The Roberts Court vs. the Trump Court

President Donald Trump seemingly did everything he could over the past year to push the U.S. Supreme Court into upholding his agenda. Trump lobbied the justices, bullied them with vituperative social media posts, and even took the unprecedented step of attending oral arguments in person as a sitting president. Yet none of it worked. When it came to the blockbuster cases that Trump repeatedly told us mattered the most to him—tariffs and birthright citizenship—Trump lost.

To understand why he lost, it’s helpful to distinguish between the Roberts Court, named after John Roberts, the conservative chief justice who (often) commands it, and what we might call the Trump Court, named after the increasingly disgruntled president who, despite his best efforts, has never quite managed to remake the lofty judicial tribunal in his own MAGA image.

Take the tariffs case: Trump wanted unilateral executive control over something that the Constitution simply does not place in the hands of the president. Once upon a time, when Joe Biden was president, or earlier, when Barack Obama was president, Republicans were vocally opposed to that sort of executive overreach. But then Trump came along, and most of the GOP abandoned its previous position or just kept quiet.

The chief justice, however, did not abandon his previous position. To his credit, Roberts ruled against Trump’s unilateral tariff scheme for the same legal reasons why he ruled against Biden’s unilateral student debt cancellation scheme.

In other words, in the tariffs case, the Roberts Court stuck to its professed principles (something that does not always happen, to be sure). If there is any sign of the Trump Court lurking in that case, it is to be found in the dissent only.

A similar thing happened in the birthright citizenship case. At issue there was something that conservatives and Republicans claim to value: the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Yet Trump wanted the Supreme Court to adopt a legal theory that would have done a grave injustice to the text and history of the Constitution. Once again, however, and once again to his credit, the chief justice declined Trump’s unconstitutional invitation.

To be clear, the Roberts Court is a conservative Court, which also explains why plenty of other important cases came out in the Trump administration’s favor, or came out in favor of legal causes that are associated with the broader conservative legal movement, such as gun rights. Rest assured that nobody on the left is going to replace their “Notorious RBG” t-shirt with a John Roberts t-shirt just because Trump lost on tariffs or birthright citizenship.

Still, it is notable that the chief justice has led the Supreme Court—or at least led it in these two huge cases that were so obviously important to Trump—to do what so many other self-described conservatives have failed or declined to do: Namely, stick to their supposed guns and refuse to do the president’s bidding.

I hope all of you had a wonderful semiquincentennial weekend and none of you lost any digits during the pyrotechnical displays that may have accompanied your perhaps not entirely temperance-oriented festivities.

In addition to reflecting on 1776, I always like to spend this holiday season thinking about two other significant moments in American history that fell very close to the Fourth of July. One of them is the Battle of Gettysburg, which concluded on July 3, 1863, and which proved to be one of the turning points of the U.S. Civil War.

And of course I also think about Frederick Douglass, whose perhaps greatest speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” was delivered on July 5, 1852. I’ve written a lot about Douglass over the years, including a book, so I won’t add much more here, except this: Douglass held his fellow Americans accountable to the founding principles they claimed to revere yet so often failed to follow. He set an example that is especially worth celebrating this time of year.

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