Politico's Ankush Khardori this week spoke with several right-wing legal scholars about the prospects of President Donald Trump defying court orders and he came away with the conclusion that doing so "will backfire badly" on the president and his allies.
While Vice President J.D. Vance and other Trump allies have made noises about defying the courts, Khardori believes that doing so would undermine a decades-long conservative project to remake the judicial branch as a bulwark of right-wing legal thought.
Additionally, conservatives who spoke with Khardori said that the United States government would simply cease to function should the president completely blow off decisions from a coequal branch of government.
Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia and onetime clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told Khardori that "the Constitution implicitly requires the executive branch to … comply with judicial judgments when the executive is part of the case."
ALSO READ: 'Under water': MSNBC's Rachel Maddow warns GOP poll numbers 'dropping like a stone
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and legal analyst at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, was even more explicit in his warning and said that "it’s never permissible for a president to defy a court order."
Khardori also adds that should Trump blow off Supreme Court rulings then a future Democratic president would feel emboldened to blow off the Supreme Court's highly controversial 2024 presidential immunity ruling and toss Trump in jail.
"This is a pandora’s box that the Trump administration — and Republicans and conservatives more broadly — should not want to open, for their own sakes as much as anyone’s," he concludes.
