Vice President Vance’s judgment that Chief Justice Roberts is “profoundly wrong” in his understanding of the role of the federal judiciary underscores the growing gap between the Trump administration and the bench on bedrock constitutional questions.

The inclusion of a provision in the House Republicans’ tax and spending bill to limit the power of judges to hold people in contempt puts in sharp relief the government’s concern in respect of judicial resistance to its agenda. The Department of Justice faces the prospect of contempt hearings across several immigration cases, though it vows it has defied no court orders.  

The provision in the bill gives teeth to Mr. Vance’s evaluation, in an interview with Ross Douthat of the Times, that Chief Justice Roberts is mistaken. The vice president was referencing remarks the chief justice delivered earlier this month, when he declared that the judiciary’s “job is to obviously decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive.”

Mr. Vance appeared to be arguing that the chief justice’s assertion that the judiciary branch possesses “the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president” is not incorrect, but just incomplete. It omits the responsibility of appellate courts to review — and if necessary, to overrule — lower court decisions. 

Mr. Vance contends that the chief justice knows only “one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for.” Mr. Vance’s reference is to the 49.8 percent of the vote he and Mr. Trump won in the 2024 election. 

The ability of district court judges to halt the immigration agenda of Messrs. Trump and Vance has emerged as a flashpoint early in the 47th president’s second term. The use of nationwide injunctions — which bind not only the parties to a case but even non-parties from coast to coast — was argued last week at the Supreme Court. It arrived to the high bench via an emergency appeal in a case concerning Mr. Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.  

Chief Justice Roberts at the Supreme Court building, October 7, 2022.. AP/J. Scott Applewhite

While the power of judicial review is not explicitly named in the Constitution, the case of Marbury v. Madison established the Supreme Court’s prerogative to review laws and executive actions — and, if necessary, declare them askew of the Constitution. The high court’s ability to review lower court opinions is sourced to Article III, Section 2 of the parchment, which ordains that the Supreme Court “shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

The Trump administration has issued emergency appeals to the Supreme Court to review injunctions handed down by lower courts. Last week the Nine granted the government’s request to pause orders by federal judges that required government officials to allow board members at two independent federal agencies to stay in office after Mr. Trump tried to fire them. Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, called the ruling “extraordinary.”

Mr. Trump lashed out last week at a district court judge, Brian Murphy, who ruled that the administration had not taken proper care with due process when it deported migrants to South Sudan. The president wrote on Truth Social: “Judges are absolutely out of control, they’re hurting our Country, and they know nothing about particular situations, or what they are doing — And this must change, IMMEDIATELY.”