How Russell Vought's 'radical constitutionalism' could spark a constitutional crisis
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This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. President Donald Trump often deploys the term radical to smear people he does not like. He called former Vice President Kamala Harris a radical Marxist. The media is, quote, the radical left media. He regularly labels Democrats as the radical left and opponents in general as, quote, radical left thugs or radical left lunatics.

There are radicals, too, within his own current administration, self-professed radicals. The president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers. This is Russell Vogt.

head of the president's Office of Management and Budget. He's speaking here with Tucker Carlson right after Trump was elected in November. And as you heard, Vogt openly embraces and endorses what he himself calls a radical constitutional perspective. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it. Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such, SEC or the FCC,

CFPB, the whole alphabet soup. But that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them. But

As an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out. So just to reiterate, Russell Vogt rejects the entire historical belief and practice that any agency in the federal government can be independent. He says the Constitution does not state any such independence exists in the executive branch. And as such, he wants to eliminate all of those agencies.

And as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Vote has the power to achieve that vision. It is the president's most important tool to dealing with the bureaucracy and administrative state. And, you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that and he knows how to use it effectively. Again, that's Vote on The Tucker Carlson Show.

The Office of Management and Budget produces the President's Budget, which is distinct from the budget produced by Congress. The President's Budget is a wish list because the Constitution says Congress has the ultimate power of the purse. According to its website, the OMB also, quote, "...oversees the performance of federal agencies and administers the federal budget, as approved by Congress."

Vogt, however, believes OMB's primary function is to ensure that all agency policies and initiatives are in line with the president's values. He described this vision clearly in a 25-page section of Project 2025. That's the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for total transformation of the federal government.

OMB is, quote, air traffic control, according to Vogt. It, quote, ensures that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let the planes take off and at times ground planes that are flying off course, end quote. Russell Vogt believes that independent agencies by default are flying off course because they are independent, end quote.

Again, in his self-identified radical constitutionalist view, those agencies need to be eliminated. Here's Vote in 2023 speaking to a private group. The recording was obtained by ProPublica. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.

Because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma. The Trump administration has already begun dismantling USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Department of Education is likely next.

Again, here's Vogt at a private event in a recording obtained by ProPublica. And guess what? We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country. He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God. Vogt combines a deification of Trump...

with a radical, again, his word, reading of the Constitution that puts almost all of the power of the federal government in the president's hands. In this view, Congress's power of the purse is by default diminished. The judiciary exists mostly to rubber stamp the president.

Vogt, in fact, describes in detail how he and the current Trump administration are moving to achieve that consolidation. We're trying to build a shadow office of legal counsel so that when a future president says, what legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots? We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community to come in and say that's an inappropriate use of what you're trying to do.

This is a reading that rejects the constitutional concept of three co-equal branches of government.

And in recent days, the Trump administration has been vocally heading towards a showdown with the judicial branch in particular, as many of the president's recent executive orders are being challenged and struck down in district courts. Members of the administration and their supporters in the media have talked openly about defying lower court orders until cases reach the Supreme Court.

So that's why in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Russell Vogt was deemed, quote, probably the most important person in Trump 2.0. The author of that op-ed is Damon Linker. He's a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and he joins us now. Welcome to On Point. Thanks. Great to be here.

So why do you think that vote as the head of OMB is the most powerful or most important person in Trump 2.0? Since a lot of the attention recently, and we even did a show about this yesterday, has been on others like Elon Musk. Well, I think the clips that you've been sharing help to make that clear, but I'm happy to kind of connect some dots. But

Basically, Vote, unlike someone like Elon Musk, who's sort of breezing in here, he has a million things going on. He's the head of several private businesses and has business all over the world and can easily be distracted, is not an accountant by training, is not an expert in how the federal government functions, and so will tend to sort of crash into walls all over the place.

Vote is someone who is very intelligent, and he grasps intimately how the executive branch actually functions from the inside. He studied it. He was the acting and then the actual director of OMB in the first Trump administration through the last 18 to 24 months of that administration. And

As Trump lost the election and then began his disastrous refusal to accept the results, OMB was actually coming very close to beginning to execute the kinds of things we're seeing now. And so what has happened is

Trump, you know, he Trump has picked many of the same people who worked for him the last time, the ones he deemed sufficiently loyal and devoted to him and his agenda. But he's also hired a lot of new people. And those who worked for him before are often in different roles.

Oh, and Vote, though, is back, and he's right back in exactly the same job he was serving in before, and that is because I think Trump and the people closest to him as advisors grasp that Vote is—

understands how this stuff works. He knows where the money comes from, where it's going and how it can be shut off, changed direction and manipulated, uh, at, at a moment's notice. And we are starting to see the consequences of that every day now. So let me ask you, um,

Regarding his overall approach to how he reads the Constitution, you know, as you pointed out, we played those clips where he specifically says he simply does not believe that the Constitution identifies any possibility of an independent agency within the executive. And he calls that he calls that radical constitutionalism.

How radical is that reading in comparison to, you know, what has been mainstream legal interpretation of the Constitution for, say, you know, the past century or so?

Well, if you come from the institutions, organizations, institutes where Vogt has cut his teeth in his career, it's not that unusual at all. But these are all pretty hard right institutions like the Claremont Institute in California and

They have been working for decades on fashioning these kinds of arguments, looking back at the history of the 20th century and saying, in effect,

that beginning with the progressive movement in the opening years of the 20th century, with Theodore Roosevelt's ambition to curtail the trusts that existed in the late 19th century, facilitating the robber barons and the Gilded Age in its great expansion of wealth,

mainly for the upper classes. And then continuing into Woodrow Wilson's attempt to create an administrative state that would persist across presidential administrations, basically

people with expertise and knowledge of how the government works and how the problems that affect a large continent-wide nation in the modern world understand the regulations that are required for it to function and for public safety to be ensured, that this would exist and persist across presidents from party to party.

And then this really reached its kind of early pinnacle with the New Deal, with FDR winning election by overwhelming majorities and expanding the scope of the federal government into areas where it didn't exist before. Now, this at first was extremely controversial. The Supreme Court knocked down a series of New Deal expansions of federal power,

Then FDR in 1936 won reelection by even a wider margin. Democrats took even more seats in both houses of Congress and he, FDR, then threatened the court with the court packing scheme.

And it never ended up happening, but it had the effect of basically scaring the Supreme Court into reversing course and then endorsing the New Deal. Yes. So when we come back, we're going to learn a little bit more about votes, own background and then dig deeper into.

how votes view of radical constitutionalism. It may be similar to the examples that you just gave, but also how it may be different. So there's more in a moment. This is On Point. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. And today we are talking about Russell Vogt. He is President Trump's head of Office of Management and Budget. It's a position he held in the first Trump administration as well. And he professes what he himself calls a radical constitutionalist view of the power of the presidency. And it's a view that could or seems to be bringing the Trump administration already in conflict with

With the judicial branch of the United States. So let's listen to a little bit of what votes said during his Senate confirmations hearings. These are the most recent ones to get him confirmed to head of OMB in Trump 2.0. He was asked many, many questions, excuse me, about the extent of executive power and including this question by Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey. Well, I guess I'll ask it in a different way. Do you believe that the president has the authority to set interest rates?

Sir, I'm not going to speak to the matter. That's not a hypothetical that is best entertained. It's not a hypothetical. I'm trying to get a sense of your understanding of the power of the president. You know, you will serve if it is confirmed in the office of the president.

And I want to have a sense of your understanding of what the president is allowed to do and not allowed to do. And I think that that's a very valid concern. Again, Senator, I'm here for the president's agenda. And my view of OMB is that it is a very important office. It touches all aspects of the federal government and that it is important for the president to have someone in this role that wants to accomplish his agenda and not their own personal agenda. That's what I'm known for. And that's what I'll continue to be if confirmed.

Let's Russell vote in his confirmation hearings for the head of OMB. Now, it's extremely common for anyone in a confirmation hearing to aggressively avoid answering questions. That's become a norm in Senate confirmation hearings. But Damon Linker, let me just get a quick answer from you on this, because Senator Kim asked a very specific question of vote, which is, does he believe that the president has the authority to set interest rates? Who in the United States right now has that authority?

Well, the Federal Reserve does that, and the Federal Reserve is one of these independent agencies that's supposed to be independent of the elected president. Right.

So, you know, I don't know for sure whether vote would, you know, in all truthfulness answer that question in the affirmative. Yes, a president can set interest rates, but I don't think he thinks it's legitimate that the Fed alone can do it. Yes, because he didn't answer that the Fed is the one is the body that sets interest rates. Well, I mean, interestingly, the president does get to name the head of the Fed, though.

That's true, although their terms are not – they're not one of these political appointees like the heads of the various cabinet-level departments and the agencies that a new president typically appoints. Like the normal way it works with the FBI director, which has a 10-year term, the Fed kind of –

It has terms that go beyond the scope of individual administrations of four years. So, you know, you can, as president, demand that the Fed chair step down early and then they can either say, OK, or they can fight it.

But, you know, vote would, I think, very clearly take the stand that Trump or any president can do whatever they wish. If they want a new Fed chair, they should be able to fire the person and put a new one in at any time. Yes.

Okay, Damon, hang on here for just a second because I want to explore a little bit about Russell Vogt's background and what brought him to this view of radical constitutionalism. So to do that, I want to bring Beth Reinhart into the conversation. She's an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, and she's written a profile on Russell Vogt. It's called Trump Loyalist Pushes Post-Constitutional Vision for a Second Term. Beth, welcome to On Point. ♪

Thank you so much. OK, so first of all, earlier in the show, we played one specific clip from Vote where he talked about Donald Trump being a gift from God. How religious is Russell Vote? And in fact, I think I read him as being a self-identified Christian nationalist.

He is. In fact, he wrote an essay for Newsweek, said, what's wrong with being a Christian nationalist, recognizing that that term sets off alarms with some people, especially when you're talking about the federal government. But yes, he was raised religiously. He's described it as a very strong Bible preaching, Bible teaching church. He went to Christian camps. He went to an evangelical Christian college, Wheaton College,

So that is his background. And that's something he definitely carries with him. He's very anti-abortion. He's mostly thought of in terms of cutting the budget and fiscal issues, but he's also a real social conservative as well. Well, in that Newsweek essay that you cited earlier,

He essentially definitely he says he wants an institutional separation between church and state. So I guess he doesn't want the state to interfere with churches. But he definitely on the on the other hand, he says that Christianity should be very deeply influencing government and society. So that's his sort of his view of the role of Christianity in American life. Now, in in your reporting on him.

Were people able to make connections between his faith and the view of the Constitution that he has arrived at as being one that pretty much consolidates most power around the president? Yeah.

I'm not sure that the people I talked to made that connection exactly. I think his view of the Constitution is informed quite a bit by what Trump has experienced over the last 10 years, the attacks, and what his supporters have, you know, cast as lawfare, as this unlawful, politically motivated vendetta against him. So vote...

seems to think that it's the left that has walked away from the constitution that they have, um, trampled on it. And so in his view, if the right, the right needs to respond in kind. And so, you know, if the rules have changed, uh,

There needs to be a level playing field in his view. So that's what he means when he talks about a post-constitutional order or radical constitutionalism. He's saying that the left has –

has basically trashed what we think of as these values. And so the right needs to kind of wrest control of what he calls, you know, the administrative state, the unelected federal bureaucrats who make up the federal government. As y'all were talking earlier, you know,

Many of us view these as professionals with expertise. The right tends to view them as dangerous, unprofessional,

un-elected bureaucrats who predominantly have a very liberal agenda. So this is an important point you're making, Beth, and I appreciate it because, you know, I keep using the phrase, Vought's own phrase of radical constitutionalism, but I think it seems like he's using this word radical because, as you said, he actually says it by himself. He believes that we are living, quote, in a post-constitutional time, right, because of these

The independence of these agencies because of how he sees the left as having, he believes, corrupted the United States. In fact, in your story, Beth, you quote one of the tweets from votes saying, do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.

Right now. So so but before he was in the first Trump administration as OMB, what was his path in terms of consolidating Trump loyalists, sort of building this network of legal thinkers and actors in Washington that could send in Trump 2.0 so quickly deploy the changes we've been seeing over the past just three weeks?

Right. So in the interim between the two administrations, Vogue was working at the Center for Renewing America, which was a nonprofit that is part of sort of a constellation of Trump, pro-Trump groups.

that were largely staffed by former Trump officials and future Trump officials. So it was kind of like a government in waiting. And they, you know, wrote policy and were very active politically and, you know, supporting the president's agenda and his reelection and then, you know, tearing down the Biden administration. And so he's been very much a part of this army of Trump

loyalists who were ready to hit the ground running when Trump won and was also a key player in the Project 2025 campaign.

blueprint that the Heritage Foundation was behind. Russ wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president. So his views of an extremely powerful executive, of a unitary executive, they're all out there laid out in black and white. And as I'm sure many listeners know that

That document became very controversial. Trump and the campaign tried to distance themselves from it. But in fact, it was a blueprint and it's something that they are the language in it. The policies in it are being largely adopted in the last few weeks. So let me ask you one more question here, Beth. Yeah.

The view that Russell Vogt advances of the Constitution, as Damon Linker was telling us earlier, it has been around for a long time amongst far-right circles, the far-right think tanks that are in Washington. But also in your story, you write that Russell Vogt has said unequivocally that this is the new blueprint for the entire Republican Party. How successful has he been in achieving that vision?

I think he's been pretty successful. I mean, he was placed, I think, very deliberately as someone who was in charge of the platform at the RNC convention. You know, the Republican Party didn't even do a platform last time. There was some concern, like, we don't want to have to be tied down by these promises and we'd rather, you know, just...

stay loose and do what Trump wants. But this time they put him there, I think, deliberately. And so he's very much at the center of all of that. Well, Beth Reinhardt is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, and she wrote a recent profile on Russell Votes, headlined Trump Loyalist Pushes Post-Constitutional Vision for a Second Term. And we have a link to that at onpointradio.org. Beth, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

As you probably know, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, two formerly very highly placed legal counsels in both Republican and Democratic White Houses, they co-wrote an article on the Substack executive functions. And here's what they say regarding Russell Vote. They say,

There's a possibility that, quote, the administration does not care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change. And they pin this view on Russell Vote. Do you think they're going too far?

No, not at all. I think that the piece you're talking about is a must read. It's very good. Both of those people, Goldsmith and Bauer, are usually quite rhetorically restrained and professional in the way they examine the law, and they're not ones to raise alarms. And so when they start talking that way, I sit up and take notice. I do think that

Vote wants to do, I mean, the reason why I actually want to go back, I was telling this kind of long history. I apologize for that earlier before the last break and we ran out of time. I don't want to go back and try to keep telling that story. But the reason why I went back that far

is to try to make the point that Vote is someone who effectively, I believe, wants to re-adjudicate that settlement in the New Deal where the Supreme Court flipped and said, actually, the federal government can do all of these things that we used to think were unconstitutional in regulating the country. And Vote is leading a charge to reverse that settlement.

and say, in effect, that was wrong. We were never allowed to do it in the first place. It's unconstitutional. And therefore, as you've indicated, we've been living in a kind of post-constitutional reality for close to a century now.

That is, you know, whether or not you accept that, and I think it's a very, very radical claim. The fact is that the baseline for the last 80 or so years has been that reality and shifting from that baseline back to something like what vote prefers is

is by any definition a radical lurch. And the courts are going to respond to that and say, what do you mean the president can impound money that Congress has appropriated and shut down agencies that have been treated as legitimate for decades by Congress? How can that be legal?

And that is where we are today with every day now a new federal judge, sometimes five federal judges in a single day coming out and saying this or that executive order by the Trump administration is either illegal or unconstitutional. And that isn't going to stop. It's going to continue. There are any number of fronts that we could discuss, but it is a...

It is not a looming constitutional crisis. I would say it is a slowly unfolding multi-front constitutional crisis that is going to define this entire presidency. So let me let me just draw a bright line under this. And you tell me if I'm overstepping here.

But given the language that we've been hearing over the past 72 hours from other members of the Trump administration, it seems as if – well, let's actually – well, in a second, we're going to hear from Vice President J.D. Vance and a clip from him. But it seems as if there's now – the Trump administration is publicly advancing a view that says –

Anytime a court issues a stay or a ruling against a presidential action that it's the court's ruling that is illegitimate. Am I am I. And so then there. And am I overreaching on that?

No, I do think there are some who have who have stated that in the most extreme view, which is, in effect, we don't have to listen to a court injunction. We don't have to abide by it. We can keep doing what we're doing because we were elected and this judge was probably a non-elected appointee. And we have, therefore, more democratic legitimacy than that judge.

You know, our court system is huge, sprawling on wield unwieldy in the sense that like we have federal judges all over the country and they weigh in on things happening in Washington in in almost a kind of haphazard way. And so that's.

That gives, I think, some leeway to the Republicans in saying, oh, who is this random judge in New Hampshire to tell me I can't do this? But it's a looming crisis. OK, so Damon Linker, hang on here for just a second. There's a lot more we have to talk about regarding Russell Vogt's view of the Constitution and how that's playing out regarding the Trump administration's, you know, tiptoeing, I guess, maybe, or marching full speed towards some kind of confrontation with the judiciary branch. So we'll be right back. This is On Point.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. And today we're speaking with Damon Linker. He's a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also author of the Substack Notes from the Middle Ground. And we're talking about President Donald Trump's head of Office of Management and Budget. His name is Russell Vogt.

He's hugely influential in the Trump administration, and he is a proponent of what he himself calls radical constitutionalism. Now, the essence of that, as Vote has written back in 2022, is this, quote, the right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years to

Now, one of the responses that Vote seems to believe the founders would have had is to consolidate a vast majority of the power of the federal government around the president of the United States. And he got a lot of questions about that in his speech.

In his confirmation hearings, his most recent ones to once again become head of OMB. OK, here's a moment from Russell Vogt's confirmation hearings, the most recent ones.

You're going to hear Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut questioning vote about the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Now, this is the law that requires a president to spend money in the way that Congress has appropriated it. Do you believe the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional? No, I don't believe it's constitutional. The president ran on that view. That's his view. And I agree with that. Have you read Train versus New York? That's...

The United States Supreme Court saying it is constitutional. You're saying that you're going to just defy the courts, the Office of Legal Counsel under both administrations, including then Attorney Rehnquist?

afterward becoming Supreme Court Justice, wrote for the Office of Legal Counsel, you are simply going to take the law under your own hands. I did not say that, nor did I imply that on behalf of the incoming administration. I said earlier to a question from Senator Peters,

that the incoming administration is going to take the president's view on this as he stated in the campaign, work it through with the lawyers of the Department of Justice, some of them who are coming before Congress just today, if confirmed, and to put that through a policy process. And I can't prejudge that policy process, but I certainly can't announce the parameters of what it would produce. I am astonished and aghast that someone in this responsible position

would, in effect, say that the president is above the law and that the United States Supreme Court is entitled to their opinion, but mine should supersede it. It's just baffling. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut there questioning Russell Vogt. And as you heard, Vogt said...

that the incoming administration is going to have to take the president's view on this. Normally, executive orders, and this was regarding the freezing of federal funds, by the way, normally executive orders are run through the Office of Legal Counsel. It seems as if a lot of the executive orders coming out of the new Trump administration have not gone through that process. So here's another moment. This is Democratic Senator Elisa Slotkin of Michigan talking to Russell Vogt about this.

how he would adhere to the Constitution. - Can you confirm for me, please, that you will abide by the Constitution and current law as it is, not what you wish it to be? - I absolutely will abide by the Constitution at all times. - Uh-huh.

And your interpretation does not, pardon the pun, trump the interpretation of the Supreme Court or current practice on the books. Again, administration goes through a very, very extensive policy process with the lawyers of the Department of Justice to abide by the Constitution. You can see how this bureaucratic wonky answer you keep giving, right? You're claiming to be an outsider that says you're going to shake things up, but you're giving the most wonky answers.

I just want to hear that when you hold up your hand, like many of us have done in this room, to put themselves in harm's way, that you're going to protect and defend the Constitution as interpreted by the people who are in a position to interpret it, like our Supreme Court. And that's what bothers me about you. It's not that we disagree on policy.

It's that basic tenet that a lot of us have had to do in this room on both sides of the aisle. That's all I care about. So with that, I'll yield back. But I just I wish from nominees that we see across the board just be straight on the U.S. Constitution. OK, Damon Linker, let me ask you this.

Is it possible that Russell Vogt is simply just clearer, more concrete and more open about about presidents sort of doing what they want than previous presidents have been, even as they've acted somewhat similarly? I mean, I'm thinking about President Joe Biden's desire to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. Right.

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court struck down that student loan forgiveness program.

Totally struck it down. But Joe Biden, after that, still found a way to cancel $48 billion of debt, right, by using other existing federal student loan forgiveness programs. Now, many Republicans and conservatives look at that and say, he didn't abide by the Supreme Court either. So what difference is, you know, is there between that and Donald Trump and Russell votes saying that the president has such broad based, you know, unitary powers?

Well, your question about forgiving student debt under the Biden administration sort of answered itself in the fact that you did distinguish between what the Supreme Court decided and then the fact that the Biden administration continued to try to cancel selective categories of student debt under existing means of doing that.

not through the way that the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional. So you could say that that was sort of fudging, but if the Biden administration had been reelected and continued into a second term, then there would have been new court cases about those new ways that Biden was doing it. And then if the Supreme Court said that those were also unconstitutional, I guarantee you

Biden would have stopped. This is very different, though. What Vogt is saying here is that, as we've already discussed, he believes independent agencies are unconstitutional. That means, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Banking System, and so forth. There are many others. And he believes that the

president should be able to get rid of these agencies by either firing the people who work there in defiance of civil service protections that are legal.

or by starving the agencies of appropriated monies. And the appropriated monies have come from Congress. And his view on this impoundment issue is that the President of the United States can look at what Congress has appropriated and treat them as a ceiling but not a floor. In other words,

That states what Congress says the maximum that those agencies can spend. But I, as president, can decide to say that actually the floor that they will spend is zero dollars and I will impound that money and use it for something else. Vought also believes that.

That the president has unilateral authority to impose tariffs, and that gives a revenue stream to the president by way of the tariffs that are collected from imports.

You put those two things together and you have cut the power of the purse out of Congress's legitimate authority. You now have a president who can cut funds that have been appropriated by Congress at will and then fund his own programs by way of collecting tariff monies apart from income taxes and other taxes. So if that succeeded...

we would effectively have, we will have lived through a kind of constitutional revolution in which the presidency has vastly expanded its powers relative to the legislature. And that's not the same constitution we've been living under. Okay. So let's talk more about how

Before our very eyes right now, it seems as if a vote and other members of the Trump administration are trying to get to this remaking of the constitutional order, as you said. Again, I've been quite surprised by how over the past 72, 96 hours, there's been a lot of vocal support.

from various aspects of the Trump administration, various people, and in the media for this idea of undermining the legitimacy of rulings from lower courts. So, for example, here is Scott Jennings. In 2006, he was appointed to the George W. Bush administration as special assistant to the president and deputy director of political affairs. After that, he moved into office

into PR in Kentucky and runs the largest PR firm there. He's also a CNN opinion contributor. And here's what he said this week on CNN's Newsnight. But let me just understand where you stand. If a district court judge rules in a way that the president dislikes, should the president listen or should the president defy? If a district court judge tries to usurp the authority of the

Chief Executive of this country, he should absolutely defy it. There's a difference between broad policy decisions and discreet disputes between parties. That's the difference. If I want a policy decided, I'll take it to the Supreme Court. But what about checks and balances? Of a district court judge who elected them?

So that second voice was Scott Jennings there saying that if he wants a policy decided, he'll take it to the Supreme Court. But of course, for a case to get there, it has to work its way up the district court and the federal judiciary system. Now, here is Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. He recently said on Fox News, actually just this past Sunday, that what President Trump is doing is not attacking democracy. Miller says Trump is restoring it.

What we continue to see here is the idea that rogue bureaucrats who are elected by no one, who answer to no one, who have lifetime tenure jobs, who we would be told can never be fired, which of course is not true.

that the power has been cemented and accumulated for years, whether it be with the Treasury bureaucrats or the FBI bureaucrats, the CIA bureaucrats or the USAID bureaucrats, with this unelected shadow force that is running our government and running our country. Donald Trump is engaging in the most important restoration of democracy in over a century.

by saying that we are going to restore power to the people through their elected president and his appointed officers. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Here's another one. This is Vice President J.D. Vance, but you're about to hear something he said before he became vice president. And it's about his view regarding the power of the court system in the United States. Now, again, just this past weekend, Vice Vance said in a tweet that, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the executives legitimate power, end quote.

Back in 2021, he basically said the same thing during a podcast interview. And this is, of course, while he was a candidate back then for U.S. Senate. Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

Okay. So there is the now vice president back when he was a senatorial candidate saying put loyalists in the entire administration and then defy the courts when they say you can't do that. By the way, Damon, I'm going to get back to you in a second here, but this quote from Andrew Jackson, which Vice President Vance said,

cited is actually from a very important case. It's from Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 when the Supreme Court of the United States held a

The actual quote, by the way, that Jackson uttered was this. The decision of the Supreme Court has fell stillborn and they find it cannot co-exist.

coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate. So I'm not sure that's the kind of case that you want to lean on as a moral authority for

the Supreme Court. But, Damon Linker, I do want to ask you, overall, do you see what Bauer and Goldsmith see? They believe that this whole spew of executive orders is not just designed to advance policy, but to provoke enough cases that some of them will eventually end up before the Supreme Court and there will be a challenge to the court to either stand up to

radical constitutionalism or do what you said earlier, a complete revolutionary remake of the Constitution? Yeah, I do say that when I said earlier that we're in a kind of slow rolling constitutional crisis that will last the entirety of this Trump administration. That's kind of what I had in mind. I think that their strategy is to

move aggressively on a million fronts, try to redraw the lines of executive power, disregard

the separation of powers, dare Congress to stop him, and so far they show no inclination to do so, and then ride the judicial system all the way up to the Supreme Court, along the way not abiding by injunctions and stays of

that judges try to impose that, you know, normally would freeze the action to give relief to the people who have been disadvantaged by this move, you know, people who have been fired or, or, uh, you know, removed like the inspectors general who were removed a couple of weeks ago in defiance of a law in Congress. Um,

And eventually these will make it to the Supreme Court. And that is where the showdown is going to happen, because you can make the case if you're a Republican and a Trumpist, you can say, well, you know, random district court judge in New Hampshire tells the president he can't do something. We're not going to cease and desist here.

while we wait to hear what the final decision is from the Supreme Court. And I think that's ill-advised, imprudent and dangerous. But that at least implies that in the end, they will abide by what the Supreme Court ultimately decides. But I really fear that we're going to end up with a showdown between John Roberts and Trump. And I don't know how that's going to play out.

Well, it seems that Russell Vogt himself implies, according to Bauer and Goldsmith, that a major element of radical constitutionalism is to instill fear in the Supreme Court of a presidency that will not comply. Well, Damon Linker, senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point.