JD Vance (Video): "Chief Justice Roberts recently said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch."

JD Vance: I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.

Principle 1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the American people decide how they’re governed. That’s the fundamental small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and 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. To be clear, it’s not most courts. But 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. That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for. That’s where we are right now.

While in Rome to meet the new pope, America's vice-president also joined Ross Douthat at the U.S. Embassy in Rome for the columnist's New York Times podcast, which led to a lengthy talk about JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies. (The two Catholics kind of look — and sound — alike; video at the hyperlink.)

JD Vance: I’ve talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend, just because there are a lot of cardinals here in Rome, and one of the arguments that I’ve made, very respectfully — I’ve had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration — is that it’s easy to get locked in left versus right; the left respects the dignity of migrants and the right is motivated by hatred. Obviously, that’s not my view, but I think some liberal immigration advocates get locked in the view that the only reason JD Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he is motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance.

 … I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.

That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.

 … Ross Douthat: The Trump administration, while running for president, made two promises: We’re going to secure the border and we’re going to deport a substantial number of the people who entered illegally under the previous administration.

I would say that you have been more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the border. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly, and there’s a lot of debates in the courts and elsewhere about relatively small numbers of potential deportees.

Vance: Sure.

Douthat: So, looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?

Vance: Well, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I do think the most important success is stopping the flow of illegal migration to begin with. And I think that the president has succeeded wildly on that. I agree, it’s been greater than my expectations, and I had high expectations. We’ve done a very good job there, and I think the president deserves a great deal of credit.

On the deportation question, first, this is just a minor wonky point that kind of bothers me in the way this is reported in the media. Sometimes you will hear people say that deportations in the Trump administration are down relative to the Biden administration. That is in fact an artifact of the fact that the Biden border was effectively wide open. In other words, if somebody comes across the border illegally and you immediately turn them around, or you schedule a deportation hearing and say, come back for your hearing, a lot of both of those would get counted as deportation.

So you can have a lot of deportations when you have quite literally millions of people per year walking across the border. That’s low-hanging fruit in terms of deportation. So just a point of clarification there.

Douthat: That’s completely fair. But at the current pace of deportations, you would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents and not commensurate with the numbers who entered.

Vance: That’s right.

I’m sure New York Times listeners are going to be scandalized by this line of argumentation, but I think it’s really important. In some ways, the deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not adequate to the task, given what Joe Biden left us.

There are different estimates of how many illegal immigrants came in under the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million? It’s hard to count this stuff because you have known got-aways, you have unknown got-aways. You have the people that we never even saw cross the border. So there’s a little bit of guesswork in all this.

I actually think the number is much closer to 20 million than to 12 million ——

Douthat: Just to pause there, one of the most hard-core, critical of illegal immigration think tanks, when I looked into this, had its estimate in the 10 million to 12 million range.

Vance: That’s right. They did. And I think they’re undercounting it, because I think they’re counting the people that we were aware of. I don’t think they were counting that estimate of unknown got-aways. They weren’t counting certain classes of asylum seekers, of temporary protected status seekers. So they were answering a question as honestly as they could. But I think, if you look at the grand scheme of it, it’s higher.

But look, whether it’s 12 million or whether it’s 20 million, it’s a lot. That’s a lot of work ahead of us, and here are two things that we can do. I think one thing is a little bit easier and one thing is a little bit harder. The first thing is you just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this possible. And again, I think that we should treat people humanely. I think we have an obligation to treat people humanely, but I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. That requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more beds at deportation facilities. It just requires more of the basic nuts and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of deportation. And that’s one of the main things in the big, beautiful bill that is moving through Congress right now: more money for immigration enforcement. That’s what that money is for, to facilitate that deportation infrastructure.

There’s also a much more difficult question, and I think you see the president’s frustration and I’ve obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process. But the due process ——

Douthat: To be clear, this is based on legislation. It’s not based on the judges who are making these decisions inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard.

Vance: But the amount of process that is due, how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear, is, I think, very much an open question.

 … A lot of very well-funded NGOs went about the process of making it much harder to deport illegal aliens. In the year of our Lord 2025, we inherited a whole host of legal rules, and in some cases not even legal rules, and in some cases not even legal rules as much as arguments that had been made by left-wing NGOs that hadn’t actually been ruled on by the courts yet. And what we’re finding, of course, is that a small but substantial number of courts are making it very, very hard for us to deport illegal aliens.

Stephen Miller, our immigration czar in the White House, a good friend of mine, is thinking of all of these different and new statutory authorities, because there are a lot of different statutory authorities the president has to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. And there is, candidly, frustration on the White House side that we think that the law is very clear. We think the president has extraordinary plenary power. You need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are, in fact, illegal aliens and not American citizens. But it’s not like we’re just throwing that process out. We’re trying to comply with it as much as possible and actually do the job that we were left ——

Douthat: OK, but ——

Vance: Let me just make one final philosophical point here. I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.

Principle 1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the American people decide how they’re governed. That’s the fundamental small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and 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. To be clear, it’s not most courts. But 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. That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for. That’s where we are right now.

We’re going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible.

 … Douthat: … The legal authorities that you guys have tried to use, the particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants. The claim is not actually that five million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States. Or is that the claim?

Vance: No, it’s not that five million are engaged in military conflict. I take issue that it’s an aggressive interpretation. Let me back up and take some issue with that premise. I don’t think that the supposition, if you look at the history and the context of those laws, is that for something to be an invasion you have to have five million uniformed combatants.

We don’t have five million uniformed combatants. I think I have to be careful here because some of this information is classified. How to put this point? I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.

Because when you say there aren’t five million people who are waging war, OK, but are there thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people? And then when you take their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that? Who are quite dangerous people who I think very intentionally came to the United States to cause violence, or to at least profit from violence, and they’re fine if violence is an incidental effect of it? Yeah. I do, man. And I think people underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is. You know, the one thing I’d love for the American media to do a little bit more is really go to a migrant community where you have, say, 60 percent legal immigrants and 40 percent illegal immigrants. The level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of I think truly premodern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to. Whatever law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious action against this. It’s bad. It’s worse than people appreciate, and it’s not Donald Trump.

 … This is not sustainable. And it’s not just unsustainable, like, oh, this is more immigrants than we used to have. This is a level of invasion that I think we already have laws to help us deal with. I wish the courts were more deferential. We’re very early innings in the court process, and even some of the capital-W worst Supreme Court decisions that have been made, the media says: Oh, this is a big blow to the administration. A lot of these things are very narrow procedural rulings. I think that we’re very early innings here on what the court is going to interpret the law to mean.

 … Typically, what I find when I look at the worst cases — I mean, the ones that the media seems so preoccupied with — I’m going to make a couple of observations about it. No. 1, it is hard to take seriously — now, this doesn’t absolve me from doing my duty as an American leader and hopefully as a Christian leader, too — but it is hard to take seriously the extraordinarily emotive condemnations of people who don’t care about the problem that I’m trying to solve and that the president is trying to solve.

That’s not you. It’s why I actually take your concerns seriously. I listen to most of your podcasts. I read most of your columns. So when I see people who for legitimately four years told me that I was a xenophobe for thinking that what Joe Biden was doing at the border was a serious problem, I am less willing — there’s a witness element to this — and I’m less willing to believe the witness of people who are now saying that this MS-13 gang member, and we’ll talk about that case in a second, this guy is somehow a very sympathetic person and you violated his civil rights, et cetera, et cetera.

 … I understand there may be disagreements about the judgments that we made here, but there’s just something that it’s hard to take serious when so many of the people who are saying we made a terrible error here are the same people who made no protests about how this guy got into the country in the first place, or what Joe Biden did for four years to the American Southern border.

 … There are two things about my boss — and I never reveal private conversations — there are two things about the president of the United States that I am extremely fascinated by. One is he has better instincts about human beings than anybody that I’ve ever met. Just almost a bizarre level of intuition about people.

Second, which I think is very underappreciated and it motivates the foreign policy in Ukraine and Russia, it motivates the things that he said about the Middle East, it motivates really a lot of them, is he has this sort of humanitarian impulse. And I’ve heard the president say: Maybe if we sent the very worst people to different places, then American prisons would be a little less violent. Because as you know, American prisons are not a good place. They’re not very good at rehabilitation. 

  … Douthat: … When I look at the big, beautiful bill working its way through the House and Senate, I see very conventional, small government Republican policymaking. Certainly not a kind of new industrial policy for the 21st century.  So is that out there as a possibility for the administration?

Vance: So, yes. But I think you’re underweighting how much there’s both a carrot and stick element to this and the Trump administration. Again, you see traditional Republicans, small government, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK, but we’re talking about no tax on overtime, no tax on tips. These are things that give domestic consumers more money. And if you combine giving domestic consumers more money with making it easier and cheaper to produce in America and more expensive to produce overseas, then that is, in our view, at least a form of industrial policy.

  … Douthat: Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?

Vance: You know, you have to bite off only so much at a time, Ross, and I think that it’s not just a tax bill, of course, it’s an immigration bill. There are a lot of other parts of the policy agenda that matter. There’s a lot of regulatory relief in this bill. This bill is what we’re focused on. And then, yes, once we get this bill passed, we’re going to think about other legislative priorities.

 … Douthat: So, a couple of times in this interview, you’ve said something to me to the effect of: I know New York Times readers hate me, I know New York Times readers don’t like me and so on.

Vance: [Laughs.]

Douthat: But here’s the reality of the last couple of years as I experienced it as a New York Times conservative. The Trump-Vance ticket won a constituency you didn’t have before, that Trump didn’t have before in 2016.

Vance: Sure.

Douthat: That included the kind of people who read The New York Times. People who were exhausted by wokeness ——

Vance: Yes. And by the way, if they don’t like me, I still love them.

I’m just trying to acknowledge that a point that I make may not land particularly well, but go ahead.

… Douthat: … There’s a group of people who, it’s not millions and millions of people, but it’s a real and substantial constituency that voted for you guys, to their own surprise. Or even if they didn’t vote for you, they woke up the day after the election — I heard a lot of people say this — and said: You know, in the end, I was glad they won.

 … So then, generally, you’re going to face the voters by proxy in the midterms.

You may face the voters personally in some future.

But to this constituency that was pro-Trump — again, maybe it’s to its own surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the first few months — what is your pitch to them right now?

Vance: I guess my pitch to them would be: We came into the administration with what we believe was a mandate from the American people to make government more responsive to the elected will of the people and less responsive to bureaucratic intransigence.

  … I think that if in two years you look at the past two years, or in four years you look at the past four years, what I hope to be able to say and what I think is true today and will still be true then is that we actually have done, with some bumps, we’ve done a good job at making the government more responsive. More efficient to the cabinet secretaries or the deputy secretaries in those departments. And that this sort of feeling of shock, I don’t dismiss it or diminish it, but I think that the system actually needed some pretty significant reform.