Despite marquee losses, Supreme Court term grows Trump’s presidential power

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But despite the mixed bag of rulings, which included several notable victories on issues championed by the president, experts told Al Jazeera the 6-3 conservative-dominated court has continued its trend towards granting broad executive power. Trump and his allies have long argued for the president’s expanded authorities over the judicial and legislative branches of government. “I would not venture to psychoanalyse Trump or anyone working for him,” Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera. “But if I were in their shoes … I would think that by and large they’re going to be thinking that they’re doing great.” To be sure, the US’s top court checked Trump on several of his most ambitious efforts, notably related to the economy. The court upheld the Federal Reserve’s independence, ruling that Trump must clear the congressionally mandated procedural hurdles before firing Federal Reserve member Lisa Cook. The panel also dealt a crippling blow to Trump’s signature reciprocal tariffs, ruling he had misused presidential emergency powers to override authority reserved for Congress. Late last year, the court also blocked the Trump administration from deploying federalised National Guard to states across the country, rejecting the White House’s position that conditions permitted Trump to override legal restrictions on deploying US troops for domestic law enforcement. The court rebuffed an effort by the Republican National Committee championed by the president to block states from accepting mail-in ballots during federal elections after polls close. On immigration, too, the court struck down Trump’s effort to use his presidential power to end birthright citizenship, with five out of nine justices arguing the effort violated the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. However, the four others embraced, in whole or in part, the administration’s argument that the Constitution had been misinterpreted for 150 years. The Trump administration has already hailed their arguments as evidence of their effort’s cogency, giving traction as Republicans elevate the issue as a political wedge, Bowman said. “[Trump’s effort to restrict] birthright citizenship was always a moonshot,” Bowman said. “The fact that it came as close to this is absolutely shocking.” “It’s now become a major issue on the right, and I think unless significant court reform occurs, you’re going to see a years-long, maybe decades-long fight over birthright citizenship of a similar kind,” he said. Chris Edelson, a lecturer in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s political science department, agreed that the Supreme Court’s checks overlay a continued lurch towards granting the US president broad executive powers. The court’s first major shift came in the 2024 ruling in Trump v United States, which held that US presidents have “absolute immunity” for conducting official acts, effectively shielding them from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office, he said. This term, in a case known as Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled that the Trump administration could fire the heads of executive branch agencies, even if those agencies were deemed independent by congressional legislation. “When you combine the Slaughter case, which says the president controls the executive branch, with Trump v United States, which says the president can violate the law, that moves the president pretty far down the road toward what Trump aspires to … a kind of American monarch,” Edelson told Al Jazeera. Beyond the Slaughter case, a slate of other rulings on issues championed by Trump went in his favour. The court determined the president had the sole authority to make decisions related to a special legal status for nationals of countries facing crises, dubbed Temporary Protected Status (TPS). It also ruled that immigration enforcement agents under the president could employ the controversial practice of turning asylum seekers away before they reach US soil, thus circumventing laws requiring that they be allowed to apply for safety. The court also backed a challenge by US Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans to restrictions on electoral spending, allowing wealthy donors to make unlimited financial donations to political parties. All told, Edelson said the term yielded mixed results for Trump but continued a more fundamental ideological trend in his favour. “The building is on fire. The fire has not been extinguished. But the question is, does it move to every room of the house? And the Supreme Court has so far said no, not every room,” he said. In its latest term, the Supreme Court also continued to rely heavily on the so-called “shadow docket”. Many cases are decided on the “merits docket”, in which the court considers a case by hearing oral arguments, accepting briefs and eventually issuing a ruling with opinions explaining the justices’ reasoning. Orders on the “shadow docket” are unsigned and do not contain reasoning, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. While the secretive orders are not final decisions on cases, they can have massive impacts, including lifting lower court decisions until a case is eventually heard by the Supreme Court. An analysis by ProPublica found the Supreme Court issued 63 decisions on the shadow docket during the 2024 to 2025 term, more than during any other period over the last two decades. The shadow docket decisions outpaced the 56 decisions on the merits dockets during that period. The orders have typically benefitted the Trump administration, according to legal experts. That has included the Supreme Court lifting a lower court order barring the Trump administration from deporting individuals to third countries. In another example, the top court lifted a ban on federal officers basing immigration stops on factors like ethnicity and language. While Trump may regularly rail against the Supreme Court’s decisions not giving “100 percent what he wants”, legal scholar Bowman argued, “he is in fact getting a huge percentage of what he wants, either explicitly or impliedly”. 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