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ANALYSIS: Supreme Court's expansive view of presidential power is 'solidly' pro-Trump

Supreme Court ends term with several major rulingsIn a major ruling the court granted a partial stay of nationwide injunctions issued by district judges against President Donald Trump's executive order to effectively end birthright citizenship.

President Donald Trump may not have a perfect rubber stamp in the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is finding little willingness by the six-justice conservative majority to stand in his way.

As the justices begin the traditional summer recess, the sweeping impact of their judgments from the recently concluded term -- in 56 cases argued and more than 100 matters from the emergency docket -- is coming into focus for the administration and the country.

Despite the nation's narrow political divide, the court delivered rulings disproportionately advantageous to interests of the Republican political establishment in power.

"Time and again, the Supreme Court came down on one side, and solidly so -- on the very conservative side," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

 

PHOTO: United States Supreme Court pose for their official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building, Oct. 7, 2022.
United States Supreme Court (front row L-R) Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, (back row L-R) Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pose for their official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building, Oct. 7, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images
 

 

Most notably, the court imposed dramatic new limits on the ability of federal judges to check presidential power, coming one year after it established sweeping, presumptive immunity for presidents engaged in "official acts."

"Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies," explained Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her historic opinion allowing Trump to move forward with plans to end birthright citizenship, which has been the law of the land for more than a century.

In 14 other emergency appeals Trump brought to the high court, the justices granted his request -- at least in part -- on 12 occasions.

The conservative majority gave the green light to the Trump administration's mass layoffs of federal workers, the removal of openly transgender service members from the U.S. military, deportation of noncitizens to third countries with little due process, and access for DOGE staffers to Americans' most sensitive information held by the Social Security Administration.

The court did narrowly block Trump's request to continue a freeze of $2 billion in foreign aid money owed to nonprofit groups for services rendered and denied a bid to dismiss the legal case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland migrant and alleged gang member whom the administration deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, and other alleged Venezuelan criminals.

The successive decisions have increasingly incensed the court's liberals.

"Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote bluntly Thursday in a dissent from the court's decision clearing the way for the government to send eight migrants to South Sudan.

 

President Donald Trump speaks with the press on board Air Force One as he travels from Ochopee, Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, July 1, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks with the press on board Air Force One as he travels from Ochopee, Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, July 1, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in extraordinarily stark and impassioned language in dissent in the birthright citizenship case, accused her conservative colleagues of creating an "existential threat to the rule of law" by frequently overriding lower court judges.

"This Court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise," she wrote.

Many legal scholars don't share Jackson's ominous view, including several critical of Trump.

"I'm pretty confident that within a matter of weeks … there's going to be basically nationwide coverage of declarations or injunctions making clear that the birthright citizenship contention of the government is just absolutely absurd, insane, and unlawful," said George Conway III, a prominent conservative lawyer who now leads a coalition of attorneys opposed to actions of the Trump administration.

 

As for a broader fear about the erosion of judicial authority, Conway suggested fixation on the court system as a check on the president might be misplaced.

"We can't expect the courts to save us. Even if every district judge in the country and every appellate court in the country, and every justice … on the Supreme Court agrees that this administration is violating the law, left and right," Conway said. "They can't save us. The people have to save themselves here."

Still, the Supreme Court's expansive view of presidential power is giving Trump significant leeway -- with potentially more to come headed into the summer.

 

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson delivers remarks, flanked by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris during an event on the South Lawn of the White House, April 8, 2022. Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
 

 

The justices will soon decide whether to roll back a temporary nationwide injunction currently barring the Trump administration from moving forward with large-scale reductions of the federal workforce across 19 agencies and offices.

They are also expected to weigh in on whether to let the president move forward with elimination of most employees at the Department of Education in an effort to dismantle the agency while litigation over its future continues in federal court.

Many veteran court watchers have decried a lack of explanation from the justices for its decisions in these consequential cases.

"This court not only militantly refuses to talk about the effect of their decisions, they kind of gaslight us into pretending that the effects of their decision won't be what they are," said Sherrilyn Ifill, Howard University law professor and former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Chief Justice John Roberts -- who was the justice most often in the majority last term at 95% of the time -- was the first member of the court to speak out publicly after the flurry of controversial decisions.

In rare televised remarks at a federal judicial conference in North Carolina, Roberts confronted what he called "some sharp adjectives" directed at the court amidst a wave of critical public opinion.

"The idea that we're responsible for whatever somebody is angry about -- it just doesn't make any sense, and it's very dangerous," Roberts said of the critics. "What they're angry about or upset about is probably not that you applied the principle … It's that they lost whatever they were looking for."

A judge's role, Roberts said, is to "interpret the law to the best of our ability," not to write the laws.

Author: Devin Dwyer

Source: ABC GMA

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