Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There are some—there's some sneakiness in how he's worded that particular tweet.
Yeah, absolutely. So when he says— Let me read you the full tweet because I think the examples he uses are actually important. So he says, he ends by saying that judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. The two examples that he leads in with are, if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, 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. So what Vance says is, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. And... Framing it that way, I think... leaves open the question of what is legitimate power and who determines what is legitimate power, right?
He's not quite saying this, but I think the implication is, well, is it the court that determines whether something is a legitimate use of executive power? Or is it the executive who determines whether something is a legitimate use of executive power? Typically, we would say that is actually the job of the court. That is the whole point of having judicial review.
Now, it's a little bit more complicated that, but at the high level, that's the whole check that the judicial branch provides. Vance, I think, is not quite saying but hinting Well, maybe if I, the executive branch, decide that a court has intruded on my legitimate power, the constitutionally appropriate thing for me to do would just be to ignore the court.
And that, I think, is what pretty much everybody would recognize as a constitutional crisis.
That seems to me to be right. I mean, I think there is a big question of whether or not it will backfire in the sense that the justices will not take particularly kindly to being threatened, and threatened not only by the vice president, but by someone who is very much within the same kind of elite legal circles that the justices themselves frequent, right?
Vance very famously went to Yale Law School. He's kind of within that milieu. And so I think there's also a kind of like intra-legal elite struggle going on here. It certainly seems to me as if he is trying to fire a warning shot. What is less clear is how urgent this threat is.
And what I mean by that is that I think this is sort of something that you put on the table and it's quite hard to take back. It will be hanging over the court. The question in my mind is how they decide to play it. You know, because you could say, on the one hand, they could respond by essentially saying, how dare you? We're going to do what we're going to do, and you can't stop us.
You know, kind of pushing back. On the other hand, you know, as everyone learns, the court does not have its own enforcement apparatus. It's dependent on the executive kind of agreeing to follow what it says. And that is really the basis of the sort of agreement that binds together the constitutional structure. And so...
You could imagine a John Roberts who feels that his hand has really been forced trying to, as you say, kind of thread the needle here and create a situation where he seems to be pushing back, but not quite so much that he feels that it will engender disobedience that could harm the long-term legitimacy of the court.
Courts do have a really, really expansive contempt power. And I think that is worth keeping in mind. They can institute fines. Sometimes they can institute really extreme fines. They can require people to be held in jail. There are a lot of different mechanisms. I think that courts are probably going to be reluctant to turn to those mechanisms precisely because they are so extreme.
The normal way that something like this would be hashed out is, you know, you have a court order. The plaintiff comes back and says, hey, the defendant is not abiding by the terms of the court order. And what we've seen now is I haven't had a chance to take a close look, but it looks like this court has said, OK, guys, you know, you really got to comply now.
And then it will be hashed out in the course of litigation. Over the course of going back and forth, perhaps appealing up and so on and so forth. And so it will take a while before we reach the stage of a real genuine crisis. You know, it goes up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court tells the administration what to do and the administration says no. no, I don't want to.
I mean, even in the example of the instance that J.D. Vance seemed to be responding to has to do with a question of an order blocking the Treasury Department from sharing access to its sensitive systems.
And despite Vance's tweet, the Justice Department actually filed a motion saying, hey, can you loosen up this order a little to the court, asking for Treasury Secretary Scott Besant to have access to the systems as well, or at least to clarify that he does have access. That's kind of, I mean, this is a low bar.
That is what you would want to see, that sort of hashing this out in the course of litigation rather than the executive just saying, go ahead, make me.
My one quibble with that is that I'm not sure I would say it is the sort of conservative legal movement that is spinning itself into that. I would say, you know, far right radical, because there is a more traditionally conservative legal movement that is very much not on board with this, in part because the conservative legal movement has been focused on, well, law, right?
You know, putting judges in these positions, and judges tend to like it when courts are powerful. I do agree with you that it seems like there's this sort of frenzy being spun up on Twitter among the sort of intellectuals in this corner, egging themselves into this position of real defiance.
And yet, as you say, when you actually look at the stuff that the administration has filed in court, it is way less gung-ho on that motion that I mentioned to allow Secretary Besson access to the Treasury systems, rather to clarify whether he does have access. The Justice Department actually notably included multiple paragraphs saying, we are complying with your order.
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