JD Vance is right about the President's Constitutional Power and Right to Criticize Judicial Overreach

The first weeks of the Trump Administration have seen the swiftest action of any new Administration in history. Criminal cartels designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations while troops have been rushed to the border. Mass arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens. Importantly, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) quickly discovered and reported massive waste, fraud, and abuse in various government agencies starting with USAID.

Unlike what the left has falsely claimed, DOGE has not shut down any agencies themselves. In a desperate move to stop the audits, Democrats sued to stop DOGE from shining light on the Treasury and found a Democratic appointed Federal Judge to do their bidding. This judge barring DOGE from access to Treasury records for the audit. Conservative criticism went straight to the top, with Vice President Vance telling George Stephanopoulos: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. 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: (ABC News, Feb. 10, 2025)

Vance’s post brought a firestorm and yet he was right about his criticism and the Constitution

First, among those criticizing Vance was the former Russian Collusion kingpin, Senator Adam Schiff, who posted on X about Vance: “we both went to law school. 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.” Other leftist legal “experts” opined the same sentiment as Schiff. The Constitution and related history provide ample proof of what Vance claimed.

Thomas Jefferson disagreed with the seminal opinion of Marbury v. Madison (1803) which produced the doctrine Judicial Review:

"The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches." —Thomas Jefferson to W. H. Torrance, 1815.

Decades later, President Andrew Jackson famously said of an 1832 Supreme Court decision, Worcester v. Georgia: "Chief Marshal has made his decision, now let him enforce it," while claiming the opinion had fallen "stillborn" on Georgia. Abraham Lincoln famously asserted about the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dredd Scot decision holding slaves were solely property: “But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country …"

Abraham Lincoln expounded on his understanding of the Court’s role with respect to the Constitution and why Judicial Review was limited: "If this important decision (Dred Scot) had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent. 

But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country …"

Lincoln’s understanding is relevant to Vance’s critique of the Court’s decision to stop DOGE. The injunction keeps the President from fulfilling his promises to the American people to audit government agencies. Vance’s criticism of the injuntion was based on his understanding of the powers of each of the branches, and that the President had a duty to follow the Constitution. In auditing Federal Agencies to determine required reform, the President had a right and duty to determine how that should be done. The Judge’s injunction was overreach of the Court into the Executive Branch sphere, and like a judge telling a General how to conduct a military operation. The President takes an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”. This is different from other United States Officers in the President’s unique duty to “preserve” the Constitution. Preserving means keeping the Constitution from being altered, including by misinterpretation of the Courts.

The Courts have a role in checks and balances but so does the President. As Jefferson and Lincoln made clear, the President has a duty to ensure the Constitution it is preserved. It’s the Court’s job to get it right and persuade through sound opinions. Barring the President’s own team from an audit of an agency is not the Court’s place. JD Vance is right about this case and right to say so.

Col. Bill Connor——Bio and Archives – Col. Bill Connor is a retired U.S. Army Infantry officer, attorney, and founding partner of NATIONAL DEFENSE CONSULTANTS, LLC. While in the Army, Connor logged multiple deployments to the Middle East, and he has commanded both light Infantry and Ranger training companies. From 2007 through 2008 he was deployed to Afghanistan where he became the senior U.S. military adviser in Helmand Province. Since the start of the October 2023 war in Israel, he has provided analysis to NEWSMAX.