'Yup': JD Vance exposed as key architect of effort to 'entirely upend' checks and balances

11 February

In 2023, then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) doubled down on his position that presidents should disobey federal court rulings — even from the Supreme Court — if they contradict the actions of the president. Now as vice president, Vance may be advising President Donald Trump to do exactly that.

In a Tuesday article, Politico's Ian Ward reprinted excerpts of an interview he conducted with Vance shortly after he was sworn in as Ohio's junior U.S. senator. In that interview, Vance defended comments he made in a 2021 podcast in which he said Trump should "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state" if reelected. He then argued that if the courts intervened to stop those firings, Trump should "stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"

Ward recalled that when asking Vance if he still held that view, he responded: "Yup." And Vance communicated over the weekend that he still holds this viewpoint, writing in a Sunday tweet: "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."

Ward pointed out that should Trump appeal a decision against him all the way to the Supreme Court, and if the High Court upheld the lower courts' ruling and Trump disregarded it, it would provoke "a full-fledged constitutional crisis of a different sort, one that would entirely upend the existing rules governing the separation of powers between the courts and the executive branch."

"Although there is some historical precedent for a president defying a Supreme Court order, no showdown between the executive branch and the judiciary has risen to the level of crisis that would follow a move of the sort that Vance is suggesting," Ward wrote. "As several legal commentators have pointed out in response to Vance’s post, the ability to determine the constitutionality and legality of executive action is core to the courts’ power, meaning that denying them of that authority would profoundly upset the constitutional system of checks and balances as currently understood."

And as Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar said in a Tuesday segment on CNN, the Andrew Jackson quote Vance referenced is "apocryphal," meaning its origins are hazy and that it's unlikely Jackson ever made such a statement. In fact, while Jackson disagreed with the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case, he ultimately stated that the Court's orders were final and that presidents were duty-bound to abide by them.

The Trump administration appears to already be testing the waters of the judiciary's enforcement mechanisms. On Tuesday, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) official instructed FEMA's Office of Grant Administration to withhold millions of dollars in Department of Homeland Security grant money despite a federal judge ordering that those funds be disbursed, as Congress already appropriated the money in question.

Click here to read Ward's full article in Politico.

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