Vance says courts are overturning the will of the people. He’s wrong.

There were two under-the-radar developments last week in the showdown between the Trump administration and federal courts. First, the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the House contains an overlooked provision that would prevent courts from enforcing contempt citations if, say, someone were to ignore their rulings.

Secondly, Vice President J.D. Vance told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in an interview, “I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. … I saw an interview with chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment.”

I wonder what Vance’s constitutional law professor at Yale thinks of that statement. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court is supposed to provide a check on any government excesses. It’s not literally in the Constitution, but Marbury v. Madison established that role in 1803. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that overturning that precedent, as Vance implies, would be equivalent to changing the Constitution.

But this is a column about public opinion, not constitutional law. I am not an expert in the latter. I have much more to say about Vance’s assertion that courts are overturning the will of the American people—and by extension, that Congress is protecting the will of the people by neutering federal courts.

There are two fundamental questions here: First, are the courts bound to “the will of the people”? This question is actually fairly simple to dismiss. The federal court system was set up explicitly not to be tied to voters. The American public has favored some profoundly wicked things in the country’s history that the Supreme Court had to eventually stop. It’s worth pointing out when the Court departs from public opinion, as it did in overturning Roe v. Wade, but public opinion was never supposed to be the Court’s lodestar.

The second question is more complex: Are the courts actually overturning the will of the people by stopping some of the Trump administration’s actions? Put another way, do voters support the administration’s actions that courts have blocked? And if not, does President Trump nevertheless have a mandate to govern as he pleases, given his win in November?

I’ll start by throwing Vance a bone—it is true that in broad strokes, the “will of the American people” is with Trump’s agenda, especially the part about closing the border and deporting illegal immigrants convicted of crimes. But when polls ask detailed questions about actions Trump has taken that courts are questioning—ending birthright citizenship, deporting immigrants to places like Libya, and canceling college students’ visas, for example—most Americans are opposed to the policy specifics.

Whether Trump has a mandate to act regardless of public opinion on any specific policy depends on how you define “mandate.” Yes, Republicans won the presidency and have control of both chambers of Congress. At the same time, Trump and Vance won 49.8 percent of the vote—just under half. It’s not an overwhelming, Reagan-in-1984-type mandate.

Nor do presidents necessarily have to govern according to public opinion. Representative democracy means that voters hire representatives to use their judgment. It also means those representatives will face consequences at the ballot box if they go too far astray from what most people want.

Trump no longer has to worry about his own reelection, but congressional Republicans will. If Republicans lose control of the House, any chance of passing MAGA legislation in Congress comes to a halt. It’s in Republicans’ interest for Trump to keep the public generally happy lest he lose that claim to a mandate.

We can bicker back and forth about the role of public opinion in how representatives set policy. It’s an interesting debate to have—although possibly moot for 2026 if the focus is on the economy.

But if we’re using majority support from the American public as a marker of what should happen as Vance suggests, I have one more data point for the vice president and Congress: 56 percent say an individual federal district judge should be able to block a president’s policy for the entire country, and only 28 percent agree with Vance. A 48 percent plurality of Republicans are on the judges’ side; 40 percent are with Vance.

It looks like the will of the people has spoken.

Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.