[Josh Blackman] Has J.D. Vance "Raised the Specter of Open Disregard for Federal Court Rulings"?

Chief Justice Roberts's 2024 year-end report warned that "elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings." When I read that claim, I had no idea who the Chief was referring to. I know that critics have talked about jurisdiction stripping, court expansion, term limits, and so on, but open defiance? Who has proposed that?

Ruth Marcus has a theory. She writes that Roberts was taking a swipe at J.D. Vance. She points out several things Vance has said over the years. (I had missed a piece in Politico Magazine that cited several of these sources.) I follow law and politics pretty closely, and I had never heard of any of these statements. Let's walk through the, one a time.

First, Marcus writes that in September 2021, candidate Vance appeared on the Jack Murphy Live podcast. You can listen to the entire podcast here, or read the transcript here. And here a section (27:13) that Marcus quotes, in part. (She omits the "constitutional crisis level" bit.)

I think that what Trump should do like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid level bureaucrat, Every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and 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, because this is, I think, a constitutional level crisis if we continue to let bureaucrats control the entire country, even when Republicans win elections, then we've lost. We've just permanently lost. We've permanently given up.

Vance returns to that theme a few minutes later in the podcast (32:39):

And I guess to me, the fundamental problem here of the administrative state is that civil servants have no real consequence, and elected officials, specifically, the President, has no real recourse when the civil servants get out of line. Now, the left doesn't care about this, because the civil servants are all on their team. But we should really care about this, because the civil servants are like 90 to 10 not on our team. And so I think the thing that you can do in the Senate is push the legal boundaries, as far as the Supreme Court will let you take it to basically make it possible for democratically accountable people in the executive, in the legislature to fire mid level, up to high level civil servants, like that, to me, is the meat of the administrative state. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to have, like, civil servant turnover, like, every time you have a new president, they're going to fire everybody, but just the knowledge that they can be fired can actually bring a lot of these administrative bureaucracies to heal that is that is like the fundamental fact of the federal government is that the people who implement the policy are very often totally unaccountable to the the people that we elect to actually do policy like that is crazy. That's not a real constitutional republic when that happens. But that is, unfortunately where we are these days.

Here, Vance makes clear that he is not calling for the defiance of the Courts. He will see how far the courts will let the President take things--that is a strategy well in bounds.

I think if you consider the full podcast, Vance is not actually calling for defiance of the Supreme Court. The Andrew Jackson line is almost cliche at this point. It is apocryphal anyway--Jackson almost certainly didn't say it.

Second, Marcus quotes Vance's appearance on ABC in February 2025. George Stephanopoulos asked Vance about his appearance on the podcast:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Fire everyone in the government, then defy the Supreme Court?

You think it's OK for the president to defy the Supreme Court?

VANCE: No, no, George, I did not say fire everyone in the government. I said replace the mid-level bureaucrats with people who are responsive to the administration's agenda. That's called democracy.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Every civil servant in the administrative state.

VANCE: One of the problems -- no, George, I said the mid-level bureaucrats. And one of the problems that we have in this government…

STEPHANOPOULOS: You said, "every civil servant in the administrative state."

VANCE: Who don't actually -- who don't -- let me finish the answer, George. You asked the question. We have a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don't respond to the elected branches.

Let's just give one very real-world example of this. In 2019, Donald Trump, having defeated ISIS, said that we should redeploy our troops in Syria and Jordan out of the region. You had multiple members of the Defense Department bureaucracy who fought him on that.

So what happened? We have people who are sitting ducks in the Levant right now, three of whom just got killed because the bureaucrats aren't listening to the political branches.

That's a fundamental component of our government, George, that whoever is in charge, agree or disagree with him, you have to follow the rules. If those people aren't following the rules, then of course you've got to fire them, and of course, 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.

This is just basic constitutional legitimacy. You're talking about a hypothetical where the Supreme Court tries to run the military. I don't think that's going to happen, George. But of course, if it did, the president would have to respond to it. There are multiple examples throughout American history of the president doing just that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You didn't say "military" in your answer, and you've made it very clear you believe the president can defy the Supreme Court.

Stephanopoulous only quotes part of the podcast, not where Vance says the President should go "as far as the Supreme Court will let you take it." And I think Vance's clarification is consistent with what he said. Vance is also correct about what would happen if the Supreme Court blocked the President from removing a general.  Does anyone disagree?

Third, Marcus points to a March 2024 interview in Politico Magazine:

On several other occasions — most recently during his interview with Stephanopoulos — Vance has suggested that a second-term President Trump should summarily fire a significant number of midlevel federal bureaucrats, and if the Supreme Court steps intervenes to stop him, he should openly defy its order.

I asked him if this was an accurate description of his views.

"Yup," he said.

I asked him to explain.

"For me, this is not a limited-government thing — this is a democracy thing. Like, you need the bureaucracy to be responsive to the elected branches of government," he said. "The counterargument is, you know, 'Aren't you promoting a constitutional crisis?' And my response is no — I'm recognizing a constitutional crisis. If the elected president says, 'I get to control the staff of my own government,' and the Supreme Court steps in and says, 'You're not allowed to do that' — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It's not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can't control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what's actually going on."

Here, I think Vance is again alluding to a hypothetical constitutional crisis. Once we get to a point where the Court itself is flagrantly violating the Constitution, then I think there is a different conversation to be had. Frankly, I appreciate Vance's candor. Roberts can hide behind the veneer of judicial supremacy, but there is a limit to any Court's powers. And we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Let's go back to Roberts's quote:

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.

Rulings, plural. Was the Chief talking about J.D. Vance? I think that is a stretch.

And this is yet another reason why I severely dislike podcasts. This was a 90 minute long discussion where Vance hit on lots of points. If you pluck out a few words here and there, and ignore the broader context, a lot will be missed.  I transcribe podcasts, for good reason.

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