Trump, Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Crisis
The 47th president says he’ll comply with court decisions. The seventh didn’t always do so.
By Peggy Noonan
President Donald Trump stands before a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the White House, Oct. 24, 2017. Photo: kevin lamarque/ReutersWe aren’t in a constitutional crisis.
If the administration takes an action, a court holds it unconstitutional, and President Trump defies the court, then we will enter a constitutional crisis.
The president said this week he will obey all court orders as he did throughout his first administration, and appeal if necessary.
But he said that Tuesday, and next week it may be different.
As Mark Halperin has observed, no Trump decision is ever really made because every Trump decision may soon be reversed, by Mr. Trump.
But if you go by two things—the temperament of this White House and the ability of its adversaries to launch innumerable cases within all levels of the judicial system—odds are good a crisis will come.
What then?
A hellacious struggle.
I’ve been going back to Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829-37), which can be seen as a nonstop constitutional crisis.
Trump supporters used to trace parallels between Mr. Trump and the seventh president, whose portrait the 45th president displayed in the Oval Office and the 47th brought back.
Now they natter on about William McKinley.
But their spirit isn’t of the placid McKinley, it is Jacksonian.
They are denying their own spirit, burying it in a well-dressed, even-toned professionalism.
The outsider Elon Musk in his jeans and his jacket bragging about feeding federal agencies into the wood chipper—that is Jacksonian.
Having been cheated out of the 1824 election—he really was, in grim bargaining between Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and House Speaker Henry Clay—Jackson defeated Adams four years later after an embittering campaign marked by “slander, slight and innuendo.”
That is H.W. Brands in his excellent “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times.”
Jackson saw the theft of the 1824 election as “emblematic of a deeper corruption that undermined American liberty and prevented the ordinary people of America from controlling their government.”
What a showman he was.
He rode a white stallion down Pennsylvania Avenue after he was sworn in.
A longtime Washingtonian quoted by Mr. Brands was shocked.
“Such a cortege as followed him!
Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white.”
No one called them “deplorables,” but that’s how official Washington viewed them.
The White House reception was famously overwhelmed by “the rabble mob,” in the long-timer’s words.
China and glass were broken, fights broke out.
“Those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.”
The nation had been a constitutional republic only 40 years.
Jackson saw much that had settled in and needed undoing.
He trained his fire on the federal workforce, moving against permanent tenure.
“No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.”
He favored “rotation”—employees should work a few years and make way for new ones.
Mr. Brands put the best estimate at “between one-tenth and one-fifth of federal office holders replaced during Jackson’s tenure other than by ordinary attrition.”
Jackson didn’t mind that they feared being fired.
Mr. Brands sums up his thinking: “A little fear would have a sobering effect on the tipsy, a vivifying effect on the lazy, a straightening effect on the wayward.”
Replaced workers saw their slots filled by Jackson enthusiasts.
“To the victor belongs the spoils,” Jackson is often quoted, but it was a friendly observer, Sen. William Marcy (D., N.Y.), who said it.
In Jackson’s terms there were two major clashes between the executive branch and the judiciary.
The first was what came to be called the Bank War.
The charter of the Bank of the U.S. was expiring in 1836. Jackson didn’t like the bank.
I think as a once-impoverished frontiersman he just didn’t like banks, but his arguments came down to a populist trope: The bank favored a moneyed elite over common people.
In December 1829 he informed Congress, with a faint air of menace, that not only did he oppose the bank, so did “a large portion of our fellow citizens.”
Congress voted in 1832 to recharter the bank.
Jackson vetoed the bill.
As a struggle ground on, he was re-elected in a landslide.
The Supreme Court had held in 1819 that the bank was constitutional, and its charter hadn’t expired.
Jackson pulled all federal deposits from the bank and disbursed them to state banks.
His first Treasury secretary refused to make the transfer and Jackson fired him, hiring a more compliant replacement while the Senate was in recess.
Clay, by then a senator, said Jackson had no constitutional authority to do what he was doing.
The Senate censured the president.
The transfer of funds went through and was followed by financial panic.
Jackson claimed there was no real distress beyond that felt by speculators and fraudsters.
It was bitter.
The president of the bank said just because Jackson had “scalped Indians and imprisoned judges” didn’t mean he’d succeed here.
Jackson said the Bank was trying to kill him, “but I will kill it!”
Federal money flowed into the states, liquidity eased, and the bank was blamed for the panic.
Jackson left the White House in triumph.
But his successor, Martin Van Buren, buffeted by continual economic aftershocks, was thrown out after one term.
Mr. Brands: “Politics in the age of Jackson wasn’t for the faint of heart and especially not for the weak of mind.”
In 1835 a man aimed a pistol at Jackson’s heart from 10 feet.
The gun misfired.
So did a second pistol.
Afterward, when police tested the pistols they fired perfectly.
Jackson’s supporters came to see his survival as the work of Providence.
The other crisis revolved around the Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia (1832).
Samuel Worcester, a white Christian missionary living in Cherokee territory, opposed Georgia’s imposition of its laws removing Cherokee control from their lands.
He brought suit on their behalf.
The justices found Georgia’s efforts unconstitutional because the Cherokee nation was a sovereign entity.
Jackson refused to enforce the decision.
He literally ignored it, seeing it as undemocratic.
He is often misquoted as saying, of the court’s chief justice, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
It was New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley who used those words to capture Jackson’s attitude.
What Jackson said is that the decision “fell stillborn.”
The court “cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
Jackson allowed Georgia to annex Cherokee lands and pursue the Cherokee, contributing to the forced relocation of the American tribes to the west of the Mississippi—the catastrophic Trail of Tears in which thousands perished from disease and exposure.
But a precedent, of sorts, had been established: The Supreme Court had limited power in enforcing its decisions without the executive branch’s support.
It was the anti-Jacksonian Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts who grasped the underlying dynamic of the age.
Though the Constitution specified a separation of powers, day-to-day democracy could override it.
“Were it not for the fear of the outdoor popularity of General Jackson,” he wrote, “the Senate would have negatived more than half his nominations.”
Congress feared or was tempered by Jackson’s support.
That is where Trumpism puts its bet, on his popularity “outside.”
Though Jackson’s election victories were landslides.
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