Open defiance of the Supreme Court is near impossible.

We’ve been down this road before with President Richard Nixon’s . But there’s no precedent for what should happen if a president defies the Supreme Court. Only a few historical episodes even come close. The most commonly cited case is Worcester v. Georgia (1832), in which the court sided with Native Americans in Georgia against white settlers who sought to remove them from their lands. President Andrew Jackson is often quoted as defiantly saying to colleagues, “[Chief Justice John] Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it!”

Except, as best as historians can tell, Jackson made no such remark. And regardless of whether or not he said anything similar, no such defiance actually took place. Jeffrey Rosen, a George Washington University law professor, the misconception last year:

But his actual remark, to his ally John Coffee, seems to have been: “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born ... and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Unlike Jackson, Georgia tried openly to defy Marshall, passing a law declaring that anyone who came to Georgia to enforce the Supreme Court ruling would be hanged. Jackson, who had no desire to threaten Georgia with federal forces or openly challenge the Supreme Court, solved the problem deftly by convincing the governor of Georgia to set the missionaries free. The Supreme Court never had to issue an order requiring compliance and the crisis was defused.

Other examples cited by the press hold even less relevance for today’s experience. The New Yorker’s Jeff Shesol of an incident where President Thomas Jefferson disregarded a ruling issued by a single Supreme Court associate justice. (Back then, the justices “rode circuit” and traveled to courts around the country to hear appeals.)

In December, 1807, at Jefferson’s insistence, Congress passed the Embargo Act, a drastic—and absurdly self-destructive—attempt to punish Britain for seizing American merchant ships; the act cut off all U.S. exports to any nation. In the Mississippi Territory, produce rotted in barns; in New England, dockworkers and sailors sat idle. Then, six months later, a Jefferson appointee to the Supreme Court, William Johnson, ruled that the President had exceeded his authority. To Jefferson, this marked a bitter betrayal. He took the extraordinary step of soliciting a dissenting opinion from his Attorney General, Caesar A. Rodney, distributing it to the press, and sending it to the customs agents who continued to enforce the embargo.

But the powers and responsibilities of both the presidency and the Supreme Court are scarcely comparable to that era. In all other cases, Jefferson acquiesced to Chief Justice John Marshall’s rulings.

A more notable act of defiance occurred early in the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln to foil a potential Confederate takeover of Maryland’s government. A case soon reached Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a pro-slavery Marylander whose ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford had helped ignite the conflict. While riding circuit, Taney ruled that only Congress could suspend the great writ; Lincoln ignored him and focused on saving the Union. (Some legal scholars have the interpretation that Lincoln defied the court.)

In the modern era, the court’s prestige and public esteem makes open defiance of the Supreme Court far more difficult. The only example that comes close is when, during the Watergate crisis, Nixon refused to hand over the White House tapes to the special prosecutor, citing executive privilege. When the case reached the high court, its members set aside their ideological differences to write a single unanimous opinion that would force Nixon to turn over the tapes. The justices that any dissents or compromises would cause the president to defy the court. In the end, he did not.