Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called out vice president J.D. Vance and her Republican colleagues for undermining the constitutional balance of powers in service to Donald Trump.
The vice president, who's a Yale Law School graduate, and fellow attorney Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) questioned the authority of the judicial branch over the executive by tweeting that judges had no authority over a president's "legitimate power," after court order blocked Trump's billionaire benefactor Elon Musk from accessing sensitive private data.
"Step back and look at this, I think, what would Mike Lee be saying if some major Democratic donor, wealthy person came in and just started mucking around in people's data?" Klobuchar told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "He is doing this, Elon Musk is doing this at the behest of the president of the United States, and so many of these things are illegal. Here's what's weird about this: They control both houses of Congress and the presidency, and Mike Lee well knows that if they want to do this right, there is a way they can go in. They can decide, even though this cancer research is going on in red states and blue states and purple states, they can go in and cut that from the budget. I don't think they'll want to do that because they understand that every dollar they put in [the National Institutes of Health] brings out $2 in economic activity. But as you note, they can do this the right way and they can pass a budget and they can give their tax cuts to the wealthy if that's what they want, and we will do everything to fight it and to make the case to our constituents and to the American people."
"But why they have to pretend that this is a coup when the courts have every right to enforce the law," Klobuchar added. "At that inauguration, I made that point. We have that inauguration in the Capitol for a reason, not at a presidential palace like they do in some countries, and we have the Supreme Court there for a reason, because it is a clear, clear message to America that we have three equal branches of government in this country. They are messing around with this, and both Mike Lee and J.D. Vance are students of the Constitution, and they know it's wrong. But again, they are doing this at the behest of one Donald Trump, and it's our job in Congress to stand up to it."