Vice President JD Vance on Sunday seemed to be laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to ignore judges’ rulings on several of the actions it has taken.
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After already usurping the legislature’s power of the purse, it seems as though the Trump administration is also getting ready to undermine the authority of judges, which would complete the transformation of the US from a democracy to an autocracy within a month.
Vice President JD Vance, who must have slept through all of his constitutional law classes while at Yale University, on Sunday made it sound as though Donald Trump’s regime is not overly interested in abiding by the decisions of federal judges… at least not those rulings that would curb the power of the executive branch.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance opined in a social media post following a few decisions that throttled Elon Musk’s efforts to destroy the federal government.
In other words, Vance seems to believe that a judge would not be allowed to stop a general who is committing war crimes.
However, this isn’t about torture or slaughtering prisoners of war; this is about laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to start ignoring decisions that keep it from violating the Constitution and the laws of the United States.
“If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal,” Vance added. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
But determining whether a power is legitimate or not is exactly the role of judges in a system of checks and balances.
Can the Trump administration end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution? Do some tech bros have the right to access the personal information of Americans? Does the administration have the right to decide whether it wants to spend money that Congress appropriated? Can the Department of Justice remove a database with information on cases prosecuted in connection with Trump’s January 6 insurrection?
These are questions for the courts to settle.
And just because Vance, Trump, and Musk may not love the answers doesn’t mean that they can ignore the respective rulings.
Instead, what they can do is appeal any decision they don’t like to a higher court until these (and other) matters either end up before the Supreme Court, or the decisions of lower courts are left in place.
As a graduate of Yale’s law school, Vance should know this… and he probably does.
Which is what makes it even more disconcerting that he would tweet this out instead of saying, for example, “We believe that these rulings were incorrectly decided and are confident that we will prevail on appeal.”
Because the inescapable conclusion of the vice president of the United States making this kind of statement is that this administration is not particularly interested in following what is commonly known as the rule of law.
And that is a much greater threat than any one action Trump may want to take.
Ultimately, if the executive branch decides to ignore a judge’s ruling, there isn’t a lot of recourse for anybody else. The system relies on everybody playing by the rules, which isn’t something Trump and Musk are known for.
Therefore, what Vance seems to be suggesting here is a slippery slope that leads to a very dark place.
It may not seem like this to most people, but the coming days will be some of the most important in the nation’s history.
If Trump ignores any of these rulings, or if Musk does so on his own without facing any consequences, then the rule of law will be greatly diminished going forward.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
