A strawman in the form of a question is by no means impossible.
If there is a good-faith basis for the question, and it has some sort of factual foundation, then it’s not a strawman. If it’s out of left field, with no good faith belief as to any factual foundation, then it’s entering an exaggerated or caricatured version of events to the debate, which is the sine qua non of the strawman fallacy.
I’m not sure citing the Jackson “precedent” comes close to satisfying the foundational requirement.
On the other hand, these boards are no strangers to the discussions of wild hypotheticals, as Libertarian and his giant squid attackers can verify. So even if it is a strawman as to the debate in this thread, I don’t think it’s any sort of off-limits discussion for the board.
A more exact counterpart may be what Lincoln did. IIRC, it involved ex parte Milligan(?).
The SCotUS said that Lincoln had to hand over a US national on the basis of a writ of habeus corpus (?) yet lincoln would not. The Justice wouldn’t send the US marshall to the Army brig to release the fellow because he feared for the safety of the marshalls.
Today, if I were the SCotUS in a similar position, I’d send three marshalls and 1000 journalists to retrieve the fellow. Make the frontpages w/ the executive branch’s violation of the US Constitution. Surely, there’re plenty Americans who hold the Constitution in higher regard than they do politicians.
What Jackson did, or for that matter, what Lincoln did, are not “precedents” in the legal sense at all. They could not lend any legitimacy to the idea that the position that the Bush Admin could legally defy the SCotUS.
There are plenty of ways for the President to legally defy a judicial order, just as Congress could. All of them assume that the order is itself illegal. The courts could order the executive branch to prosecute someone, for example, or order Congress to pass a particular law. The three branches of government are, after all, co-equal; supreme in their area and subject to the checks and balances developed by both law and 200+ years of tradition.
This particular order is well within the bounds of judicial compentency to make, and the only way the adminsitration could conceivably ignore it is by holding our for the Supreme Court to speak on the matter.
Well, I’m sorry if I mischaracterized your question.
If it was indeed serious, you might have wanted to use his actual name, instead of “Shrub”. That tends to throw people off concerning the seriousness of whatever follows.