Trump’s ‘So-Called’ Judgment
President Trump can’t seem to control his impulse to question his critics’ legitimacy.
.. Andrew Jackson reportedly said of the chief justice that “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Jackson vetoed reauthorization of the Bank of the United States because he believed the Constitution did not give Congress the power to create a bank, despite the Supreme Court’s decision to the contrary in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).
.. Franklin D. Roosevelt accused justices who struck down his New Deal of living in the “horse-and-buggy” era and acting “not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.”
.. But if presidential attacks on the courts are nothing new, the history also underscores the smallness of Mr. Trump’s vision. Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR knew when to speak and when to keep silent. They invoked the great powers of the presidency to oppose the Supreme Court only when fundamental constitutional questions were at stake: the punishment of political dissent; secession and slavery; Congress’s power to regulate the economy.
.. Mr. Trump is upset about losing a minor procedural test of a temporary executive order. If he doesn’t learn to be more judicious, we’re in for a long four years.