Can we survive J.D. Vance?
If Donald Trump follows the advice of J.D. Vance, the vice president-elect, we could see the end of our “nation of laws”.
Our soon-to-be vice president has advised our soon-to-be president to ignore the courts when it comes to cleaning out the federal bureaucracy.
“If I was giving him [Trump] one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance has said. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like (then-President) Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Jackson probably never said those exact words, but that captures the sense of what he apparently did say: his actual words to Brigadier General John Coffee are reported to be: “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell (fallen) still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
The case was about Christian missionaries living with the Cherokees in the 1830s. Georgia claimed the land and demanded that white people get state approval for staying with the tribe. Despite being repeatedly arrested, some of the missionaries just kept coming back. Ultimately, Samuel Worcester, a native of Vermont, and others were sentenced to four years’ hard labor in a state prison.
Andrew Jackson and the state of Georgia attacking Christian missionaries. Who would have thought?
In Worcester v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s laws extending state control of Cherokee land. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the Indian nations were “distinct, independent political communities retaining their original natural rights” and the United States had acknowledged as much in several treaties with the Cherokees. Marshall harshly rebuked Georgia for its actions and declared the Cherokees “possessed the right to live free from the state’s trespasses.”
And Jackson ignored the ruling.
More than 190 years later, that is the advice Vance is giving to Trump: Ignore the courts, do what you want.
In March 2024, Vance asserted: “If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on.”
Sound reasonable? Think again.
Laws governing the federal civil service were enacted to end the very practice Vance is advocating: Every new president gets to fire everyone and bring in his own people. The problem with the so-called Spoils System was that it led to chaos, inefficiency and corruption.
Can this country afford that in this day and age?
The other, possibly bigger problem, is that if a president can ignore the courts in this case, why not ignore court rulings whenever a president doesn’t like them?
That’s the conservatives famous “slippery slope.”
And that could end our nation of laws, replacing it with a nation of presidential dictates.
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