Vice President JD Vance attacked federal judges on Sunday for blocking several of the Trump administration’s sweeping executive actions, characterizing their recent decisions as “illegal.”
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Mr. Vance wrote on social media.
Mr. Vance’s post raises questions about whether the Trump administration will abide by federal rulings curtailing President Trump’s agenda. He compared judicial intervention to courts telling generals how to conduct military operations, suggesting that American presidents should wield broad powers in executing their domestic policy.
Federal courts have risen in the first weeks of the Trump administration as the front lines of a push from state attorneys general and outside watchdogs’ efforts to stop the Trump administration from enacting partisan policies through extensive directives and executive orders.
In recent days, those critics racked up a considerable number of victories, as federal courts have blocked some of Mr. Trump’s executive actions, at least temporarily. Judges have shut down decrees from Mr. Trump and his officials aimed at ending birthright citizenship, transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons, potentially exposing identities of F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending.
Judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents both joined in condemning some of Mr. Trump’s most contentious decrees, such as ending birthright citizenship or shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Congress had established and funded.
One of the most scathing judicial criticisms came from a Reagan-appointed judge who was the second to block Mr. Trump’s order to end universal birthright citizenship.
“The Constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games,” Judge John C. Coughenour said, referring to the 14th Amendment, which endows U.S. citizenship to “all persons born” in the United States.
Such a change, he added, could be made only through amending the Constitution. “That’s how the rule of law works.”
