Trump Criticizes Supreme Court Over Mail-In Voting Ruling

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  When Presidents Treat Judges as Employees

  A ruler who rebukes judges for deciding against his own plan mistakes the constitution for a counting-house and the justices for his clerks—and the public quietly pays the bill.

  We are told that a president proposed a scheme respecting mail-in voting; that a lower judge found this plan unlawful and blocked it; and that the highest court of your union has now upheld that block. The plan falls; the judgment stands. So far, this is no more than the ordinary operation of law. What renders the incident remarkable is not the decision, but the president’s response: a public denunciation of the ruling as a “bad decision,” and, more curiously still, a complaint that the judges who joined it “are not the people I interviewed” to serve. Here we pass from lawful disagreement into a more instructive impropriety.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  When a President Treats Judges as Employees

  A ruler who complains that judges are “not the people I interviewed” mistakes the nature of their office and edges his power toward the arbitrary authority of being judge in his own case.

  I begin with the reported fact that a president, dissatisfied with a ruling that upheld a block on his mail‑in voting plan as unlawful, has delivered what is called a blistering attack on the court, and has said of the justices in the majority, “these are not the people I interviewed” to serve. I meet here no obscure doctrine about trade or distant colonies, but a plain contest over who decides what the law is. One party holds the sword of executive power; the other, though lacking force of arms, holds the authority of judgment in controversies about law. The quarrel, therefore, goes to the heart of political power held on trust.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  A Prince Who Publicly Scolds His Own Judges Plays a Dangerous Game

  When a ruler calls a lawful judgment a “bad decision” and disowns the judges he himself advanced, he wagers his future on spectacle over restraint, and the stake is not only his power but the authority of the laws that sustain it.

  A ruler goes before his people and declares that the highest court of his state has made “a bad decision.” He adds that “these are not the people I interviewed” to serve as judges. This is not a legal argument; it is a political move. The case, as described, concerns a mail‑in voting plan the courts have blocked as unlawful. The Supreme Court has upheld that block. The prince answers not with a careful defense of his plan, but with a blistering attack on the tribunal itself. I have seen this play before, in many costumes. When a man quarrels with the law, he must choose whether to fight the sentence or to fight the judges.

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