This could lead to the end of our republic

At 3:23 this afternoon, sitting before the Senate Appropriations Committee for the first time since taking over as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s replacement was asked a simple question: Would he follow court orders? He refused to say yes.

And with that single exchange, the Department of Homeland Security found itself back in the headlines, because the man overseeing one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government would not commit to obeying the judiciary branch of our government. It was a chilling moment, one that points toward a question every American should be asking tonight: What happens when the people entrusted to enforce the law no longer believe they have to follow it? Can our country survive such a moment?

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wasn’t supposed to be in this story. Until March, he was a Republican Senator from Oklahoma. Then Donald Trump fired Kristi Noem and put Mullin in her chair, and at his confirmation hearing he sold the Senate a softer version of himself. He promised to work across the aisle. He said he would bring confidence back to an agency that had lost it. For two months after that, he was quiet. Today we found out what the quiet was for. He was planning for this moment.

The question came from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and he built it carefully. He read aloud from a ruling by Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz of Minnesota, a man who clerked for Antonin Scalia and was put on the bench by George W. Bush. “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” the judge had written. Murphy made sure no one in the room could file that away as partisan. “That’s not a Democratic-appointed judge,” he said. “That is a Republican-appointed judge describing the scale of illegality.” Then he asked the simplest version of the question there is. When a court tells DHS that something it is doing is illegal or unconstitutional and orders it to stop, will you comply with the court order?

And Mullin would not say yes. He said, “We will never break the Constitution and we’re not going to break the law.” It sounded like an answer, but it wasn’t one. The entire structure of our government gives the courts the power to decide whether the law is being broken, not the officials accused of violating it.

So Murphy asked again. And this time Mullin revealed the real issue. “If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” he said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.” That was the moment. Because Murphy wasn’t asking whether Mullin agreed with a court order. He was asking whether DHS would obey one. Four times. Four times, he was given the opportunity to say yes. Four times he refused.

At one point, he didn’t even try to hide how he really feels, saying, “Not all judges are above the law, but sometimes they think they are.” Murphy told the entire committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, that they “should be really, really freaked out.” And he named the stakes without flinching. “I think that’s actually the end of our republic, if the administration willfully ignores a court order because they disagree with it or its motivation.”

This is the trick Mullin is playing. He keeps swapping in the words “the Constitution” and “the law” where the words “court order” belong. He wants us to hear a man pledging fidelity to the founding document. But under our system, he does not get to be the one who decides whether he is obeying it. A court does. That is the whole purpose of an independent judiciary.

So when he reserves the right to ignore the judges who make that determination, while wrapping himself in the language of constitutional devotion, he is not promising to follow the law. He is claiming the authority to decide for himself whether the law applies to him at all.

And the judge Murphy quoted was not exaggerating. Schiltz had attached a list. Ninety-six court orders were violated across seventy-four cases, in one state, in roughly a month. These were habeas cases, people detained and challenging whether their detention was even legal. The judge wrote that ICE has every right to challenge an order, but, like any other party in any other case, it has to follow that order unless and until it is overturned.

The danger of ignoring court orders isn’t just in the orders themselves. A court rules that something DHS is doing is illegal and orders it stopped. DHS decides the order doesn’t count. What happens then? The uncomfortable answer is: not much. The courts can issue contempt orders. They can impose fines. They can even order arrests. But courts do not have an army. They do not have police forces. They depend on the executive branch to enforce their rulings.

Alexander Hamilton warned about this more than two hundred years ago. He called the judiciary the weakest branch because it possesses “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The entire system depends on one assumption: that government officials will obey court orders even when they don’t like them. What Mullin told the Senate today is that he may not.

And this won’t stop with DHS. This is just another test. What happens when an election ends up before a court and the ruling goes against the Trump regime? Do they ignore that, too?

Murphy made one more point that we need to think about. If a Republican administration gets to ignore the court orders it decides are political, then so does the next Democratic one. You do not get to break the rule only when it serves you. Once it is broken, it stays broken for whoever comes next. But more importantly, it creates a system where the law means whatever the people in power say it means. Nobody wins in that system.

And maybe the hardest thing to sit with is that none of this is a surprise. We expected this. Not Mullin by name, but this. Exactly this. We have been saying for more than a year that the guardrails would be tested until one of them finally gave way. We are still in the testing phase. But the next phase comes after the tests stop and the consequences begin. And history has taught us that the most dangerous attacks on democratic institutions rarely come from chaos. They come from people who know exactly what they are doing.

Hearing Mullin declare that he might not follow court orders did not shock me. I am not shocked by Trump anymore, either. I expected all of it. What I cannot get past, still, after all this time, are the people in Congress who are letting it happen. The Republicans who know exactly what this is and have decided that a seat at his table is worth more than the country that gave them that seat in the first place. They think they are buying safety. Influence. Access. Power. Whatever he has promised them.

And maybe that is the part that still hurts the most. Not that men like Trump and Mullin would test the limits of our democracy. Authoritarians always do. It is that so many people who swore an oath to defend it have decided not to. They are watching the same events we are. They understand the same stakes. And they are choosing silence anyway. That is what I have never been able to understand. And I know so many of us feel the same way.

Tonight I am watching the election results in California and in five other states, primaries that will help shape what next November even looks like. And while one man in a hearing room was telling the Senate he might not honor a ruling he dislikes, real Americans all over the country were standing in line and casting ballots. Votes were counted. Results came in and were accepted, even by candidates who lost, even when the loser had the president’s own endorsement behind him. That is the thing they have not taken. Our democratic norms are still holding tonight.

Today was not an explosion of good news. It was quieter than that. It was people still showing up, caring, and believing their voice counts for something. And maybe that is what stayed with me tonight. The willingness to participate, to stay engaged even when things feel uncertain, is exactly what we are going to need in November. And people are already showing us they are ready to meet the moment. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: My election night buddy. She was just as interested in the results as I was. Or at least she pretended to be.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/homeland-security-mullin-court-orders-immigration

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/06/02/dhs-chief-dodges-questions-obeying-court-orders/

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/27/chief-judge-schiltz-one-way-or-another-ice-will-comply-with-this-courts-orders/