By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) – On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ended Donald Trump’s quest to narrow who can be considered a citizen if born in the United States, a harsh loss for the Republican president. But just one day before, it handed him a form of power that the dissenting justices said even English monarchs of the past did not possess.
The top U.S. judicial body issued rulings on Tuesday in three important cases, as it brought to a close another momentous nine-month term heavily focused on legal disputes involving Trump and his administration.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, dealt Trump three big losses during the term – on tariffs, birthright citizenship and his bid to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. But it also continued to back his aggressive use of executive authority, vastly expanding the power of the presidency.
“The Trump administration has pushed a robust vision of executive power, which the court has largely embraced,” George Mason University law professor Robert Luther III said.
‘SERIOUS DISRUPTION’
In his second term as president, Trump has pushed to expand his powers in domestic affairs and foreign policy, drawing numerous legal challenges.
When these cases have reached the Supreme Court, it generally has been highly deferential to Trump, avoiding direct confrontation with the norm-shattering president on all but his most audacious assertions of executive authority.
“The exceptions to that general trend are cases in which the president’s position was so far removed from any conceivable legal justification that the Supreme Court was unwilling to follow quite that far … or in which the Supreme Court seemed to fear serious disruption to the markets or broader economy,” Syracuse University College of Law professor Jenny Breen said.
The Supreme Court’s workload this term has been marked to an unusual degree with cases involving the president, with much of the action occurring on an emergency basis on its so-called shadow docket. In such cases, the justices often make rapid and highly consequential decisions outside their regular process, without extensive briefing and oral arguments held in public and typically with little explanation of their legal rationale.
The conservative majority backed Trump in most of these cases, letting him implement key policies while challenges to their legality played out in lower courts.
In such cases during this term, the court let him carry out aggressive immigration raids that can target individuals based on their race or language, cut National Institutes of Health grants for research related to racial minorities or LGBT people, and bar passport applicants from selecting the sex reflecting their gender identities for the document.
Beyond emergency cases, the court has also resolved cases in Trump’s favor in the traditional manner, after extensive deliberation, briefing and arguments, including by acceding to Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration. The court often has deferred to the president on matters such as immigration and national security.
Last week, the court’s conservatives gave Trump and his administration three victories, over the dissent of the liberal justices, making it easier to deport people, or refuse them entry, including those who have legal status in the United States. Among those rulings, the court let the administration strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian legal status protecting them from deportation.
HUMPHREY’S EXECUTOR
On Monday, the court’s conservatives delivered a watershed ruling that some legal experts said boosts Trump’s power under the U.S. Constitution more than any prior ruling in the history of the Supreme Court. They freed Trump to fire leaders at independent government regulators, placing the levers of the government’s executive power firmly in his hands. In the process, the court overturned a precedent dating to 1935, in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that had insulated such officials from at-will firings by a president.
Overturning Humphrey’s Executor for years had been a priority of the U.S. conservative legal movement. Critics of the move said the court’s action will lead to further politicization of federal agencies that Congress had sought to entrust to nonpartisan experts, as well as to broader partisan swings in American regulatory policy.
The dissenting liberal justices said the ruling handed too much power to the president, allowing him even to act in defiance of laws. The court “gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Cornell Law School professor Gautam Hans said the decision “represents the triumph of decades of conservative advocacy.”
“Whatever losses the administration has had, they are probably quite happy with that prize,” Hans said.
EMBRACING TRUMP’S LEGAL POSITIONS
Some legal experts also emphasized that the Supreme Court adopted the Trump administration’s legal positions in certain major cases in which the president was not an original party to the dispute, but rather assumed an “amicus,” or friend of the court, role. These included in a landmark decision in April that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
That 6-3 ruling, powered by the conservative justices, made it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under that historic 1965 civil rights law. The ruling opened the door for Republican-led Southern states to dismantle Democratic-held majority-Black and majority-Latino districts ahead of the midterms. Black and Latino voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
Trump’s fellow Republicans seek to retain control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
MAJOR LOSSES
Although the justices were largely deferential to Trump, two searing defeats he sustained this term revealed its reluctance to strengthen the president’s hand over the economy.
In a 6-3 decision in February authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, the court struck down Trump’s sweeping global tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies.
The loss prompted Trump to lash out in remarkably personal terms at the six justices who ruled against him, including two of his own appointees — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
“I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you wanna know the truth, the two of them,” Trump said, referring to the pair.
In another painful defeat, the court on Monday refused to let Trump fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, standing firm to preserve central bank independence.
Despite these losses, Trump’s record at the midway point of his second term is far more favorable than that of his Democratic predecessor President Joe Biden, who the court dealt a sustained and a historic series of defeats.
“This court had essentially the same composition of justices during President Biden’s term but was more likely to rule against his major exertions of presidential power,” Breen said. “Of course every case presents different legal arguments, but the comparison is striking.”
The court on Tuesday ruled that Trump’s executive order seeking to deny birthright citizenship to the children of certain immigrants violated language in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that confers citizenship to those born in the United States who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
George Mason University’s Luther called the birthright citizenship ruling “wrongly decided” and “a catastrophic loss.”
“Its consequences will be felt throughout the country for decades to come,” Luther said of that decision. “But the Trump administration has largely been rewarded for pursuing an ambitious vision of executive power, and I encourage them to continue because it’s generally been rewarded for doing so.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
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