President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on January 20, 2025

Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade on Friday gave the Trump administration a legal history lesson after Vice President JD Vance claimed it would not deliver Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds to hungry Americans despite a court order to do so.

U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. on Thursday “ordered the Trump administration to make a payment to fully fund” the program through November by Friday, ABC News reports.

Asked about the decision Thursday, Vance called it “an absurd ruling” and blamed SNAP funding on the Democratic Party.

“… You have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of a government shutdown, which what we'd like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government,” Vance said Thursday. “Of course, then we can fund SNAP. We can also do a lot of other good things for the American people. But in the midst of a shutdown, we can't have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

“We're not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge,” Vance claimed.

Reacting to the vice president, McQuade didn’t mince words.

“Yeah. You know, JD Vance is a law school graduate — shame on him,” she said. “He knows that as far back as the seminal case of Marbury vs. Madison at the dawn of the Republic, the courts have said it is emphatically the province of the courts to say what the law is. It is the role of the courts to tell the president what to do when he is violating the law, the courts. The president's remedy is to file an appeal, and if they get a different ruling there, that's fine. But in the meantime, they are obligated to follow the court's order.”

McQuade pointed to the judge’s remarks, noting it’s “obvious” there’s money to fund SNAP but the White House won’t do it “because they want to put pressure on Democrats in Congress.”

“President [Donald] Trump’s own social media posts were cited by the court to support that conclusion by the judge,” she noted. “And so this idea that somehow the president doesn't have to follow the order of the court, that’s what’s absurd.”