Donald Trump is directing US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to pay military personnel despite the federal government shutdown.
The president said on Saturday that Hegseth must make sure troops do not miss out on their regular paycheque, scheduled for Wednesday. The directive comes as other government employees have already had some pay withheld and others are being laid off.
“I will not allow the Democrats to hold our Military, and the entire Security of our Nation, HOSTAGE, with their dangerous Government Shutdown,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
That’s such a load of bullshit. Your Founders barely bothered to outline what the Supreme Court is and what it can do. It was in 1789 that Congress actually determined the details of that and most of the powers of the Supreme Court were determined during John Marshall’s tenure as Chief Justice.
This is also doubly funny because it has happened before when President Andrew Jackson refused to respect the Supreme Court Decision in Worcester v. Georgia and the Supreme Court did nothing because the State of Georgia and the President aimed to hurt people they all hated (Native Americans) and it eventually led to the Trail of Tears.
I swear Americans don’t know their own history.
Actually, this illustrates my point entirely. Article III (which describes the Judiciary) explicitly defines a single Supreme Court but leaves the structure of the rest of the Judiciary to the Congress. So this interplay between Congress and the Court is exactly what they were looking for. The Courts have wide latitude to judge cases, but it has to be within the structure that Congress creates.
They didn’t get into specifics, on purpose, because they felt that in a well-functioning government, ambitious people would keep each other in check.
Because the SCOTUS has no enforcement mechanism for what you described. Even just for Worcester v. Georgia, what is the USMS supposed to do against the state of Georgia without support from the Executive? Jackson literally wrote in 1832: “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Jackson did eventually threaten enforcement as part of what became known as the nullification crisis.
But either way, Worcester v. Georgia wasn’t directly about the 1830 Indian Removal Act or 1835’s Treaty of New Echota; it was about the freeing of Worcester etc., which did eventually go through. The Treaty of New Echota should’ve been illegal on the basis of *Georgia v. Worcester", but again, the SCOTUS doesn’t just go around enforcing cases it didn’t rule on unless it gets back to their court to rule on that separate case; that’s the Executive’s job.
“The Supreme Court did nothing because they hate Indian Americans” is such unfounded bullshit that you just made up because it sounded right. You can correctly argue all you want that this shows separation of powers is just an illusion because one single person has to agree to enforce laws and can only be removed (theoretically) with a supermajority of Congress if they fail to do so.