Tim Tai

Two weeks ago, a federal judge halted President Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. Last week, another judge ordered the government to “immediately restore funding” after the Trump administration froze some federal funds. Yet another judge halted the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program.

As courts across the country issue rulings that challenge Trump’s agenda, Vice President JD Vance LAW ’13 took to X, arguing that judges should not control what he called the “executive’s legitimate power.” His comments sparked a debate over the judiciary’s role in the checks-and-balances system.

“Yale Law School should be embarrassed,” John Yarmuth ’69, former Democratic Congressman and Chair of the House Budget Committee, wrote on X. “The judge’s legal role is to define what executive powers are legitimate. It’s called separation of powers, which [Vance] apparently doesn’t believe in.”

In the same post, Vance wrote that “if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.” He added, “if a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”

While traveling to the Super Bowl via Air Force One last Sunday, Trump denounced a judge’s ruling that halted DOGE’s ability to access Treasury payment systems, calling it a “disgrace.”

“No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” Trump said.

That same day, Vance shared a post from Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, who supports strong executive powers. 

“Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers,” Vermeule wrote.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller agreed, writing, “If a district court judge wants control over the entire executive branch … he should run for president.”

After former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wrote that “decisions about what is legal and illegal are made by courts of law. Not by the Vice President,” Miller pushed back.

“Hey Pete, care to show us the line in the Constitution where it says a lone unelected district judge can assume decision-making control over the entire executive branch affecting 300M citizens?” Miller wrote. “Any mention of nationwide district court TROs? Or permanent all-powerful bureaucracy?”

Legal scholars and Yale alumni quickly responded.

“They didn’t teach us much law at Yale Law School,” Nathan Robinson LAW ’14, editor-in-chief of the left-wing Current Affairs magazine, posted. “But one thing I do remember is that actually when the executive branch violates the law, the judiciary is fully entitled (and obligated) to command the executive branch to behave legally.”

John Bolton ’70 LAW ’74, who served as National Security Advisor during Trump’s first term, agreed.

“JD Vance must have slept through his Constitutional law class at Yale,” Bolton wrote. Citing Marbury v. Madison, a landmark Supreme Court case that established judicial review, Bolton added that Chief Justice John Marshall said, “‘It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’”

The debate extended to Yale Law School faculty.

Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld defended Vance, writing on X that Vance was “correct” and that “judges cannot constitutionally interfere” in areas where the executive branch has “sole and plenary power under the Constitution,” such as “in commanding military operations or exercising prosecutorial discretion.”

Another Yale Law professor, Natasha Sarin ’11, disagreed, writing that the issues Rubenfeld was referring to as in the sphere of the president’s plenary power were not the issues Vance was “implicitly referring” to. Sarin added that “it is not within the executive’s legitimate power to refuse to spend funds Congress has appropriated.”

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also pushed back, writing that Rubenfeld should delete his “account and resign from the law school” if he supported “a president unilaterally stopping congressionally mandated spending and programs” and “Elon Musk and his minions blocking employees from entering their workplaces and hacking into secured government databases.”

As of Wednesday, the New York Times reported that more than 28 court rulings have “temporarily paused” Trump administration policies. The Trump administration “has asked higher courts to intervene,” and some cases could make it to the Supreme Court.

Three Trump-appointees currently serve on the Supreme Court, including the News alumnus Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90.

Correction, Feb. 20: The previous version of the article incorrectly identified the Supreme Court case that established judicial review.