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From POLITICAL WIRE, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2025
Vice President J.D. Vance suggested Sunday courts “aren’t allowed” to overrule President Donald Trump and his executive orders, Forbes reports.
Said Vance, on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Vance also shared a post from legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, who claimed: “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.”
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If you are represented in Congress by one or more Republicans, I encourage you to email them today to ask if they agree with J.D. Vance that a President can legitimately ignore orders from the courts (including the Supreme Court.) If they do not, ask them if they are prepared to vote for the impeachment and removal from office of any President who expressly disregards an order from the Supreme Court. If you get any response, I also encourage you to share that response as widely as possible, so that those who are openly willing to discard our Constitutional order are identified, and those who express an intention to defend it can be held accountable to do so.
At present, it is difficult to know how much of this Administration’s professed willingness to ignore the law and the Constitution is bravado and how much is in earnest. But we would be foolish to assume that they “don’t mean it.” America has been governed for more than two centuries as an at-least-somewhat-democratic government under the rule of law and with some meaningful limitations on executive power, but there is no guarantee that this will continue, however hard we find it to imagine the alternative. Ancient Rome was a republic for more than five centuries…and then it wasn’t anymore.