‘This Is Trolling!’ Joe Scarborough Rips JD Vance’s Insisting Judges Cannot Check President’s Power
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough ripped Vice President JD Vance’s “no sense” comment that the federal judiciary could not “control” the “legitimate” power of the president as “trolling” and quipping that it was “remarkable” it came from a law school grad.
Vance took to X on Sunday night to protest after a New York judge blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing Treasury Department payment systems. The post was met with pushback online from legal commentators but roused the MAGA base, prompting Musk to call for the judge to be fired and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to brand judicial resistance to President Donald Trump’s orders a “coup.”
On Monday’s Morning Joe, New York Times legal correspondent Mattathias Schwartz questioned if Vance’s tweet was a “hint” that the Trump administration would not comply with judicial orders that branded his actions “unconstitutional.” He added that this was a “far graver and more dangerous scenario to our constitutional order than simply the Supreme Court overturning some big precedents.”
Unleashing on the prospect, Scarborough protested the idea as “trolling.”
The tweet though was circular. It made no sense. And it made no sense because the legitimate powers of the president of the United States is not determined by the president of the United States or the vice president.
“Take that down,” the host told producers, pausing as they showed Vance’s tweet on screen.
He continued:
Listen, listen, you need to understand. Everybody needs to understand. In reading this, it is the Supreme Court of the United States who determines what the legitimate power of the president is, of the vice president is of what congress is. That is the way it has been since John Marshall was the first Supreme Court justice. This is trolling. And I will say and we will give examples for Mike Lee, who also went to law school, to say this is a ‘judicial coup.’ This is all planned. They decided they were going to do these things that pushed the boundary of the law that went over the line. This is all planned because let me tell you something again.
We’re going to show you a list of presidential actions that were enjoined, stopped, overturned during the Biden administration. And we could go back and do the same thing during the Bush administration, during the Clinton administration… This is how things are.
So when you say a court cannot stop a president from doing what’s in its legitimate power to do, well, yes, of course that’s true. But it is the court that determines the contours of that power. It’s that simple… Remarkable that these people went to law school.
Watch above via MSNBC.
