It’s an old but timely question: ‘What sort of hope have we?’
Are we in the throes of a constitutional crisis? As I write this, the unanimous reply from pro-Trump Republicans is “No.” The predominant answer from the other half of the country is “Not yet,” with the caveat, to quote Peggy Noonan, that “odds are good that a crisis will come.” The crisis in question would result should President Trump either ignore or (more likely) openly defy a federal court that has ruled one of his initiatives unconstitutional. By the time you read this, that crisis may be upon us.
I’m neither an expert in constitutional law nor can I predict the future, but as a historian of nineteenth-century America, I am very much struck by the return of Andrew Jackson to contemporary debates about presidential power. Vice President Vance has recommended that when the courts (predictably) try to stop the president, he should “stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did,” and refuse to abide by its decision. Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) agrees that President Trump should “take a page out of Andrew Jackson’s playbook.” In a rare instance of intraparty disagreement on executive power, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) counters that Jackson’s defiance of the courts was “lawless” and “wrong.”
All three prominent Republicans are referring to Jackson’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1832 case Worcester vs. Georgia. In their 6-1 decision, the court concluded that in driving the Cherokee Nation from its ancestral lands, the state of Georgia had violated multiple federal treaties. Two decades after Jackson’s death, a journalist would imagine Jackson defiantly proclaiming that Chief Justice John Marshall “has made his decision: now let him enforce it!”
Although apocryphal, the declaration aptly captured Jackson’s contempt for the judiciary whenever it disagreed with him. Jackson had long seen negotiating treaties with Indian tribes as an “absurdity,” and although the federal government had negotiated ninety-one such treaties in the previous three decades, one of his first acts as president was to inform Congress that the Constitution prohibited the federal government from recognizing the sovereignty of any Native American tribe situated within a state. In effect, he was pronouncing the government’s policy going back to George Washington’s presidency to be unconstitutional. It would not be the last time that he asserted his right to interpret the Constitution unilaterally.
And so, when the Supreme Court handed down its Worcester decision, Jackson simply ignored it, and the Court was powerless to enforce its decree. “What sort of hope have we,” asked a spokesman for the Cherokee Nation, “from a President who feels himself under no obligation to execute, but has an inclination to disregard the laws and treaties?” What sort of hope? Over the next decade the federal government would coerce the removal of more than eighty thousand Native Americans from the southeast to tribal reserves in present-day Oklahoma. One-fourth of the Georgia Cherokee would die on a tragic trek known as “the Trail of Tears.”
Although Jackson’s showdown with the Court over Indian removal gets all the attention, he defined his philosophy of executive power more clearly in another contentious episode that unfolded concurrently. In “the Bank War,” Jackson squared off against both the Supreme Court and Congress over the desirability and constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. The B.U.S. was a part public, part private corporation that Congress had chartered in 1816. In an age long before the establishment of a national banking system, the Bank of the United States functioned both as a private corporation and a public agency, extending loans to private borrowers and earning profits for its stockholders, but also serving as the sole depository for the federal government’s money and doing its best to provide a stable circulating medium for the nation. Defenders of the B.U.S. claimed—with considerable evidence—that the Bank was fulfilling its role effectively. Critics warned—with good cause—that it wielded enormous economic power with minimal governmental oversight.
For his part, Andrew Jackson was suspicious of all banks, but his deep-seated animosity toward the B.U.S. specifically was driven more by personal grievance and partisan passion. Two of the most vocal champions of the Bank were John Quincy Adams, who had defeated him in the presidential election of 1824, and Henry Clay, “the Judas” whom Jackson held personally responsible for his defeat. Without evidence, Jackson insisted that Clay and Adams had conspired to deny him the presidency. We might call their so-called “Corrupt Bargain” the first “Big Lie.”
When Congress approved a bill to renew the Bank’s charter in the summer of 1832, the president responded with a resounding veto. Sounding a populist theme, Jackson condemned the bill as an ill-disguised scheme “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” Striking a nativist chord, he warned that foreign investors owned a quarter of the bank’s stock, making Americans “debtors to aliens.” But measured by the number of words he devoted to the question, the paramount argument in Jackson’s veto message was his insistence that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.
This was not an easy argument to make. The Supreme Court had twice ruled the Bank constitutional—first in McCullough v. Maryland in 1819, then again in Osborn v. the Bank of the United States in 1824. None of that mattered, Jackson insisted. The Supreme Court had no business ruling on the B.U.S. at all. “Questions of constitutional power” must always remain open until the opinion of “the people and the States can be considered as well settled,” the president explained. That hadn’t happened yet.
More ominously, Jackson went on to declare that “each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, not as it is understood by others.” The opinion of the Supreme Court “has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress over the judges, and on that point the president is independent of both.” In determining the constitutionality of the B.U.S., Jackson was simply exercising his constitutional duty to uphold the Constitution—as he unilaterally interpreted it.
Jackson’s veto became a major issue in that fall’s presidential campaign, and he insisted that his reelection (with a smaller percentage of the popular vote than he had earned in 1828) was irrefutable proof that the nation agreed with his determination to kill the B.U.S. The opinion of “the people and the States” was now “well settled,” Jackson concluded. The “highest power known on earth” had spoken. But while the people’s defender had thwarted the renewal of the charter of the B.U.S., its original charter would not expire until 1836, giving this “hydra of corruption” another four years to “destroy the liberty of our country.” The solution, Jackson decided, was to immediately withdraw all government deposits from the B.U.S. and distribute them among approved state banks.
But there was a problem. The bank’s charter specified that only the Secretary of the Treasury could authorize the withdrawal of the government’s deposits. When the current Treasury secretary refused to do so on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds, Jackson shifted him to a different post. When his successor similarly objected, Jackson summarily fired him in a one-sentence memo. Jackson finally succeeded on the third try, identifying a compliant lackey who would pledge in advance to remove all federal deposits as a condition of his appointment. Jackson would later reward this willing accomplice, Roger B. Taney, by appointing him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. We remember Taney today as the architect of the most infamous judicial ruling in U. S. history, Dred Scot v. Sandford.
What are we to do with this historical context? For starters, we should be appalled at politicians and social media influencers who hold up Jackson’s defiance of the judiciary as a model to emulate. Such references are either historically ignorant or monumentally misguided. Think about Jackson’s claim that he was obliged to uphold the Constitution only as he interpreted it. There can be no denying that the Constitution explicitly charges the executive branch with the unique responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If each branch of the federal government has an equal right to determine the constitutionality of laws, as Jackson insisted, but only the president has the authority to execute the laws, then it’s the president’s understanding of the Constitution that matters most. You could almost say that it’s only the president’s understanding that matters at all. When it comes to the enforcement of the law, at any rate, Jackson’s stance amounts to a declaration that the Constitution means whatever the president says it means. He was claiming powers for the presidency that none of his predecessors had even dared imagine.
Jackson’s political opponents were not blind to this, and their warnings to the nation in 1833 sound eerily familiar in 2025. Anti-Jackson journalists cried that “the will of a dictator is the Supreme Law!” A cartoonist drew a crown on his head, clothed him in royal robes, and christened him “King Andrew I.” Anti-Jackson rallies condemned the president for encouraging his followers to replace “love of liberty” with “devotion to a man.” In Congress, opponents warned the country that “we are in the midst of a revolution” laying waste to the Constitution. To its credit, the Senate even managed the gumption to pass a resolution of censure, charging the president with exercising power over the federal monies “not granted to him by the Constitution and laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.”
This remains the only formal censure of the president by a house of Congress in our history. But its immediate effect was negligible. Far from cowed, Jackson responded by declaring the Senate’s resolution unconstitutional.
The good news is that Andrew Jackson did not eventually crown himself king. The bad news is that he convinced a critical mass of Americans to be more accepting of concentrated executive power. While claiming to revere the Constitution, Jackson systematically asserted presidential prerogatives that threatened to demolish the separation of powers and checks and balances the Framers had designed as a bulwark of liberty—and he did it in the name of the people. While the architects of the Constitution viewed power as a threat to liberty, Jackson charted a strategy to defend liberty that led directly to an increasing concentration of power: his own.
I began by asking whether we are in the throes of a constitutional crisis. Here’s a more disturbing question: Should such a crisis occur, will enough of us even care? Writing shortly after Andrew Jackson left the White House, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans seemed willing to “sacrifice the future for the sake of the present.” As he put it in Democracy in America, a “contemptible love of present pleasures” had created a widespread myopia among Americans, an unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of partisan policies. Two centuries later, have we really changed? Unless the undermining of the Constitution affects us—directly, concretely, immediately—it will be easy to chalk up warnings of a “constitutional crisis” to the politically motivated ravings of the other side.
That’s essentially what happened in the 1830s. Jackson’s assault on the Constitution was controversial. But with limited exceptions, it was controversial along partisan lines. Jackson’s supporters (increasingly calling themselves Democrats) praised a hero. His opponents (soon to style themselves Whigs) denounced a tyrant. This would set the mold for a pattern that continues to this day. While the Framers of the Constitution viewed power as a threat to liberty regardless of who wields it, we have tended to be suspicious of power primarily when it’s controlled by the other side.
We would do well to take seriously the Framers’ view that a collapse of the separation of powers is always an invitation to tyranny. If you find their warning unpersuasive, just ask the Cherokee Nation.
Tracy McKenzie is professor of history at Wheaton College, where he holds the Arthur Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning. He is the author most recently of We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy.
Image: King Andrew the First, c. 1832
