A historian who secretly wrote some of former President Joe Biden’s speeches during the 2020 campaign spent more than three minutes Monday complaining about Vice President J.D. Vance’s criticism of an injunction blocking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from reviewing data from the United States Treasury, claiming it could “break apart” the Constitution.

Jon Meacham, who had multiple meetings with then-President Joe Biden in the White House during Biden’s term in office, addressed Vance’s Sunday post on X criticizing an injunction issued on Saturday by United States District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama. Meacham said Vance was advocating for an “extreme version” of presidential power.

“I think this is what, for instance, the Federalist Papers were drafted for. This is what the — if you look at the American founding, you see in many ways an imperfect group of men, and they were men, trying to create the most perfect system they could, all the while knowing that they were going to fail at that. But they made the argument that because human nature is sinful and we are fallen and frail and we’re fallible and we want power because, you know, since the third chapter of Genesis, we’ve been taking instead of giving. And the Founders understood that. And as Madison said, ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Meacham told MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. “So David French, my neighbor in middle Tennessee, wrote a really wonderful piece as well in ‘The New York Times’ in the last 24 hours or so, which I recommend to you. And it’s not just Mika because he quotes the Anti-Federalist Papers, but that it was part of the charm.”

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“What they understood — what the Founders understood, and this is, by the way, isn’t this what conservatives are supposed to be fascinated by, points like this, is that whenever you give one force, one party, one interest, one man, too much power, then the body politic, and they always use those terms, they borrowed from the ancient world, body politic, corruption, words that talked about how important politics were as important as our health, right?”

Meacham, who secretly helped write some of Biden’s speeches for his 2020 presidential campaign while commenting on the presidential campaign for MSNBC, continued. “I mean, that’s where the metaphorical language comes from. You have to have the balance. And that’s what Madison’s insight was. He borrowed it. It was a theological insight as much as it was a political one. The head of what became Princeton, a man named John Witherspoon, who taught many of these figures, was a deep Calvinist and understood that most of what we would want to do would be wrong and selfish. And so therefore, we were going, as Hamilton said, by reflection and choice to create a system where we would check our worst impulses. And the problem, of course, is everybody’s against executive power until they have it. But this is an extreme version of that.”

Despite a Supreme Court ruling that struck down an effort to forgive student loans in a 6-3 ruling in June 2023, Biden repeatedly attempted to continue forgiving the loans. The Supreme Court rejected those efforts again in August 2024 by declining to block injunctions against Biden’s new actions.

“And of all — and of all — and I believe in the keep calm and carry on, absolutely, as we’ve talked about before, you know, as John Belushi, that great political scientist, said, we did not give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, that said, the thing that is the most troubling to me in the past x number of days was the vice president weighing in in that way, because it felt to me — and I hope I pray that I’m wrong — it felt to me as if it might be setting a predicate, a predicate for the kind of showdown that would potentially, potentially, break apart this constitutional system of checks and balances,” Meacham said.

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Harold Hutchison

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