Is there any history of Presidents ignoring court orders?
The examples that are often pointed to are not quite outright defiance of court orders. They’re showings of disrespect, possibly contempt, for the Supreme Court, but each of the examples generally involves the President resisting the Supreme Court’s reasoning in some way.
After the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, declared that Black people cannot be citizens of the United States, Abraham Lincoln’s Administration continued to issue passports to Black people, which requires citizenship. So it’s an effective repudiation of Dred Scott, but it was not a rejection of the underlying order. Or take the famous example of Andrew Jackson supposedly saying, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it,” which he probably didn’t actually say, and didn’t involve a court order issued to Jackson. It involved Jackson refusing to enforce a court order against the State of Georgia, which the Supreme Court had found was dispossessing the Cherokees of their land in violation of their status as a distinct people. And so Jackson is showing disrespect for the Court, and of course the federal government later forces the Cherokees out of the Southeast altogether on the Trail of Tears, but it’s not a defiance of a court order issued to Jackson. And the other examples that people raise have a similar quality to them.
What about Lincoln during the Civil War?
So the example that comes up with respect to Lincoln is that he supposedly defied a court order that required him to release John Merryman from detention. John Merryman was a member of a Maryland militia who was detained on the accusation that he was burning bridges to try to prevent Union troops from passing through. In the decision, [Chief Justice Roger B.] Taney, who’s sitting in his capacity as a lower-court judge in the case, says that the detention is illegal. Taney doesn’t actually issue an order demanding that the executive release Merryman. He says that the detention is illegal, and he hopes that the President will abide by his constitutional responsibilities.
And Lincoln doesn’t respond to this but instead delivers a message to Congress, and this is when he makes his famous statement, “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” So Lincoln is resisting the determination by Taney, sitting as a lower-court judge, that he has unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Taney says only Congress can do that, but Lincoln says, In fact, the President can do it, and I have to do it to save the Union. There’s no order that he’s actually defied, but it is a defiance of a judge and his conclusions about the law.