EDITORIAL: Overblown talk about Trump, constitutional crisis

JD Vance had Democrats reaching for the smelling salts this week after the vice president tweeted about federal judicial authority. The social media blast also triggered talk from the resistance about a “constitutional crisis.”

Can’t we all just get a grip?

Mr. Vance issued his salvo after a federal judge temporarily stopped Elon Musk’s cost-cutting commission from accessing certain Treasury Department data.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation,” he tweeted, “that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Progressives hyperventilated that the administration was poised to defy judicial rulings that run counter to the Trump agenda. In fact, Mr. Vance was pointing out — correctly — that, under the separation of powers, there are limits to judicial oversight of “the executive’s legitimate power.” Note the word “legitimate.” As Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week, it is not unusual for judges to determine that “the courts ought not to be the ones to decide a given issue.”

Of course, presidents — or anyone else, for that matter — are not free to pick and choose which judicial rulings to respect or disregard. A healthy democratic republic cannot function that way. The proper recourse is to appeal unfavorable decisions, which is precisely what the White House has done. The fact that Mr. Trump is provoking legal challenges in hopes that the administration will prevail in the courts doesn’t constitute a “crisis.” If the president doesn’t have some authority over federal agency workers, who does?

“Any court that would say that the president or his representatives — like secretary of the Treasury, secretary of State, whatever — doesn’t have the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest,” Mr. Trump said this week, “I mean how can you have a country?”

Plenty of Democratic presidents — Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for instance — have bristled at constitutional checks on their authority. Mr. Obama bragged about circumventing Congress with his pen and phone; Mr. Biden flouted the law when it came to student loan forgiveness.

None of that, however, is justification for Mr. Trump to ignore legal guardrails, as some Republicans and MAGA enthusiasts now seem to believe. Respecting the Constitution requires an adherence to its principles regardless of which “team” controls the White House.

Mr. Trump, for his part, said he has no intention of ignoring the courts. “I always abide by the courts and then I’ll have to appeal it,” he said Tuesday. And that’s how it should be.