It’s up to the courts — and to us by Ruth Neuwald Falcon & Barry Rosenbaum

Every Sunday night, Joyce Vance publishes The Week Ahead on her Substack. It is stunning, though not surprising, how much worse things are week to week. From last night’s post:

The biggest concern right now is how the Trump administration will respond to court orders that go against them. Will they thumb their nose, as there is already some suggestion they’re doing in the impoundment case…? Will this administration, as JD Vance’s retweet suggests it could, decide that only its own decisions, not those of the courts, are legitimate, and keep on acting as it pleases? 

This is the retweet she is referring to:

In her Sunday night Letter, Heather Cox Richardson said:

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary… Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

(We looked up Adrian Vermeule and learned that, in addition to being a professor at Harvard Law, he is is a proponent of integralism, the principle that “the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society.” You might want to take a minute and read what Wikipedia has to say about it. It’s chilling.)

In a 2021 interview, when he was running for the Senate, Vance said he would advise Trump to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” 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.'”

This afternoon, according to The New York Times, a federal judge said “the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.”

In today’s Newsletter from Robert Hubbell, entitled We are not sheep. Get louder. Take action. Create a shadow cabinet, he writes:

The right solution is for Trump, Musk, and JD Vance to stop making wild statements that the president can act in a lawless manner with impunity. Let’s hope they do so. We should give them at least another 30 minutes to prove their bona fides.

And when the 30-minute grace period has expired, we need to ramp up the pressure, increase the volume, and make American businesses realize that their profits will evaporate overnight unless they become part of the solution.

He then gives us a list of things we can do:

• Street protests must continue to grow daily.
• Telephone lines into the offices of every US Representative and Senator should melt from the volume and anger of the messages.
• Everyone in America should belong to a grassroots organization that is actively involved in planning protests (even if you are unable to show up at the protests).
• Engage in daily acts of resistance: Jessica Craven Chop Wood Carry Water, Third Act, and 5Calls.org, and others.
• Support Democrats while demanding that they act in a manner consistent with the constitutional emergency we face.
• Support the legal advocacy organizations leading the fight in court: Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Docket, ACLU, and other legal advocacy groups.

Will it work? We don’t know but take encouragement from Joyce Vance’s words:

It’s up to the courts and the people now. Don’t buy into the myth that we don’t have power together. We’re beginning to see opposition to Trump take shape, and if it is persistent enough, it can check what he’s trying to do.

Don’t obey in advance, and don’t let anyone convince you your voice doesn’t matter. That’s how dictators come to power.