Democrats nervously wait on Trump response to court rulings
House Democrats howling over the flood of unilateral actions streaming from the White House are voicing confidence that the courts will provide a check on potential abuses of power.
They’re less certain, however, about how President Trump will respond.
Some Democrats say they trust the president to heed the courts even when judges rule against him, particularly if cases rise to the Supreme Court. Others say there’s no indication the administration feels bound by judiciary rulings at any level and fear that Trump will simply ignore unfavorable decisions.
As dozens of cases move their way through the courts, the chaos and uncertainty is triggering a kind of panic among those Democrats who see Trump as an autocratic figure with little regard for the balance of powers in Washington. Some are wondering what recourse remains if Trump does defy court orders in the pursuit of his agenda.
“That is what keeps me up at night, thinking about what will we end up as a nation? What will be left of our Constitution?” Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) said.
Amid the debate, all Democrats seem to agree on one thing: Capitol Hill Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, will provide no check on their White House ally, the Democrats charge, leaving all constitutional restraints on executive power to the judicial branch. Even then, many Democrats wonder if Republicans will honor the courts’ decisions — a skepticism inflamed by Trump’s denial of the 2020 election outcome and his more recent pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters.
“The Republican Party stands for: We trust the answer if it … is decided in our favor,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said this week. “They trust the election results when they win. They trust the court decision when they win.
“When they do not win, they want to burn it all down.”
To be sure, Trump heeded the courts in his first term, despite numerous rulings against him at all levels of the justice system, and some Democrats expect the same result this time around.
“If this administration is going to start ignoring court orders, they're essentially eliminating the entire judicial branch, because why even have judges if you're not going to follow their court orders?” said Rep. Ted Lieu (Calif.), vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
“So we expect this administration to follow the court orders.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed to two reasons he thinks Trump will comply with the courts, particularly if a conflict reaches the Supreme Court level. First, defying court orders would produce a severe public backlash, Khanna predicted. And second, it would rattle economic confidence.
“His numbers would fall so precipitously if he was defying a Supreme Court [ruling]. More than the numbers, it's the stock market,” Khanna said.
”I think we're overthinking this,” he added. “The simplistic thing is what Abraham Lincoln said: 'In this country, public sentiment is everything.'"
But Democrats’ concerns have been fueled in recent days by members of Trump’s inner circle, who have gone after those judges who have put temporary holds on some of Trump’s early executive actions, including efforts to repeal birthright citizenship, freeze trillions of dollars in federal spending and gut the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused those judges of continuing “the weaponization of justice against President Trump” by “acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law.”
“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump's basic executive authority,” Leavitt told reporters Wednesday.
Elon Musk, the billionaire head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is also going after judges critical of Trump’s executive actions; one of whom has blocked DOGE’s access to sensitive financial information held by the Treasury Department. On Wednesday, Musk called for “an immediate wave of judicial impeachments.”
Perhaps most notably, Vice President Vance last weekend questioned the authority of the courts to overrule the executive branch at all. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he posted on social platform X.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have rushed to Vance’s defense, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) saying he agrees “wholeheartedly” with the vice president for a simple reason: “Because he’s right.”
“When Congress, for example, appropriates dollars for the executive branch to use, we build in not only in the spirit of the law, but in the letter of the law, a broad amount of discretion for how that is used,” Johnson said, defending Trump’s efforts to defund certain agencies and programs previously approved by Congress.
“There is a presupposition in America that the commander in chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.”
Some legal scholars have joined the Republicans in defending Vance, arguing that judges don’t have the power to block just any executive action.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal this week, Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said the balance of powers necessarily implies limits on all branches of government, including the judiciary.
“Even where courts have jurisdiction to decide, it is always legally valid to argue that their decisions ought to respect the separation of powers,” Vermeule wrote. “No constitutional crisis is created when the executive branch appeals to such principles, whether in court or on social media.”
Many Democrats have a decidedly different view, accusing Vance of attempting to commandeer powers the executive branch simply doesn’t have.
“What JD Vance said was just clearly insane,” Lieu told reporters this week. “If he really wants to eliminate the third branch of government, I think there's going to be enormous pushback from both Republicans and Democrats.”
Those concerns have been inflamed this week by the Justice Department’s decision to order the dismissal of federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams — an episode that triggered the resignation of at least seven federal prosecutors and raised new questions about the autonomy of the Department of Justice in Trump’s second term.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) framed Trump’s actions — combined with the attacks on the courts — as a moment of crisis, suggesting the only effective recourse for critics might be protests in the streets.
“We're going to have to find an enforcement mechanism,” Schakowsky said. “People — any people — can't just decide, ‘I'm not going to obey the law.’”
Yet not all Democrats see Trump’s actions as a hair-on-fire moment — at least not yet.
“We can’t be at a 10 every moment of the day,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said. “We’ve got to let some of this play out in the courts.”
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