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<\/figure>\nIt\u2019s an old but timely question: \u2018What sort of hope have we?\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Are we in the throes of a constitutional crisis? As I write this, the unanimous reply from pro-Trump Republicans is \u201cNo.\u201d The predominant answer from the other half of the country is \u201cNot yet,\u201d with the caveat, to quote<\/a> Peggy Noonan, that \u201codds are good that a crisis will come.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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<\/a> that when the courts (predictably) try to stop the president, he should \u201cstand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did,\u201d and refuse to abide by its decision. Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) agrees<\/a> that President Trump should \u201ctake a page out of Andrew Jackson\u2019s playbook.\u201d In a rare instance of intraparty disagreement on executive power, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) counters<\/a> that Jackson\u2019s defiance of the courts was \u201clawless\u201d and \u201cwrong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n All three prominent Republicans are referring to Jackson\u2019s response to the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in the 1832 case Worcester vs. Georgia<\/em>. 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\u2019s death, a journalist would imagine Jackson defiantly proclaiming that Chief Justice John Marshall \u201chas made his decision: now let him enforce it!<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Although apocryphal, the declaration aptly captured Jackson\u2019s contempt for the judiciary whenever it disagreed with him. Jackson had long seen negotiating treaties with Indian tribes as an \u201cabsurdity,\u201d 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\u2019s policy going back to George Washington\u2019s presidency to be unconstitutional. It would not be the last time that he asserted his right to interpret the Constitution unilaterally.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so, when the Supreme Court handed down its Worcester<\/em> decision, Jackson simply ignored it, and the Court was powerless to enforce its decree. \u201cWhat sort of hope have we,\u201d asked a spokesman for the Cherokee Nation, \u201cfrom a President who feels himself under no obligation to execute<\/em>, but has an inclination to disregard<\/em> the laws and treaties?\u201d What sort of hope<\/em>? 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 \u201cthe Trail of Tears.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Jackson\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Bank War,\u201d 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\u2019s money and doing its best to provide a stable circulating medium for the nation. Defenders of the B.U.S. claimed\u2014with considerable evidence\u2014that the Bank was fulfilling its role effectively. Critics warned\u2014with good cause\u2014that it wielded enormous economic power with minimal governmental oversight.<\/p>\n For his part, Andrew Jackson was suspicious of all<\/em> 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, \u201cthe Judas\u201d 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 \u201cCorrupt Bargain\u201d the first \u201cBig Lie.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When Congress approved a bill to renew the Bank\u2019s 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 \u201cto make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.\u201d Striking a nativist chord, he warned that foreign investors owned a quarter of the bank\u2019s stock, making Americans \u201cdebtors to aliens.\u201d But measured by the number of words he devoted to the question, the paramount argument in Jackson\u2019s veto message was his insistence that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.<\/p>\n This was not an easy argument to make. The Supreme Court had twice ruled the Bank constitutional\u2014first in McCullough v. Maryland<\/em> in 1819, then again in Osborn v. the Bank of the United States<\/em> in 1824. None of that mattered, Jackson insisted. The Supreme Court had no business ruling on the B.U.S. at all. \u201cQuestions of constitutional power\u201d must always remain open until the opinion of \u201cthe people and the States can be considered as well settled,\u201d the president explained. That hadn\u2019t happened yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n More ominously, Jackson went on to declare that \u201ceach public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he<\/em> understands it, not as it is understood by others.\u201d The opinion of the Supreme Court \u201chas no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress over the judges, and on that point the president is independent of both.\u201d In determining the constitutionality of the B.U.S., Jackson was simply exercising his constitutional duty to uphold the Constitution\u2014as he<\/em> unilaterally interpreted it.<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s veto became a major issue in that fall\u2019s 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 \u201cthe people and the States\u201d was now \u201cwell settled,\u201d Jackson concluded. The \u201chighest power known on earth\u201d had spoken. But while the people\u2019s defender had thwarted the renewal<\/em> of the charter of the B.U.S., its original charter would not expire until 1836, giving this \u201chydra of corruption\u201d another four years to \u201cdestroy the liberty of our country.\u201d The solution, Jackson decided, was to immediately withdraw all government deposits from the B.U.S. and distribute them among approved state banks.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there was a problem. The bank\u2019s charter specified that only the Secretary of the Treasury could authorize the withdrawal of the government\u2019s 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n What are we to do with<\/strong> this historical context? For starters, we should be appalled at politicians and social media influencers who hold up Jackson\u2019s defiance of the judiciary as a model to emulate. Such references are either historically ignorant or monumentally misguided. Think about Jackson\u2019s 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 \u201ctake care that the laws be faithfully executed.\u201d 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\u2019s the president\u2019s understanding of the Constitution that matters most. You could almost say that it\u2019s only<\/em> the president\u2019s understanding that matters at all<\/em>. When it comes to the enforcement of the law, at any rate, Jackson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s 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 \u201cthe will of a dictator is the Supreme Law!\u201d A cartoonist drew a crown on his head, clothed him in royal robes, and christened him \u201cKing Andrew I.\u201d Anti-Jackson rallies condemned the president for encouraging his followers to replace \u201clove of liberty\u201d with \u201cdevotion to a man.\u201d In Congress, opponents warned the country that \u201cwe are in the midst of a revolution\u201d 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 \u201cnot granted to him by the Constitution and laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s resolution unconstitutional.<\/p>\n 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\u2014and 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<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I began by asking whether we are in the throes of a constitutional crisis. Here\u2019s 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 \u201csacrifice the future for the sake of the present.\u201d As he put it in Democracy in America<\/em>, a \u201ccontemptible love of present pleasures\u201d 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<\/em>\u2014directly, concretely, immediately\u2014it will be easy to chalk up warnings of a \u201cconstitutional crisis\u201d to the politically motivated ravings of the other side.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s essentially what happened in the 1830s. Jackson\u2019s assault on the Constitution was controversial. But with limited exceptions, it was controversial along partisan lines. Jackson\u2019s 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\u2019s controlled by the other side.\u00a0<\/p>\n We would do well to take seriously the Framers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n