Federal judges are working overtime to defy President Trump. 

How much thought have they given to what happens if he defies them in turn?

So far, Trump has been obeying the court orders coming from mostly leftist federal district judges, even when those orders are deeply questionable.  

Law professor Jonathan Turley calls it “injunctivitis,” while Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule says that district courts’ nationwide restraining orders “are basically an automatic judicial veto on all new policy.”

“Whatever form of government that is, let’s please not call it ‘democracy,’ ” Vermeule notes.

A new standing order in Maryland automatically blocks the deportation of any illegal alien whenever their lawyer files a petition — before a judge even reviews it. 

District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts blocked Trump’s funding ban on Harvard almost the moment papers were filed. “Did she even read it, or was the rubber stamp already loaded?” one observer asked.

Clearly, a significant portion of the federal judiciary is hostile to Trump’s policies and is happy to thwart them in any way it can. 

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho last week denounced his colleagues for acting like short-order cooks for the left. 

“We should admit that this is special treatment being afforded to certain favored litigants . . . and we should stop pretending that Lady Justice is blindfolded,” Ho wrote.

It all raises a question: What if Trump simply ignores these rulings?

He wouldn’t be the first president to do so.

In the famous case of Marbury vs. Madison, President Thomas Jefferson announced in advance that he wouldn’t comply with a Supreme Court decision favoring Marbury — leading to some fancy legal footwork by Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote an opinion that carefully avoided forcing Jefferson’s hand. 

President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Cherokee tribe in Worcester vs. Georgia, reportedly remarking “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Abraham Lincoln essentially disregarded the court’s Dred Scott ruling, arguing that an unelected body couldn’t legitimately make policy for an entire nation based on a single case. 

As he observed in his first inaugural address, “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

One can only imagine what Honest Abe would have said about district court judges. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like Jefferson before him, announced in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 1942 case involving Nazi saboteurs that he would not obey an order in their favor.

But in recent decades, presidential defiance of a Supreme Court opinion has become almost unthinkable. 

The high court’s prestige has been far greater than it was earlier in US history, and no president has enjoyed the political whip hand held by FDR. 

The press, too, has generally been very supportive of the Supreme Court — especially when Republicans hold the presidency.

But what about now? 

The judiciary’s prestige has been badly damaged, in part because of Democrats’ attacks after rulings on abortion, affirmative action and gun control went against their preferences.

And the power of the press has much declined: Despite the legacy media’s unrelenting anti-Trump negativity, the number of Americans who think the country is “on the right track” is at a near-record high, according to RealClearPolitics. 

If the media can’t move that needle, how much can it hurt Trump over a disputed legal question — especially when large majorities of the public support the president on spending cuts and deportations, the issues drawing the fiercest judicial opposition?

In the past, defying the courts would have looked like an abandonment of the rule of law. But given the courts’ behavior, that’s not the argument it used to be.

Leftists have spent the past several decades attacking and breaking down institutions. Now that they need the public to venerate those institutions, they don’t have much to work with.

Will the Supreme Court impose some order on the lower courts — or will we find out how far a president can go in ignoring the judiciary? 

And if it’s the latter, is that so bad?

The Framers set up a system of separated branches in which, as Lincoln noted, power and responsibility were compartmentalized.

The judiciary’s claim to be the final authority on all constitutional questions is comparatively new, and poorly founded. As Vermeule says, such a system isn’t anything like democracy — and is nothing like what the Framers envisioned.

Previously, the balance worked because the judiciary had self-control and understood the dangers of overreach.

Now, like so many of our institutions, it’s been addled and corrupted by Trump-hatred — and one way or another, a corrective is in order.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.