This week, Rhode Island Federal Judge John McConnell ordered the Trump administration to immediately restore funding it had frozen during its illegal wide-ranging funding suspension last month.

What was remarkable was not just that McConnell had to issue this order, but that he’s done so twice now, after the administration has simply failed to heed it. The judge reminded federal officials that continuing to ignore his order could be cause for criminal contempt. He, and every federal judge, must insist that judicial orders be obeyed.

This was settled 222 years ago, in Marbury vs. Madison and it applies to presidents, including Donald Trump.

Pushing back by the executive against the judiciary is normal; defiance is not and cannot happen. Yet Vice President JD Vance and de facto Prime Minister Elon Musk have been openly toying with that possibility after a Manhattan Federal Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered Musk’s DOGE team sever their unlawful access to the Treasury’s most sensitive systems, including those that could be used to cut off federal expenditures on a whim.

Vance in particular has been a proponent of Trump ignoring court orders for years, long before he was picked to be the man’s running mate; the purported lawyer, who should understand the structure of separation of powers, wrote on Musk’s Twitter/X of Engelmayer’s order that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” What constitutes such legitimate power is, of course, recursively in the hands of the executive, which is another way of saying Trump really should be above all other branches of government.

Musk called Engelmayer “corrupt” and for him to be impeached. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called the Treasury ruling “an assault on the very idea of democracy itself,” flipping the paradigm on its head to deflect from the administration’s own targeting of democracy.

We get the fatigue of people who have been hearing and reading about the threat Trump poses to democracy and the U.S. system of government for years; it’s never not been true, but we can understand that it can become background noise or seem overblown when our institutions do continue to hold despite the warnings.

A dam working, though, does not mean that we can go merrily along as the cracks build. One day, the water starts trickling through, and the open defiance of judicial orders is just such a moment, a clear and urgent warning that things are about to crumble.

For all of Trump’s abuses of power in his first term, culminating in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, his administration never attempted to openly defy a court order despite losing, by one analysis, over three quarters of the federal cases it was involved in. In the end, it complied with judicial decisions on everything from its draconian immigration enforcement efforts to attempted rollbacks of environmental protections to efforts to weaken housing discrimination rules.

The courts have been one of the most effective tools to curtail Trump’s power grabs, even more-so now with a MAGA-captured Congress whose GOP leaders appear content to abdicate their power in service to pleasing Trump or avoiding his wrath. If Trump and team commit to ignoring the courts, we really are in uncharted waters. There’s no clear path back, then.

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