Let’s say a president and his campaign are given covert help by a foreign power to win office, that he violates the emoluments clause, and engages in a string of other acts impermissible under the Constitution, like claiming an emergency to use money appropriated by
Congress for purposes not intended by it.

Let’s also suppose Congressional leaders fail to perform their oversight function or to act as a check on the president’s unconstitutional acts. Or that he orders a Special Counsel to cut short an investigation of him or obstructs justice. Or that the House is prepared to Impeach, but the Senate will not convict. Is there no protection against such a descent into autocracy?

Some argue the answer is at the ballot box, years in the future. But arguably, a president who gained office through a rigged election will have no scruples about doing it a second time. And to leave an aspiring despot in control of the immense power of the executive branch unchecked for years is acquiescing to lawlessness.

His Vice President and cabinet have the power to sideline a president by invoking the 25th Amendment, but they are his creatures, so unlikely to rise to the occasion. Which leaves the remaining stopgap, the judicial branch. We are said to be a nation of laws, not men. The rule of law is supposed to be supreme, but the historical behavior of the Supreme Court offers little solace.

In 1901, Mr. Dooley, a fictional Irish bartender created by a Chicago newsman, summed up the problem when a case was decided in a popular but peculiar way: “The Supreme Court follows the election returns.” Some would say that’s too cynical.

For example, a Court with four Nixon appointees on it nevertheless unanimously put the nail in his coffin by ordering his incriminating tapes released. He was gone 12 days later. But impeachment and conviction were already staring him in the face. His own party told him it was time to go. The Supremes were hardly out on a limb.

At all too many crucial junctures in American History, however, the Supreme Court has failed to rise to the occasion. We get misty about “Brown v. Board of Education,” but it was 100 years late. During all those years the injustice of legalized racial discrimination received Court sanction in decisions like “Dred Scott,” “Plessy,” and many more.

The Court’s record on immigration cases is a grime history of blithe racism, as in “People v. Hall” from 1854 that ruled that Chinese people can be excluded from the country because they are an “inferior” race.

Not much had changed ninety years later when tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese heritage were consigned to internment camps, a practice declared legal in “Korematsu v. United States” on the theory that they might be saboteurs, though they might be more likely to be patriots. Is it the Courts job to make assumptions about the thoughts of citizens or to uphold the Constitution?

In the 1870s in “Minor v. Happersett,” women brought a case demanding to be allowed the right to vote because they were citizens. The Court ruled that citizenship does not automatically confer the right to vote.

In 1866, Roscoe Conkling was a Senator who participated in the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment designed to overturn Dred Scott and confer Equal Protection of the Laws on all people. By the 1880s The Gilded Age was in full swing, and Conkling had become a corporate lawyer so highly paid he turned down a Supreme Court appointment rather than lose the lucre.

In a warning to gullible originalists to “Trust, but Verify,” Conkling won a case by claiming the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment intended it to confer “personhood” on corporations as well as humans.

Scholars have since determined, he was lying his head off. The drafters had no such lunatic idea, but corporate personhood became embedded in Constitutional precedent, giving us 130 years of evil spawn like “Hobby Lobby” which supposes chain stores have religious beliefs and “Citizens United” which imagines corporations have political opinions and can’t be denied the right to express them with money, the spending of which the Court regards as speech.

In 1951, at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, the Court in “Dennis v. United States” found that First Amendment freedoms of speech, the press and assembly did not extend to communists. The list of shameful opinions could be extended for pages, along with the embarrassing reversals that only arrived many years later.

Before the Civil War, blacks weren’t people, later the place for women was in the home, not the voting booth, in the age of the Robber Baron corporations became people, when we were frightened of the Japanese or the Communists Americans lost their rights. Obviously Mr. Bumble was right, “The law is a ass — a idiot.” Or at least those who write it and rule on it can be.

So, can we count on the courts to curb the excesses of a president now, or only decades after he is gone? And even if they do rule against him, will it matter? Stalin was warned that the Pope was upset at his government’s discrimination against Catholics. Stalin said, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?”

But one doesn’t have to cross the ocean to find such cases of executive brute force. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Native Americans constituted distinct communities occupying their own territory over which the laws of the states “can have no force.” But President Jackson chose to remove them a thousand mile to the west. Jackson allegedly said, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”

It is no accident that Donald Trump chose to hang a portrait of Jackson in the White House, along with one of himself. How we get them, and him, removed is not obvious.