Expert says don't be fooled: Supreme Court isn't in 'Trump's pocket'

While popular opinion argues the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court is determined to empower President Donald Trump, SCOTUSblog Editor Sarah Isgur says she’s cracked the court’s motives and can better tell which direction it’s going.

That direction, Isgur claims in the Atlantic, is not necessarily into Trump’s pocket.

“By striking down President Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court has once again shown that it is no partisan instrument of Republican power,” said Isgur. “Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the decision, has a much more ambitious goal in mind.”

But the court has shown astounding willingness to buttress many of Trump’s more controversial policies through the wordless might of its shadow docket, such as when it upheld the administration’s push to fire members of the formerly independent National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board in an unsigned two-page decision (Trump v. Wilcox) last year.

But Isgur argues that Trump is actually losing at the Court more than winning.

“[I]n his first term, Trump had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century. In fact, the first Trump administration was the first modern presidential administration more likely to lose than win before the Supreme Court, including in cases involving immigration and the census,” Isgur said.

The court also bounced his push to change the outcome of the 2020 election. And even though Trump had a good summer on the Court’s interim docket in his second term, “he has not only lost on the tariffs case; the Court also blocked him from federalizing the National Guard in Chicago and using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process,” Isgur argued.

The bigger gambit the Roberts Court is indulging, said Isgur, appears to be “reining in the power of the presidency and making the president more politically accountable.”

This, said Isgur, is a trend they also applied to former president Joe Biden.

“Trump’s tariffs and Joe Biden’s student-loan-debt-forgiveness cases were both about whether a president could act without clear congressional authorization,” said Isgur. “The 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch. So did the vaccine-mandate case (Biden) in 2022 and the tax-records case (Trump) in 2020. This is a through line across administrations.

The court appears to be giving the White House the power to fire members of so-called independent agencies, but Isgur said that’s only after the justices, in Loper Bright, “took power away from those agencies and handed it back to Congress, where it belonged,” essentially making Trump “a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.”

Isgur argued that the court’s 2024 criminal-immunity decision might also appear to run counter to Roberts’s motives because of how openly Trump is abusing the power of his office. But it still fits, said Isgur.

“… [I]t’s up to Congress to impeach a scofflaw president,” said Isgur. “Criminal prosecution, no matter how deserved it might seem, can’t be a substitute for political action by Congress — just as executive orders, no matter how desirable, can’t be a substitute for legislative action by Congress.”

By this argument, Isgur claimed the object of the court “is not to help one political party. It is to shrink the presidency back to size and force 535 people to figure out a lasting solution to our problems, one that everyone can live with.”

“This is no small thing: If the power of the legislative and executive branches were more equal — if Americans knew that every presidential election wasn’t “the most important election in our lifetime” — perhaps our politics wouldn’t be so broken.

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