Vance is doing his best to help Trump tear down the Supreme Court | Opinion
I highly doubt Vice President JD Vance would be making the same argument of an executive mandate in the case of former President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness scheme.
The story of President Donald Trump’s second term thus far is the stress that he and his allies are placing on the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.
Nobody has done more to instigate that fight than Vice President JD Vance, who has been openly critical of the Supreme Court, particularly statements made by Chief Justice John Roberts on the role of the court to check the executive branch.
Vance is not politically ignorant like Trump is, but he sure acts as if he learned nothing in his time at Yale Law School. While Trump opposes things that stand in his way, Vance has an ideology of how he wants to shift the balance of power within our federal government, but only when Republicans are in power.
Trump has surrounded himself with voices that insist the presidency is in a stronger position than it is, and as a result, the courts are being strained when he exceeds his authority.
JD Vance is wrong about the role of the presidency
For Vance, the executive branch is the motor meant to power our federal government. This goes against what conservatives have historically understood, which is that Congress is the branch that ought to power our government, despite some administrations giving in to the temptation of executive rule.
“You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for,” Vance recently told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the “Interesting Times” podcast.
To him, an electoral victory means the American people elected that administration to act with impunity for four years. This is a majoritarian view in which the American people give broad mandates to the politicians they elect, rather than those elections being reflections of the choices in front of Americans.
As I have argued before, the people do not elect a president because they trust whatever that individual’s whims are for four years, but rather because they trust that person within the framework of American government more than the alternative.
I highly doubt the vice president would be making the same argument of an executive mandate in the case of former President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness scheme. Vance doesn't actually believe these arguments (he's far too intelligent to). It's simply partisan politics.
Trump's administration is causing unnecessary conflict
The vice president’s view ties in perfectly with his hostility to the courts.
“I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential,” Vance said on the podcast. “In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.”
The job of the Supreme Court is to settle what the law is, rather than make political judgments. In this sense, Vance is correct that political matters should be left to the discretion of the executive branch. However, that is not what is happening with the Trump administration's deportation plans.
While there are some legitimate examples of activist judges hindering the administration’s deportation actions, the ones that have made broader headlines involve the administration’s legally sketchy decisions.
Thus far, the Trump administration has launched a hostile collision course with the courts by:
- Reinterpreting a 1798 wartime statute to consider illegal immigrants as foreign invaders.
- Mistakenly deporting a suspected gang member to El Salvador, though he had an American court order against being removed, and refusing to facilitate his return ‒ despite a court order demanding the administration do so.
- Signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a constitutionally protected policy upheld by several court precedents.
- Repeatedly questioning whether suspected illegal immigrants are entitled to due process before being deported.
- Called for the impeachment of a judge who ruled against Trump.
The Supreme Court has been way too active
It is not simply a matter of political judgment for the court to block policies that run afoul of the law.
You would think that an administration that believes in deference to the executive branch would act in good faith with the court, but that is not what has happened. Instead, the Trump administration has worked with open contempt for both the judicial branch and the Constitution. An administration looking for deference on any number of policies should at least act like it cares about what the Constitution says.
The Supreme Court is not meant to be in the news this much, and one of the reasons it is is because of this administration’s very aggressive view of the executive branch. When an administration runs afoul of the law as much as Trump's has, the Supreme Court gets bogged down in the political world, where it is not meant to be.
When an administration forces the Supreme Court to routinely rule on its policies, it politicizes the judicial branch in ways that it was never meant to be. Both in their rhetoric and in their attempted policies, White House officials are stressing the role of the judicial branch. As I've written before, Congress isn't helping the problem with inaction, but Trump is taking a far more active role in the erosion of our federal government than any other recent president.
One can argue about the merits of the chief justice's statements about the administration and its rhetoric, and there are debates to be had. However, the fact that Roberts even feels the need to comment publicly on the Trump administration's bad faith says a lot about where the court is.
The Trump administration has raised the temperature in the power struggle between the judicial branch and the presidency, and White House officials complain when judges meet them at the rim to check against their power.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for Paste BN and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.