Presidents Should Not Ignore Court Rulings
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how states could legally interact with Native American tribes, but the matter was resolved when the state of Georgia repealed the law that triggered the legal battle in the first place.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 co
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