JD Vance Challenges Judicial Authority, Threatening Constitutional Balance

Photo via Reuters

TRISHA GARUD: Politicians have thrown around the term “constitutional crisis” often in recent election cycles. As people grow desensitized to this phrase, we forget how significant constitutional checks and balances are to the health of our democracy. 

In the past week, Vice President JD Vance, a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, has used the media to refute basic judicial authority, established by Marbury v. Madison in 1803 as the power of judicial review. Vance’s comments seem to respond to judges’ rulings against his administration. 

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance wrote on X. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” 

In fact, there is judicial precedent to disprove Vance on each of these three counts. 

Both the left and the right have claimed that Vance’s remarks represent a constitutional crisis. Vance, President Trump and Elon Musk believe that the courts are infringing on executive power, and others believe that the Trump administration is abusing its power. Given the nature of case law, the Constitution has too much grey area to answer which side is correct. 

Since Trump was inaugurated in January, he has signed dozens of executive orders—these are written directives by the president, ranging in power. Ending birthright citizenship is beyond presidential power, pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, but Trump can certainly rename Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. 

As a result, coalitions of Democratic states and attorneys general have challenged some of Trump’s executive orders, claiming he has unconstitutionally reached past his allotted power. 

They have been largely successful; the courts blocked many of Trump’s agenda items, including the aforementioned acts of ending birthright citizenship and freezing federal funds.

Recently, nineteen Democratic attorneys general filed an injunction against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to block the team from accessing the Treasury Department’s private data, including social security numbers, account numbers, bank balances and tax refunds of all individuals, businesses and nonprofit organizations in the United States.

The attorneys general argued that the Trump administration violated federal law by allowing the DOGE team access to the Treasury’s payment system within the Bureau of Fiscal Service. DOGE had requested access to root out instances of fraudulent payments and minimize waste.

After the injunction was granted, Musk called the presiding judge “corrupt” and called for her impeachment. Likewise, Trump signalled that his administration would be willing to fight rulings against him. 

“No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” Trump said to journalists on Air Force One heading to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, referring to the injunction against DOGE. “It’s a disgrace.”

The traditional means of disagreeing with a court’s decision is to appeal. The Trump administration seems to prefer a different approach through negative media comments, a hallmark of Trump governance. 

Trump, Vance and Musk reserve the right to freely express their opinions on rulings against them. The issue becomes when they unduly use their platforms to undercut the judicial branch to fortify the executive branch. 

If this administration uses their rhetoric to justify noncompliance with the courts’ rulings, we would enter a bona fide constitutional crisis through a dissolution of checks and balances. 

By simply ignoring court rulings, the president could prove that congressional and judicial oversight over the executive branch has no concrete enforcement mechanisms—at least none the country has ever needed to employ.

Trisha Garud is a staff writer from San Francisco for On the Record. She is a first-year in the College of Arts and Sciences studying Government and Art History. Trisha is especially interested in constitutional law and fiscal policy.