On June 25, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, the deportation shield that lets people from disaster-struck or war-torn countries live and work here legally. The vote was 6 to 3. Within hours, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the ruling was "not something we will ever accept."

That is not a policy complaint but a mayor telling the public that a final decision of the highest court in the country will not bind him. It is the exact thing the press spent a year warning that Donald Trump would do.

For a year, Democrats said Trump would break the courts. Fetterman says his own party just did.

For most of 2025, the warning ran on a loop: the second Trump administration would defy the courts and drag the country into a constitutional crisis. Senator Chris Murphy called it the most serious constitutional crisis since Watergate. It never came. When a federal judge ordered a halt to deportations under an eighteenth-century wartime law, the administration challenged the order and won at the Supreme Court. That is how the system works.

Senator John Fetterman is the one Democrat who says what changed. A real constitutional crisis, he told the press, is when a president defies a court ruling, and he had not seen one. Now the mayor of the country's largest city says he will not "follow or honor what the Supreme Court says," and, as Fetterman put it, "many of the members in my party are not calling him out."

Mamdani put illegal immigrants ahead of the New Yorkers he governs.

Mamdani cannot grant Temporary Protected Status, and he cannot overrule six justices. What he can do is obstruct. New York's sanctuary rules already bar the city from helping federal agents enforce immigration law. In February he signed an order shutting those agents out of schools, shelters, and hospitals without a judge's warrant. The tell is who it serves: a mayor is spending the power of the nation's largest city to keep illegal immigrants, and the criminals his sanctuary rules shield from deportation, ahead of the citizens who elected him.

Democrats understood federal power fine when it ran their way. When Texas strung razor wire along the border to slow illegal crossings, the Biden administration went to the Supreme Court and won an order to cut it down, arguing that border enforcement is Washington's job and a state cannot interfere. Now a Democratic mayor interferes on the same subject, in the other direction, and the party that used the Court against Texas has nothing to say.

Republicans do the same in Virginia, and suddenly it is lawlessness.

Wisconsin's governor did the same with a different ruling. In March, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado's ban on certain talk therapy for minors runs into the First Amendment, because the counseling it blocks is protected speech. Governor Tony Evers said he would keep Wisconsin's near-identical rule anyway: "period, end of story." He is daring the Court to make him stop.

The standard flips when the officials refusing are Republican. In Virginia, a new gun-control law signed by Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger was set to take effect July 1. Seventeen prosecutors and twelve sheriffs said they would not enforce it, invoking the Second Amendment. Attorney General Jay Jones said they had no such choice: prosecutors "are elected to enforce our laws." The Virginia officials are standing on a right the Founders wrote into the Bill of Rights. Mamdani and Evers are defying the Court for the cause of the moment. One side stands on the written Constitution. The other rejects whatever the Court hands down the moment it loses. If a prosecutor citing the Second Amendment is lawless, a mayor vowing to ignore the Supreme Court is worse.

A court they call the rule of law only when they win.

In the same stretch of days, the same Court handed Democrats a win they liked, and the language changed. On June 29, Governor Gavin Newsom's office greeted a ruling upholding California's count of late-arriving mail ballots as "a win for voters, for the rule of law, and for the future of our democracy." Attorney General Rob Bonta thanked the Court for respecting the states' authority over their own elections. The next day, the Court ruled that states may keep girls' and women's sports for biological females, on the same authority Bonta had just praised. Federalism is the rule of law when it counts their ballots and an attack when it protects girls' sports.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker met that ruling by calling it small: his state has "three" transgender athletes in high school, he said, and the country "ought to be talking about bigger things." Two years ago, the Trump campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars airing one line nearly fifty-five thousand times: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you." The party learned nothing. Handed a ruling for the average woman, it called her a distraction.

The country turns 250 this weekend. It has lasted that long on a plain rule: when you lose at the Supreme Court, you obey the ruling and make your case to the voters. Mamdani says that rule does not bind him. Evers says the same. For a year their party warned that Donald Trump would crown himself and ignore the courts. He obeyed them. They are the ones who won't.