Jack Stevens: JD Vance Needs a History Lesson

During a podcast interview in 2023, JD Vance said, “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.'”

Vance is an attorney, an officer of the court, and he should have known better than to counsel the executive branch to defy a US Supreme Court ruling. Surely, he is aware that this would thwart the checks and balances devised by the framers of the Constitution and drive us dangerously closer to authoritarian rule. That peril has been thoroughly discussed by legal commentators and others and has been made more topical by the US Solicitor’s recent shocking and troubling comment during Supreme Court arguments that the US Department of Justice does not have to uphold all federal court rulings.

What has not been discussed sufficiently is the outcome of Jackson’s decision to ignore the court’s ruling and its tragic impact on Indian nations. Vance’s cavalier treatment of the subject suggests that he is ignorant of one of the most appalling human rights violations in US history, that he knows nothing about the Trail of Tears.

The ruling that Jackson defied was that of Justice John Marshall in the 1832 case of Worcester v. Georgia that the State of Georgia had no authority to regulate Cherokee lands because the tribe was sovereign and a distinct political entity.

Historians agree that Jackson’s statement was probably apocryphal because it didn’t appear in print until 20 years after the fact. Yet there is no doubt that he deliberately failed to execute the court’s ruling, remarking in an 1832 letter that “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born.”

The reason Jackson opposed the ruling is that he wanted to force the Cherokees, in addition to the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles, off their sovereign lands and relocate them, en masse, to what is now Oklahoma.

This he did in 1838 and 1839 under authority of the Indian Removal Act, rousting 16,000 native people from their homes in in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina, confining them in stockades, then depositing them onto alien lands halfway across the country. Along the way, 4,000 died of exposure, starvation, and neglect. The land, mansions, farms, and orchards they left behind were distributed by lottery to white citizens.

None of this would have happened had Jackson simply heeded Marshall’s ruling as constitutionally required.

That is why Vance’s favorable invocation of Jackson’s defiance of the high court, in its historical context, should concern us all.