JD Vance Condemned For Saying Federal Judges "Aren’t Allowed" To Limit Trump

Experts and officials expressed alarm after Vice President JD Vance suggested that federal courts “aren’t allowed” to limit the White House’s “legitimate power,” Josh Marcus reported for The Independent.

Experts and officials expressed alarm after Vice President JD Vance suggested that federal courts “aren’t allowed” to limit the White House’s “legitimate power.” I Photo: Vice President JD Vance Facebook

“JD, we both went to law school,” Senator Adam Schiff wrote on X.

“But we don’t have to be lawyers to know that ignoring court decisions we don’t like puts us on a dangerous path to lawlessness. We just have to swear an oath to the Constitution. And mean it.”

Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote on X that Vance’s comments suggested the Trump administration was “gearing up to defy a court order,” warning that this moment marked “the battle lines for our democracy.”

She pointed to the landmark 1803 Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison, which itself was a dispute over executive power and appointments.

The ruling established the principle of judicial review in the U.S. and contains the oft-quoted line: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Goitein added, “The answer to that question is 100% settled and has been for 222 years. This has nothing to do with partisan politics or whether you like Trump’s policies.”

Ty Cobb, a former White House counsel, commented: “I think the real question is not whether the courts are going to do their job, but whether, once they do their job, it’ll have much effect on Trump—unless and until the Supreme Court intervenes—because that’s the only court he seems to listen to.”

Paige Skinner also reported for HuffPost that JD Vance wants Trump to have unlimited power.