority.’ During his first term, Trump repeatedly lost cases — as did his predecessor, Barack Obama, and successor, Biden — but he continued to comply with those rulings…
“Biden was repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution, including with unilateral actions through executive orders. Courts called him out for it. None of these Democratic members declared a coup or collapse of democracy. Such court challenges are common and often these early initiatives shake out with new guarantees and judicial guidelines…
“The courts may oppose certain moves by Trump and DOGE, but these are decisions of process, not policy. Eventually the president will be able to pare government spending, which is what the Democrats are really upset about — not the invented ‘constitutional crisis.’”
Jonathan Turley, New York Post
“Many of the people who feigned horror at the president auditing departments under his purview were quite happy when former President Barack Obama ignored Congress and unilaterally bestowed millions of illegal immigrants with amnesty. Obama also ignored Congress and SCOTUS on immigration law, and then repeatedly ignored the courts on his signature law, Obamacare, as well as on recess appointments.‘When Congress won’t act, this president will,’ one of his aides famously bragged…
“Democrats now contend an activist district court judge should be able to micromanage the White House’s hiring decisions. Only recently, though, they were pushing Biden to ignore the Supreme Court and ‘forgive’ billions of dollars in existing loans by decree. He did. ‘The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,’ Biden bragged. Not one Democrat, as far as I can tell, decried this flagrant circumvention of separation of powers.”
David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner
“Vance said, ‘Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.’ But you didn’t need the vice president to tell you that. The Court occasionally tells you that. During the Biden years, a number of red states sued to attempt to make Biden enforce immigration law, in part by reinstating the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. But a court has no power to force a foreign country to agree to something, let alone to direct the president to negotiate such an agreement…
“[Democrats] maintain, wrongly, that courts must rein Trump in lest he take lawless action under the guise of his constitutional authority because — as they’d have the judiciary take as a given — Trump is an unscrupulous president. That’s not how it works. Regardless of what you think of the president’s scruples, he is the president and he is constitutionally supreme in such areas as foreign policy and setting enforcement priorities for the executive branch. A court has no business interfering.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
