US Supreme Court expands Trump’s powers but also doles out defeats

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court vastly expanded President Donald Trump’s executive powers during the eventful term that ended this week but also dealt him defeats on signature initiatives.

The court, where conservatives hold a 6-3 supermajority, also handed down decisions on a number of hot-button issues, including gun ownership and transgender rights.

In February, in one of the first rulings of the session that began in October, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to strike down Trump’s tariffs – one of the core planks of the Republican president’s economic agenda.

The setback saw Trump lash out in unusually personal terms at the conservative justices who voted against his tariffs, including two of his own appointees – Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett – calling them “fools and lap dogs”.

Trump was much more laudatory of the court this week after it ruled he has the authority to fire members of federal government agencies once considered independent.

“This Decision gives tremendous additional Power back to the Presidency, where it belongs,” he said on Truth Social.

Harry Litman, a former US attorney and law professor, said in a Substack post that the ruling could have a “corrosive” impact on the administrative state.

“Nothing excites Trump more than the power of saying ‘you’re fired,'” Litman said, referencing the catchphrase Trump popularised in his former role as a reality competition show host.

“An expert at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission deciding whether a reactor is safe, an economist weighing a rate decision, a scientist evaluating a vaccine – all of them now know that the ‘wrong’ finding, the politically inconvenient one, can get them sacked at will, no cause required,” he said.

While granting Trump the power to dismiss regulatory agency members, the court drew the line at the Federal Reserve, turning back his attempt to fire a governor of the US central bank.

The president’s other major defeat was the court’s 6-3 rejection of his bid to restrict birthright citizenship.

Trump signed an executive order last year decreeing that children born to parents in the US illegally or on temporary visas would not automatically become US citizens.

And in an unprecedented move for a sitting US president, he personally attended oral arguments in the case at the Supreme Court in April.

While Trump suffered a loss on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court handed him a victory on another plank of his anti-immigration agenda – stripping legal protections against deportation from approximately 350,000 Haitian migrants and 6,000 Syrians.

Mixed bag

Trump’s Republican Party got a boost in a pair of election-related cases ahead of November’s midterms, which could decide control of Congress for the remainder of his presidency.

The court sharply limited the use of race in drawing electoral districts and lifted restrictions on the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with individual candidates.

The court did hand Trump a defeat in another election-related case, ruling that mail-in ballots can be counted if they are postmarked Election Day and arrive within five business days after the day of the vote.

Trump has been a vocal critic of mail-in ballots, falsely claiming they are subject to fraud and contributed to his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court also issued rulings in gun-related cases during the term.

It struck down a Hawaii law banning the carrying of firearms on private property that is open to the public, such as stores or restaurants, without the owner’s permission. And it ruled unanimously that a habitual user of marijuana cannot be barred from owning a firearm.

In one of the country’s most fiercely contested culture-war battles, the court split along ideological lines and delivered a 6-3 victory to conservatives, upholding state laws barring transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s school sports.

Gerard Magliocca, a law professor at Indiana University, said the session could be seen as a mixed bag.

“(Trump) cared about tariffs, he cared about birthright citizenship, he wanted to fire this person from the Federal Reserve,” Magliocca said. “He lost all three of those so he’s probably going to look at it as if it was a bad term for him.

“Whereas others are going to look at it and think, well, overall it was a good term for the administration because they won most of the cases,” he told AFP.