By Charlie Savage and Minho Kim
Vice President JD Vance declared earlier this week that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” delivering a warning shot to the federal judiciary in the face of court rulings that have, for now, stymied aspects of President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The statement, issued on social media, came as federal judges have temporarily barred a slew of Trump administration actions from taking effect. They include ending birthright citizenship; giving associates of Elon Musk’s government-slashing effort access to a sensitive Treasury Department system; transferring transgender female inmates to male prisons; and placing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees on leave.
Vance, a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, has repeatedly argued in recent years that presidents like Trump can and should ignore court orders that they say infringe on their rightful executive powers. While his post did not go that far, it carried greater significance given that he is now vice president.
The post may also offer a window on the administration’s thinking toward the orders against it as Trump has openly violated numerous statutes, like limits on summarily firing officials and effectively dismantling USAID and folding it into the State Department. It also raised the question of whether the administration would stop abiding by rulings if it deemed them to be illegitimately impeding his agenda.
Vance’s post did not cite any specific ruling. But many of Trump’s allies have denounced an order early Saturday prohibiting Trump political appointees and associates of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiative from gaining further access to the Treasury Department’s payments system.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday as he went to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, Trump said the judge had overreached, calling the Treasury ruling a “disgrace.” But he appeared to be contemplating appeals, saying the court case “had a long way to go.”
Trump added: “No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”
Earlier in the day, Vance reshared a post by Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law School professor who has argued for strong presidential powers, and who wrote, “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.”
Vermeule appended his comment to a post by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who called the order about the Treasury Department “outrageous” and branded the judge who had issued it an “outlaw” who should be barred from hearing additional cases involving the Trump administration.
Notably, however, Cotton did not call for Trump to defy the order. Rather, he said an appeals court should “immediately reverse” it.
The second Trump administration’s brazen pattern of blowing through myriad apparent legal limits has prompted debate about its intentions. One theory is that it is deliberately setting up test cases that would ultimately pave the way for the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority to expand presidential power by striking down the statutes as unconstitutional.
But the escalating pace of courtroom clashes has raised the question of what would happen if Trump simply started ignoring decisions he did not like, rather than appealing them. The result would be a constitutional crisis.
In his same social media post, Vance also cited types of decision-making by executive branch officials that he portrayed as outside the legitimate purview of courts.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”
It has been more common for arguments to arise about the scope and limits of executive power in the context of statutes enacted by Congress, and where the line should be drawn between lawmakers’ ability to regulate the government and a president’s exclusive constitutional authority. For example in the George W. Bush administration, the president’s lawyers declared that Bush could lawfully disregard laws like a ban on torturing detainees, citing its broad view of his power as commander in chief.
But Vance has repeatedly asserted that presidents should ignore court orders they believe intrude on their own view of their constitutional authority.
In a 2021 appearance on a podcast, Vance, then running for a Senate seat in Ohio, said that if Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
He continued: “And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — 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.’”
In an interview on ABC News in February 2024, Vance, who was then the junior senator from Ohio, was asked whether he thought the president could defy the Supreme Court. Yes, Vance replied, if a ruling cut into a president’s rightful constitutional powers. He invoked a hypothetical example to lay out his reasoning, describing a decision that forbade a president, in his role as commander in chief, to fire a particular general.
“This is just basic constitutional legitimacy,” Vance said. “You’re talking about a hypothetical where the Supreme Court tries to run the military.”
He doubled down, in an interview with Politico Magazine the following month, that a president should ignore the Supreme Court if it stopped him from dismantling the federal bureaucracy.
“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,” Vance said. “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.”
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