Vice-President J.D. Vance suggested Sunday that judges “aren’t allowed” to overrule Donald Trump as the president’s sweeping executive orders face legal roadblocks.
Federal judges have issued several rulings blocking Trump’s executive orders seeking to expand the power of the presidency and reshape the U.S. government.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance said in a post 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,” he added.
The judiciary branch is a co-equal branch of government and courts have overturned presidential actions in every administration.
Since returning to the White House, Trump’s actions on immigration, transgender rights and federal employee issues have all been swiftly challenged in court.
So far, judges have blocked or paused Trump’s efforts to freeze spending, fire federal employees, end birthright citizenship, send transgender women to male prisons and dismantle the United States Agency for International Development.
Vance’s comments on Sunday comes hours after a federal judge blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing sensitive taxpayer data at the Treasury Department.
Musk has since called for the judge to be impeached and also cheered Vance’s remarks on Sunday.
This is not the first time Vance has questioned the power of the judiciary.
In an interview last February on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Vance about comments he made in 2021 urging Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” and ignore the Supreme Court telling him to stop.
“The Constitution says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings but if the Supreme Court—and look, I hoped 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,” Vance said. “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.”
