Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Tuesday that court decisions “stand whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not,” days after two of President Donald Trump’s top lieutenants attacked rulings that halted some of his contentious executive orders.
During an appearance at Florida’s Miami Dade College, she stressed—as justices, who must do their best to maintain the appearance of impartiality, do—that she was speaking in broad terms and did not mention Trump by name.
But Sotomayor’s remarks, at times, seemed like pointed responses to the new administration. The president argues he has a mandate to shutter government programs and agencies even if Congress has ordered them to be funded, and his allies blast any court that would get in his way.
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A federal judge threatened the administration with being found in criminal contempt on Monday after the White House defied his order to release billions of dollars in congressionally authorized federal grants that Trump had frozen.
A day later, Trump said he would “always abide by the courts, always abide by them,” before announcing his administration’s attempt to appeal.
Sotomayor said at the college: “Our founders were hellbent on ensuring that we didn’t have a monarchy and the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse.”
Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, has argued that judges should not be able to wield influencer over Trump’s recent run of aggressive executive orders.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal,” he wrote, in a social media post. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Vance’s post followed two separate rulings by federal judges against the Trump administration, one that temporarily blocked some elements of its attempt to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and another that temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his federal spending task force from accessing the Treasury Department’s payments systems.
Musk responded by going on the warpath, accusing the judge who ruled against his DOGE team of being “corrupt” and calling for his immediate impeachment.
Their criticisms have led to concerns among legal experts who worry that the Trump administration could openly defy the courts, and ignore congressional authority, in what could spill out into a full blown constitutional crisis.
“Court decisions stand, whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not,” Sotomayor told the audience in Miami, when asked about maintaining the separation of powers between government branches. “It doesn’t change the foundation that it’s still a court order that someone will respect at some point.”
If the Trump administration’s appeals to recent rulings make their way to the Supreme Court, the government will make its case before the six-three Republican majority on the current bench.
Sotomayor, one of the three liberal leaning justices, praised her colleagues, while stopping short of endorsing their ideas: “Good colleagues sometimes have silly thoughts, but it doesn’t make them bad or silly.”
