“We have had an executive branch that has emasculated itself by surrendering constantly to the idea that once the court says something, that’s it, it’s the law of the land,” Mike Huckabee, the conservative commentator and former governor of Arkansas, said on Fox News, on Monday, talking about the court rulings against President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban. “When I hear that phrase, ‘It’s the law of the land ’cause the court said it,’ I think, Did you guys pass ninth-grade civics, for gosh sake?” It is unclear what was taught in ninth-grade civics classes at Hope High School in the early nineteen-seventies, when Huckabee was a student there, but it probably wasn’t that judicial opinions are a form of advice that a President can disregard.

Huckabee, though, didn’t make his comment casually. He’d gone on television to provide Trump with some advice of his own and, apparently, to stiffen the President’s spine. Huckabee said that he was “glad to see” Trump’s attacks against James Robart, the Seattle judge who, along with several other judges across the country, had blocked key parts of the executive order restricting immigration and travel. (A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered Robart’s ruling in a contentious hearing, on Tuesday.) As lawyers debated his order, Trump, too, seemed to be recalling civics class: in the capital, on Wednesday, he told a gathering of police chiefs and sheriffs that even a “bad high-school student” would know enough to rule in the Administration’s favor. “Courts seem to be so political,” Trump said. His belligerence prompted a rebuke from his own nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, who conceded to Senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, that the President’s comments were “demoralizing” and “disheartening.” Yet many on the right have joined Huckabee in cheering—or egging—Trump on. Steve Deace, the radio talk-show host, has urged Trump to “stand up to the courts” and to prove that he is, as some supporters contend, “the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson.”

Trump has sought comparisons to Jackson, but the Jackson that conservatives are now invoking is not the populist but the unbending chief executive who showed contempt for the Supreme Court. In 1832, when the Court ruled that the U.S. government, and not the state of Georgia, had jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation, Jackson reportedly said that Chief Justice “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” He never, in fact, said such a thing; neither was he responsible for enforcing the decision. (And, before the Court could issue its final order, the case became moot; Georgia had settled the litigation.) But the apocryphal quotation—nineteenth-century fake news—is apt today. Its high-handedness, its flash of menace, its disregard for constitutional norms—all this now has a familiar ring. It does not require a leap of the imagination to suggest, as a recent Times editorial did, that “Mr. Trump may decide—out of anger at a ruling or sheer spite at a judge—that he doesn’t need to obey a court order.”

If he did, he wouldn’t be the only President to defy the judiciary. The first was Thomas Jefferson. In December, 1807, at Jefferson’s insistence, Congress passed the Embargo Act, a drastic—and absurdly self-destructive—attempt to punish Britain for seizing American merchant ships; the act cut off all U.S. exports to any nation. In the Mississippi Territory, produce rotted in barns; in New England, dockworkers and sailors sat idle. Then, six months later, a Jefferson appointee to the Supreme Court, William Johnson, ruled that the President had exceeded his authority. To Jefferson, this marked a bitter betrayal. He took the extraordinary step of soliciting a dissenting opinion from his Attorney General, Caesar A. Rodney, distributing it to the press, and sending it to the customs agents who continued to enforce the embargo. Johnson, aggrieved, published a rebuttal of his own: the logic of Jefferson’s position, he argued, was “not that the executive have done right, but that the judiciary had no power to prevent their doing wrong.” Jefferson had the last word; the policy remained in effect until he left office, in 1809.

The most notable case of what scholars, euphemistically, call “nonacquiescence” came in 1861, at the start of the Civil War. That April, two weeks after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Philadelphia and Washington—a corridor rife with secessionists who had been burning railroad bridges and cutting telegraph lines. Lincoln’s order gave his commanders the right to imprison suspected saboteurs indefinitely, without so much as an indictment. A month later, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney—best known and much reviled today for his opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857—issued a categorical decision that only Congress, not the President, could suspend the writ. In a book on Lincoln and Taney, published in 2006, James F. Simon, of New York Law School, observed that the Chief Justice’s opinion had “a gauzy, surreal quality,” giving no indication that the nation faced an existential threat. (Taney himself favored secession.) Lincoln rejected the ruling and its reasoning. He would not agree that he, or any President, should permit a single clause of the Constitution to put the whole of the Union at risk. “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Lincoln asked a special session of Congress, that July. It was, of course, a rhetorical question. The order remained in force.

Facing an altogether different kind of threat—the Great Depression—in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt made a series of moves to rein in the gold supply, part of his strategy to increase prices for farm products and consumer goods. In January of 1935, the Supreme Court, dominated by conservative Justices, considered a pair of legal challenges to the policy. An adverse decision, Roosevelt and his advisers believed, could send the U.S. Treasury into bankruptcy and the economy into chaos. He mulled his options. Court-packing—adding seats and filling them with liberals—was discussed and quickly dismissed. (A full-fledged and ill-fated plan to pack the Court would come two years later.) Instead, Roosevelt inched toward “outright defiance,” in the words of one aide, and dictated a speech to have on hand. “To carry through the decision of the Court to its logical and inescapable end will so endanger the people of this Nation that I am compelled to look beyond the letter of the law,” he was prepared to say. He didn’t need to, as it turned out. In two 5–4 decisions, the Court upheld his policy. That afternoon, in his delight, Roosevelt performed the speech for a small audience of exuberant aides.

Like Roosevelt, every President finds his commitment to the system of checks and balances tested at some point. If that commitment is weak to begin with, as is clearly the case with Trump, any assertion of supreme authority can be justified. This week, Trump has attacked the courts in the name of “security.” For Richard Nixon, it was a “strong Presidency,” free from harassment by the other two branches. During the Watergate crisis, as special prosecutors, Congress, and the courts ordered that Nixon release his White House tapes, he observed at a press conference that Lincoln was “a very strong President.” Lincoln, he added, did not hesitate to “move in the national interest in a way that many thought was perhaps in violation of the law—the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, for example.” Perhaps with this in mind, Nixon refused to say whether he would comply with anything less than a “definitive” ruling—a term he left vague. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to produce the tapes. This was definitive enough. Nixon resigned two weeks later.

Yet, in the end, the check on Nixon came not from the Court but from Congress. When Jefferson, Lincoln, and F.D.R. defied court rulings (or considered doing so), they all had Congress on their side. Nixon quit the Presidency because he did not. He could see that his impeachment by the House, conviction by the Senate, and forced removal from office had become inevitable. Today, however, Congress is with Trump. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been quick to shrug off or explain away Trump’s transgressions; their posture toward the President has so far been supine. If Trump’s travel ban goes before the Supreme Court and is overturned—or if some other order or action or bill, down the line, meets that fate—congressional Republicans might be ready to condone “nonacquiescence.” “We’re going to see what happens,” Trump said at the White House, on Tuesday, musing about the legal challenges to his ban. “You know, some things are law, and I’m all in favor of that. And some things are common sense. This is common sense.”