The chief justice takes a swipe at JD Vance

[David Lockmiller]

The vice president-elect has repeatedly suggested that government officials may defy court orders.
Washington Post 1/2/2025
Ruth Marcus

Judicial independence, [Chief Justice John Robert] wrote “is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.” He cited, of course, the response to the court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, when governors throughout the South sought to defy court orders to desegregate public schools.

the pointed reference to the role of both Republican and Democratic administrations in enforcing court orders, Roberts went on, and he’s worth quoting:

“Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

These words cannot be read in a vacuum — nor, I suspect, were they written in one. Because of all the “elected officials from across the political spectrum” who have toyed with defying court orders, the most prominent by far — and the one who ought to know better — is JD Vance, Yale Law School Class of 2013, whose wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.

Vance said on a 2021 podcast. “Replace them with our people. 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.’”

This was no casual, one-off comment.

Vance said on a 2021 podcast. in a February interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.”

Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?”

Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this, but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

President Abraham Lincoln defied the Supreme Court, and most importantly the Chief Justice:

Team of Rivals, page 354-55:

Receiving word that the mobs intended to destroy the train tracks between Annapolis and Philadelphia in order to prevent the long-awaited troops from reaching the beleaguered capital, Lincoln made the controversial decision. If resistance along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia made it "necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety," Lincoln authorized General Scott to do so. In Lincoln's words, General Scott could "arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to public safety." Seward later claimed that he had urged a wavering Lincoln to take this step, convincing him that "perdition was the the sure penalty of further hesitation."

Lincoln had not issued a sweeping order but a directive confined to this single route. Still, by rescinding the basic constitutional protection against arbitrary arrest, he aroused the wrath of Chief Justice Taney, who . . . blasted Lincoln and maintained that only Congress could suspend the writ.

Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief executive, he was responsible for ensuring "that the laws be faithfully executed." An insurrection "in nearly one-third of the States" had subverted the "whole of the laws . . . are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" His logic was unanswerable, but as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the "grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."

"So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history." -- Plutarch

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times, January 10, 2025

In a brief unsigned order, a five-justice majority noted that Mr. Trump was not facing jail time and that he could still challenge his conviction “in the ordinary course on appeal.”

Although Mr. Trump had argued that being sentenced 10 days before his inauguration would distract from the presidential transition, the majority held, “The burden that sentencing will impose on the president-elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial.”

The majority included Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor; Amy Coney Barrett; Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Four of the court’s conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — noted dissents without providing reasons.



How can four Justices of the United States Supreme Court issue a dissent on a constitutional powers question and not state publicly their reasoning?

[Gene C]

(01-10-2025 09:02 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  How can four Justices of the United States Supreme Court issue a dissent on a constitutional powers question and not state publicly their reasoning?

They probably have better and more important things to do, or....
...they did publicly state their reasoning but it made so much sense the press decided not to print it.

[David Lockmiller]

(01-10-2025 01:31 PM)Gene C Wrote:  

(01-10-2025 09:02 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  How can four Justices of the United States Supreme Court issue a dissent on a constitutional powers question and not state publicly their reasoning?

They probably have better and more important things to do, or....
...they did publicly state their reasoning but it made so much sense the press decided not to print it.

It could be that these four justices just flipped a coin and it came up "tails" all four times.