My column on JD Vance for the San Francisco Chronicle

Ever heard of Marbury v. Madison?

Did JD Vance sleep through his Yale law class on the U.S. Constitution?

By Jack Ohman

Feb 15, 2025

The vice president of the United States and law school alum JD (he does have one of those) Vance posted a truly bone-chilling statement on X the other day.

“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. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

This Hillbillionaire shill went to Yale Law School. They have a class there called “Constitutional Law.”

I wonder if he slept through that class.

In his Con Law class at Yale, Vance might have discovered interesting, immutable points in the U.S. Constitution. For example, judges are, in fact, there precisely to interpret executive power — and, in some cases, check it.

We call this system “checks and balances,” something mere mortals who went to public elementary schools and state universities know pretty well. You know, three branches of government and all.

Now, Yale is a truly fancy law school. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, also a Yale Law alum, appointed only Yale Law grads to the California Supreme Court.

Hey, I hear Berkeley has a law school, too, and I even teased Brown about that.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former fixer and proud alumni of Cooley Law School, the lowest-rated law school in the United States, could probably tell you chapter and verse about the power of the judiciary, since he went to prison for paying off a stripper, unlike his convicted felon boss who committed the actual crime itself.

You see, the power of pardons is also in that same U.S. Constitution. You’ll pardon me if I compare Cohen’s knowledge of said law to the legal education of the vice president of the United States, Yale Law ’13.

Vance is a fan of what conservative legal scholars call the unitary executive theory, which is what they’re hanging all these Elon Musk slash-and-burn operations on.

Unitary executive theory basically says that the president should pretty much be able to do what he wants, when he wants, without pesky oversight from Congress or the federal judiciary.

This has been cooked up by the fun folks over at the Heritage Foundation, which is the holding company of the Trump nuts who came up with Project 2025.

Project 2025? Didn’t Trump disavow that in the fall of 2024?

“Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left,” Trump said at a campaign rally last fall.

Yeah, sort of the opposite.

We call them insane fascist ideologues over here in Sanityland, not Hannityland.

Trump also said, “I’ve never read Project 2025, never seen it.”

Well, that’s lie No. 34,789.

Memo to Trump: your new OMB Director/Christian Nationalist Mouthpiece Russell Vought and some his buddies who were in your cabinet wrote it, and it’s now something of a topic of conversation in the news. Check it out.

Vance, presumably, has studied the separation of powers and, specifically, Article I of the Constitution.

Article I is the pesky part about Congress and congressional power, and there’s a reason the Framers put it first: It’s the most important. There’s no unitary executive language in Article II, either.

Article III is that judicial part, JD, and it’s also a necessary check on your favorite branch of government, the executive. You’re not wrong that a military commander, a sworn constitutional officer of the United States such as yourself, shouldn’t be having to file a motion every time he or she (DEI, sorry, JD) every time they (more DEI?) want to fire a shot or park a jeep.

But if a military commander issues an illegal order, that commander is also under the same rules you, me and every U.S. citizen live under. It is, in fact, illegal for a soldier to execute an illegal order.

That’s another example of checks and balances.

Vance also went to THE Ohio State University, where they also have a fine law school and a poli sci department, where any student can check out Articles I, II and III.

Remember in 2022 when your education-challenged president said his ridiculous assertion of a “stolen election” — yet another lie, of course — “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Whoa, buddy. That’s something a Day One Dictator would say.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee at the time, said that he “absolutely” condemned and “vehemently” disagreed with Trump’s remarks.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., responded then that “the Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American.”

Not just Donald Trump. Not just Elon Musk. Not just billionaires.

Every American.

In the movie “The Paper Chase,” the 1973 film about a first-year law student named Hart at Yale’s blood rival Harvard Law School, John Houseman, who played the magisterial Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, intoned, “Mr. Hart. Mr. Hart, here’s a dime. Call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you becoming a lawyer.’

I guess JD Vance didn’t take that class at Yale, because I keep wondering why the vice president would denigrate the rule of law.

I’ll even give him a dime to call his mother.

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Hey, You Betchamericans!: Will post more this weekend. Was working and speaking in The City. If you’ve got an extra dime, and you’re a wealthy lawyer, send it along so I can keep this law school class open on Substack. Teeth are OK, for the moment. Thanks for asking!—J.