WASHINGTON — Donald Trump nominees for key posts in the Justice Department fielded questions during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday about whether elected officials could refuse to obey a federal court order.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, the top Democrat on the panel, posed his first questions at the hearing to Aaron Reitz, Trump’s nominee for assistant attorney general for the department’s Office of Legal Policy, which gives legal advice to the president and executive branch agencies.

“Bottom line: Should an elected official be allowed to defy a federal court order?” Durbin asked.

The question has become more relevant to Democrats in the first months of the Trump administration, as Vice President JD Vance and other senior White House officials have questioned the authority of federal judges to halt executive branch actions.

Reitz, who currently works as chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said it would be “too case specific” for him to make a blanket statement about that.

Durbin followed up, asking under what circumstances could a legal federal court order not be followed.

“What I’m saying is that there are some instances in which a public official is lawfully bound by the holding of a particular court, in which case, that official would in fact lawfully be required to be bound by it,” Reitz responded.

But Reitz also said he could not speak for “all instances in which that dynamic may or may not be at play, given a certain lawsuit.”

Durbin responded: “That’s an incredible statement by someone who wants to be part of the Department of Justice.”

The Illinois Democrat then turned his attention to D. John Sauer, Trump’s nominee for solicitor general, a role that oversees the federal government’s advocacy before the Supreme Court.

Sauer told Durbin he did not want to speak to hypotheticals. But Sauer said “generally, if there’s a direct court order that binds a federal or state official, they should follow it.”

After being pressed by Durbin about why he used the word “generally,” Sauer said “one could imagine hypotheticals in extreme cases,” and mentioned the Supreme Court decision in Korematsu v. United States.

That ruling upheld internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, and in a 2018 decision Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote it was wrongly decided and “has been overruled in the court of history.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., weighed in shortly afterward, saying: “I thought it sounded to me like my friend Senator Durbin was defending the Korematsu decision, which I think is one of the worst and most abhorrent decisions in the history of the United States.”

Hawley then asked if the U.S. is better off if public officials do nothing in the face of severe moral wrongs.

Sauer said the point he was trying to make in his exchange with Durbin was that it’s hard to make a blanket statement about a topic without being presented with the “facts and the law that apply [to] that particular scenario.”

Reitz said there is “no hard-and-fast rule,” about whether, in every instance, a public official is bound by a court decision.

“There are some instances in which he or she may lawfully be bound and other instances in which he or she may not lawfully be bound,” Reitz said.

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