The left is faking another Trump ‘crisis’ — but Vance gets the Constitution right

On Saturday US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, barred “political appointees” from accessing internal Treasury Department systems — an utterl🧜y baseless, and frankly ludicrous, order.

In effect, Engelmayer prohibited Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his politically accountable employees, along with Elon Musk and President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, from doing their🌊 jobs, in favor of rule 𝔉by unelected bureaucrats.

The Constitution nowhere empowers the judiciary to issue such a ruling, so in response, Vice President JD Vance correctly posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Then the left lost its mind.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker descr꧂ibed Vance’s post as a warning that “the Trump administration intends to break the law.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) claimed it🐷 was “the meat” of a “constitutional crisis.”

Not to be undone, former GOP congresswoman from Wyoming and Washington, DC native Liz Cheney accused 🌊the vice president of “rage quit[ting] the Republic.”  

Yet Vance’s statement was correct — and should not be controversial: Engelmayer’s order is ridiculous on its face,ꦯ and the vice president is right about the limits of judicial pow🗹er.

The Supreme Court hasꩵ long recognized that certain government actions are beyond the power of the judiciary to review and control, and itsܫ precedents back Vance’s position.

As the court recently put it in Trump v. United States, “when the President acts pursuant to his exclusive constitutional powers, Congress cannot — as a structural matter — regulate such actions, and courts cannot review them.”

Vance in his tweet gave a hypothetical example of how the judiciary might violate legitimate executive power: “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s . . . illegal.”

Not long ago, the Biden administrat⛄ion agreed with him abo🌞ut this exact matter.

In a 2022 brief to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar quoted the court’s ruling in Heckler v. Chaney, arguing that the “decision of a prosecutor in the Executive Branch not to indict” is “a decision which has long been regarded as the🔯 special province of the Executive Br🐻anch.”

Moreover, the Supreme Court in its Seila Law opinion in 2020 explained that political appo🔯intees, like the Treasury secretary, “wield significant authority” but remain democratically accountable because they are “subject to the ongoing supervision and control of the elect𒅌ed President.”

By contrast, the ruling noted, our constitutional structure is violated where “significant governmental power” is vested in individuals “neither elected by the peopl🥀e nor meaningfully controlled . . . by someone who is.”

Ye💫t that is what Englemayer’s order required, effectively flipping our constitutional order on its head.

Because Engelmayer’s order has no constitutional basis, more⛦ sober voices have rightly siꦚded with Vance.

For example, Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at the VP’s alma mater Yale Law School, described Vance’s post as “exactඣly right.” 

Then what explains the Democratic Party’s complete hy👍steria over a social media post?

Li❀z Cheney, Chris Murphy and JB Pritzker are not unfamiliar with prosecutorial discretion, the separation of powers, or the existence of constraints on judicial power.

But they do have a vested interest in manufacturing a supposed “constit☂utiona🉐l crisis” in the early days of Trump’s second term.

Their plan is to delegitimize the White 🐓House’s policy initiatives and derail the momentum of his ea⛄rly presidency to wipe away the mandate Trump secured with his total victory in November. ;

Sympathetic press outlets are only too🥀 eager assist.

Once the ♚“constitutional cri🐷sis” talking point went out, leftist outlets amplified it.

On Monday, The New York Times ran a🔯n article headlined: “Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Sa🔜y.”

The🦂 same day, The Washington Post asked: “What is a constitutio𒉰nal crisis?”

There is preced⛎ent for this sort of maneuver, too.

In 2016 and 2017, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and the deep state worked together to manufacture the Russia-collusion hoax out of whole cloth.

The❀ Democratic Party wrote the script, and the mainstream media performed it.

But the collu🐲sion narrative was a farce, 🎀just as the so-called “constitutional crisis” is now.

According to t🌠he American left, our Constitution is thrown into crisis whenever the president and his appointees are actually allowed t꧟o run the Executive Branch.

In 2016, the mantra of the “resistance” leftists and their mainstream media la🍨pdogs was “Russian collu☂sion.”

This ൩time around, we’re wise to their game as resistance liberals intone a new inca💝ntation: “constitutional crisis.”

Don’t be fooled.

President Trump and his political appointees, like 𒉰Treasury Secretary Besse𝐆nt, are using the power that American voters entrusted to them.

Engelmayer’s order has no constitutional basis, no matter what ꦦ“crisis♑” the left attempts to create.

Theo Wold, former solicitor general of Idaho and former acting-assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, is director of the Claremont Institute’s Administrative State Project.