Because of all that has happened since President-elect Trump’s first term in office, it is easy to forget that the Supreme Court repeatedly stood up to him during those chaotic four years.
The court impeded Mr. Trump’s initial efforts to ban people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. It blocked Mr. Trump’s attempt to put a question on the 2020 census asking whether the respondent was a U.S. citizen. It rejected his effort to rescind the program that shields people brought to the United States as children from deportation and allows them to work. It ruled against him in a high-profile subpoena dispute. And it sat on its hands as Mr. Trump and his supporters tried to use the legal process to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump won some big cases, too, but his track record was surprisingly poor for a Republican president before a Supreme Court with a majority of Republican-appointed justices.
Now, with Republicans looking likely to control both chambers of Congress by the time Mr. Trump is inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, and with fewer moderating influences within Mr. Trump’s own party to restrain him, it seems inevitable that the court will once again be the last institution standing between Mr. Trump and whatever he wants to do.
The problem for the court — and for the Republic — is that it’s going to be much harder for the justices to push back this time around, even if they want to. That is because of the sharp decline in public support for the court, which has plummeted, no doubt in response not just to the justices’ controversial rulings, but also to the ethically questionable behavior of some of them. Without that public support, what would happen if Mr. Trump simply ignored a decision by the nation’s highest court that he doesn’t like? It is a question that until now seemed largely thinkable.
Yet the vice president-elect, JD Vance, suggested such a scenario in a 2021 interview in which he first said Mr. Trump should fire “every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.” And then he added: “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.”
