The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?
Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then 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,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More
