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      Supreme court lets Trump fire FTC commissioner for now and will hear arguments later

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      The US supreme court on Monday let Donald Trump fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, for now, while agreeing to hear arguments in the case in December, setting up a major test of presidential power over government agencies designed by Congress to be independent.The court granted a justice department request to block a judge’s order that had shielded Rebecca Slaughter, who sued to challenge Trump’s action, from being dismissed from the consumer protection and antitrust agency before her term expires in 2029.The supreme court said it will hear arguments in the case, which could lead to the justices overruling a landmark 90-year-old precedent upholding job protections put in place by Congress to give the heads of certain federal agencies a degree of independence from presidential control.The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from Monday’s order letting Trump remove Slaughter for now.John Roberts, the chief justice, on 8 September had paused an order from Loren AliKhan, a Washington-based US district judge – – a move that allowed Trump to keep Slaughter out of her post – to give the court more time to consider how to respond to the justice department’s request.Federal law permits a president to remove FTC commissioners only for cause – such as inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office – but not for policy differences. Similar protections cover officials at other independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.Slaughter was one of two Democratic commissioners who Trump moved to fire in March. The firings drew sharp criticism from Democratic senators and antimonopoly groups concerned that the move was designed to eliminate opposition within the agency to big corporations.AliKhan in July blocked Trump’s firing of Slaughter, rejecting the Trump administration’s argument that the tenure protections unlawfully encroach on presidential power. The US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit on 2 September in a 2-1 decision kept the judge’s ruling in place.The supreme court did not set a precise date for the arguments scheduled for December.The lower courts ruled that the statutory protections shielding FTC members from being removed without cause conform with the US constitution in light of a 1935 supreme court precedent in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v United States. In that case, the court ruled that a president lacks unfettered power to remove FTC commissioners, faulting Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner for policy differences.The Trump administration in its supreme court filing in Slaughter’s case argued that “the modern FTC exercises far more substantial powers than the 1935 FTC”, and thus its members can be fired at will by the president.Lawyers for Slaughter in court papers pushed back against that contention, arguing that the FTC’s development over the decades is “a story of continuity, not transformation”. More

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      Trump’s take on a court decision on tariffs is bonkers – even for him | Steven Greenhouse

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      Just hours after an appeals court ruled that it was illegal for Donald Trump to impose his unpopular across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries, he posted a frantic, over-the-top rant that declared: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”So here the president of the United States was asserting that if the courts torpedoed his tariffs, then the US, the most powerful nation on earth, would be destroyed, would “literally” be kaput. Trump seemed to suggest that court rulings that blocked his beloved tariffs would have the destructive power of, say, 100 hydrogen bombs.Call me naive, but I never cease to be amazed when Trump says such egregiously false and ludicrous things. OK, I sometimes forget that he’s the guy who said that noise from wind turbines causes cancer. After narrowly winning the presidency a second time notwithstanding the 30,573 Trump lies, falsehoods and misleading claims in his first term, Trump evidently thinks he can say anything, no matter how false or foolish, and get away with it. As part of his tariff fight, Trump also blurted this absurdity: if the courts don’t uphold his tariffs, “we would become a Third World Nation.”Trump’s statement that ending tariffs will destroy the US is totally bonkers because the US became the world’s richest nation and has largely prospered for nearly 250 years (despite occasional slumps) before Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. In the months before then, the US had solid GDP growth, low unemployment and declining inflation – the Economist magazine even called the US economy “the envy of the world”. But now Trump says that if the courts give a thumbs down to his favorite plaything – I mean weapon – to bang other countries over the head with, it would end the US. Even Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of the conservative National Review, called that “lunatic stuff”.The truth is that if the courts block Trump’s across-the-board tariffs, that would be good news for the US economy. It would prevent Trump’s tariffs from further pushing up inflation and slowing economic growth. By giving a thumbs down to Trump’s tariffs, the courts might be doing him a huge economic and political favor because his tariffs, and the inflation they are fueling, have been dragging his dismal approval ratings even lower.On 29 August, the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC ruled that Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose his Liberation Day tariffs. The court said that act doesn’t give presidents the authority to slap sweeping tariffs on other countries. Trump has appealed the ruling to the supreme court, which might rule on the tariffs this fall.The court of appeals repeatedly noted that the constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to impose tariffs. It further noted that the Emergency Act doesn’t mention the word “tariffs” even once among the tools the act authorizes presidents to use to deal with emergency trade problems. (That appellate ruling overturned the bulk of Trump’s tariffs: the blanket 10% to 50% tariffs on exports from more than 70 countries. The court didn’t rule on Trump’s product-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum and auto parts.)As part of his conniptions over the appeals court ruling, Trump also warned of fiscal disaster, complaining that the US would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if his tariffs were halted. But Trump conveniently forgets that it’s embattled US consumers who will be paying most of those hundreds of billions as they pay Trump’s tariffs, essentially import taxes on furniture, cars, coffee, electronics and other foreign goods.In using his hysterical language, Trump evidently had one audience in mind: the supreme court’s six conservative justices who have repeatedly ruled his way. Trump’s goal is evidently to scare the bejesus out of those justices – he hopes that by shrieking “You’ll Destroy the Country If You Rule Against Me,” that will persuade them to overturn the appellate court’s decision and uphold his tariffs. (The appellate court let the tariffs remain in force to allow time for appeal.)So far in his second term, Trump has a remarkable batting average with the supreme court’s six rightwing justices, who seem astonishingly subservient and supine vis-a-vis the most authoritarian, power-grabbing president in US history. The justices have used their emergency docket to grant Trump administration requests 18 times in a row, often vacating injunctions that lower courts put in place to stop what they saw as Trump’s rampant lawlessness. In repeatedly siding with Trump, the supreme court has scrapped lower court injunctions in several highly controversial cases, provisionally letting Trump fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, gut the federal Department of Education, and give Doge – with its staff of twentysomethings – access to the highly private social security information of hundreds of millions of Americans.Trump is no doubt worried that the supreme court, though submissive so far, will overturn his tariffs. Many conservative and libertarian scholars and lawyers oppose his tariffs as both harmful and illegal. Not only do they dislike the tariffs for pushing up inflation and disrupting global supply chains, but they see Trump’s tariffs as anti-free market and mucking up the US and world economies.When Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, he invoked a national emergency, saying the US trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs were urgent problems undermining the US economy. Admittedly the trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs are a problem, but in no way do they constitute a national emergency, especially since the US economy was seen as “the envy of the world” before Trump went hog wild with his tariffs. (There’s no denying that the flood of imports from China and other low-wage nations badly damaged many communities in America’s industrial heartland two and three decades ago.) Wouldn’t it be great if, in this tariff litigation, the supreme court stood up to Trump and issued a candid ruling that told him: “Sorry, Mr President, your supposed national emergency is hogwash, a pretext for you to pursue your destructive tariff obsession”?The supreme court’s justices shouldn’t let themselves be cowed, bullied or fooled by Trump’s talk that the nation will be destroyed if they nix his tariffs. Trump is like the boy who cried wolf, forever crying catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. It’s time for the court and the nation to wise up to Trump’s lies, hype and shenanigans.Virtually every non-Trumpian economist agrees that Trump’s tariffs have hurt the US by increasing inflation, undermining GDP growth, creating huge headaches for corporations and seriously damaging the US’s relations with other nations. The justices shouldn’t buy Trump’s calamitous warnings that if they overturn his tariffs, the world will end.If the justices declare his tariffs illegal, it certainly won’t be a “disaster” for the US, as Trump has claimed. But it might be a disaster for Trump’s ego and for his dangerous dream of having an authoritarian presidency wholly unchecked by the other branches of government.If the supreme court rules against Trump’s tariffs, let’s hope that will serve as a much-needed first step to the court’s developing the backbone to rule many times more against Trump’s authoritarian and lawless actions.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      US supreme court to decide on legality of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs

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      The US supreme court agreed on Tuesday to decide the legality of Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, setting up a major test of one of the Republican president’s boldest assertions of executive power that has been central to his economic and trade agenda.The justices took up the justice department’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that Trump overstepped his authority in imposing most of his tariffs under a federal law meant for emergencies. The court swiftly acted after the administration last week asked it to review the case, which involves trillions of dollars in customs duties over the next decade.The court, which begins its next nine-month term on 6 October, placed the case on a fast track, scheduling oral arguments for the first week of November.The justices also agreed to hear a separate challenge to Trump’s tariffs brought by a family-owned toy company, Learning Resources.The US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington ruled on 29 August that Trump overreached in invoking a 1977 law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the tariffs, undercutting a major priority for the president in his second term. The tariffs, however, remain in effect during the appeal to the supreme court.The levies are part of a trade war instigated by Trump since he returned to the presidency in January that has alienated trading partners, increased volatility in financial markets and fueled global economic uncertainty.Trump has made tariffs a key foreign policy tool, using them to renegotiate trade deals, extract concessions and exert political pressure on other countries.Trump in April invoked the 1977 law in imposing tariffs on goods imported from individual countries to address trade deficits, as well as separate tariffs announced in February as economic leverage on China, Canada and Mexico to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the US.The law gives the president power to deal with “an unusual and extraordinary threat” amid a national emergency. It historically had been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets. Prior to Trump, the law had never been used to impose tariffs.Trump’s Department of Justice has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorize a president to “regulate” imports.
      “The stakes in this case could not be higher,” the justice department said in a filing. Denying Trump‘s tariff power “would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe”, it added.Trump has said that if he loses the case the US might have to unwind trade deals, causing the country to “suffer so greatly”.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported in August that the increased duties on imports from foreign countries could reduce the US national deficit by $4tn over the next decade. More

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      Supreme court lifts restrictions on Los Angeles immigration raids in win for Trump

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      Federal agents can resume sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles after the US supreme court lifted an order barring the Donald Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job.The court ruled in favor of Trump’s administration, granting a stay against a restraining order from another judge that found “roving patrols” of immigration agents were conducting indiscriminate arrests in LA. The ruling from the conservative majority is a win for the administration in its ongoing effort to enact mass deportations.US district judge Maame E Frimpong in Los Angeles had found a “mountain of evidence” that enforcement tactics were violating the constitution. The plaintiffs, who said the administration’s approach amounted to “blatant racial profiling”, included US citizens swept up in immigration stops. An appeals court had left Frimpong’s ruling in place.But the Trump administration argued the order wrongly restricted agents carrying out its widespread crackdown on illegal immigration.The supreme court’s 6-3 decision comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents also step up enforcement in Washington amid Trump’s unprecedented federal takeover of the capital city’s law enforcement and deployment of the national guard.The lawsuit will now continue to unfold in California. It was filed by immigrant advocacy groups that accused Trump’s administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people during a crackdown on illegal immigration in the Los Angeles area.The Trump administration has made California a center of its deportation campaign, sending federal agents near schools and workplaces and Home Depot stores. The large show of federal agents – along with the deployment of the military – has left southern California communities in fear.In its order granting the stay, the court majority wrote that the government sometimes makes stops to check the immigration status of people who work jobs in landscaping or construction, among others “that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English”.“Immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of US immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations,” the decision states.In a stinging dissent joined by her two liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”Department of Homeland Security attorneys have said immigration officers target people based on illegal presence in the US, not skin color, race or ethnicity. Even so, the justice department argued that the order wrongly restricted the factors that Ice agents can use when deciding who to stop.The Los Angeles region has been a battleground for the Trump administration after its hardline immigration strategy spurred protests and the deployment of the national guard and the marines. The number of immigration raids in the Los Angeles area appeared to slow shortly after Frimpong’s order came down in July, but recently they have become more frequent again, including an operation in which agents jumped out of the back of a rented box truck and made arrests at an LA Home Depot store.The supreme court decision was condemned by LA mayor Karen Bass, who said it “isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country.“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country. Today’s ruling is not only dangerous – it’s un-American and threatens the fabric of personal freedom in the United States of America.”The plaintiffs argued that her order only prevents federal agents from making stops without reasonable suspicion, something that aligns with the constitution and supreme court precedent.“Numerous US citizens and others who are lawfully present in this country have been subjected to significant intrusions on their liberty,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “Many have been physically injured; at least two were taken to a holding facility.”The Trump administration said the order is too restrictive, “threatening agents with sanctions if the court disbelieves that they relied on additional factors in making any particular stop”.D John Sauer, the solicitor general, also argued the order can’t stand under the high court’s recent decision restricting universal injunctions, though the plaintiffs disagreed.The order from Frimpong, who was nominated by Joe Biden, barred authorities from using factors such as apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a location such as a tow yard or car wash, or someone’s occupation as the only basis for reasonable suspicion for detention. It’s covered a combined population of nearly 20 million people, nearly half of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino.Plaintiffs included three detained immigrants and two US citizens. One of the citizens was Los Angeles resident Brian Gavidia, who was shown in a 13 June video being seized by federal agents as he yelled: “I was born here in the States. East LA, bro!”Gavidia was released about 20 minutes later after showing agents his identification, as was another citizen stopped at a car wash, according to the lawsuit. More

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      Amy Coney Barrett says supreme court rulings are ‘not opinion polls’

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      US supreme court rulings are “not just an opinion poll” of its nine judges’ beliefs, conservative Amy Coney Barrett says, as she and her colleagues weigh a request to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage.“The court should not be imposing its own values on the American people,” Barrett remarked in a preview of an interview airing on the latest episode of CBS News Sunday Morning. “That’s for the democratic process.”Barrett delivered her comments in what was billed as her first television interview since she joined the supreme court in 2020 – a conversation with the Sunday Morning host Norah O’Donnell meant to promote her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.In the book, set for publication on 9 September, Barrett asserted her belief that the June 2022 ruling that struck down abortion rights nationally “respected the choice” of Americans. She wrote that she believed the 7-2 Roe v Wade ruling that established those federal abortion rights had “usurped the will of the American people”, as put by CNN, which ran an excerpt of the book a week before its release date.Yet more than 60% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a May 2024 poll found. That was only four points higher than in 2021, a year before Barrett joined four other ultraconservatives in removing national abortion access protections, clearing the way for numerous states to quickly ban or severely restrict the procedure.Meanwhile, a May 2025 Gallup poll found 68% support for legal same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, Barrett and her colleagues have been asked to overturn the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges supreme court ruling that recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.The former Kentucky county court clerk Kim Davis, who stopped issuing marriage licenses in the aftermath of the Obergefell decision, made the request.In a recent interview with the Raging Moderates political podcast co-host Jessica Tarlov the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton predicted the supreme court “will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion”.“They will send it back to the states,” Clinton, who Donald Trump defeated in 2016 to win the first of his two presidencies, said to Tarlov.When O’Donnell mentioned Clinton’s prediction to Barrett, the justice replied: “People who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things.“The point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”Barrett’s nomination and confirmation were rushed through the US Senate by the Republican majority leader at the time, Mitch McConnell, within weeks of the death of the veteran liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.It gave Trump his third supreme court pick along with a 6-3 conservative supermajority that has consistently ruled in his favor for his second presidency, which began in January, including landmark decisions expanding Oval Office powers.Barrett’s confirmation was just eight days before the November 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. It contrasted sharply with McConnell’s handling of the aftermath of the death of another justice, the conservative Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. McConnell back then touted his successful stalling of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year, until Trump took office for his first presidency and replaced Scalia with Neil Gorsuch in April 2017.CNN reported that references to Trump in Barrett’s book – for which she is said to have been paid a $2m advance – were “only in passing”.O’Donnell pointed out to Barrett that in her book the justice wrote that “the rights to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control and raise children are fundamental, but the rights to do business, commit suicide and obtain abortion are not”.“I want Americans to understand the law – and that it’s not just an opinion poll about whether the supreme court thinks something is good or … bad,” Barrett said. “What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided.” More

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      Trump asks US supreme court to overturn trade tariffs ruling

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      Donald Trump has asked the US supreme court to overturn a lower court decision that most of his sweeping trade tariffs were illegal.The US president filed a petition late on Wednesday to ask for a review of last week’s federal appeals court ruling in Washington DC, which centred on his “liberation day” border taxes introduced on 2 April, which imposed levies of between 10% and 50% on most US imports, sending shock waves through global trade and markets.The court found in a 7-4 ruling last Friday that Trump had overstepped his presidential powers when he invoked a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies to justify his “reciprocal” tariffs.The decision was the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies, but the levies were left in place until 14 October – giving the administration time to ask the supreme court to review the decision.Trump has now appealed and the supreme court is expected to review the case, although the justices must still agree to do so. The administration asked for that decision to be made by 10 September.The appeal calls for an accelerated schedule with arguments being heard by 10 November, according to filings seen by Bloomberg. Justices could then rule by the end of the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling that the tariffs were unlawful upheld a previous decision by the US Court of International Trade.The federal appeals court said last Friday that US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”.It said many of Trump’s steep tariffs were “unbounded in scope, amount and duration”, the ruling added, and “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration has leaned on.A defeat for Trump’s levies would at least halve the current average US effective tariff rate of 16.3%, and could force the country to pay back tens of billions of dollars, according to Chris Kennedy, an analyst at Bloomberg Economics. It could also derail the preliminary trade deals the president has struck with some countries, including the UK and the European Union.Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress, but Trump claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.Earlier this week, the US clothing brand Levi’s said that “rising anti-Americanism as a consequence of the Trump tariffs and governmental policies” could drive British shoppers away from its denim. Other brands, such as Tesla, have also suffered in Europe and in Canada, while protests against US goods have led to a slump in sales of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. More

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      Supreme court allows Trump officials to cut research millions in anti-DEI push

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      The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the supreme court decided on Thursday.The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783m worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Donald Trump’s priorities.The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who would not have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three liberal justices. The high court did keep the Trump administration anti-DEI guidance on future funding blocked with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.The decision marks the latest supreme court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life”.The justice department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination”.The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12bn of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.Solicitor general D John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier supreme court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and could not be sent to claims court.They said that defunding studies midway though halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.In June, US district judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing.He later added: “Have we no shame?”An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place. More

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      The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America

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      View image in fullscreenOn 4 March, Donald Trump delivered his epic 100-minute speech to Congress, the longest such presidential address in US history. Having finished speaking, in time-honored fashion, he walked down the line of supreme court justices, gladhanding each in turn before coming to a stop before the chief justice, John Roberts.“Thank you again, thank you again,” Trump said, taking Roberts’s hand into both his own and shaking it vigorously. Then, as he began to step away, the president tapped Roberts on the arm in a gesture of buddy-buddy intimacy, and said: “Won’t forget.”Supreme court watchers have wondered why Trump thanked the chief justice so effusively. Was it because the Roberts court had, exactly a year earlier, allowed Trump to stay on the electoral ballot even though he had inspired a violent mob attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021?Could it have been that Roberts had written the ruling that immunised Trump from criminal prosecution for that January 6 insurrection and for any other criminal misdeed he might commit while in the White House?Or was it, as Trump later claimed, more innocent than that: a simple thank you to Roberts for having administered the oath of office at Trump’s second inauguration?Whatever the truth, time has moved on since that friendly encounter five months ago. Were the president to bump into the chief justice today, one might expect an even more extravagant display of gratitude.In the past 10 weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed. The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief. Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack, One First, noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.View image in fullscreenThey have been piped through the court’s so-called “shadow docket”, where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation. By Vladeck’s count, seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.Yet the emergency rulings, though temporary in nature, could have seismic consequences. For as long as they hold they have the potential to cause untold suffering to millions of people targeted by Trump.That includes countless federal employees who can now be fired at whim after decades of loyal public service; transgender people purged from the military; more than 1 million individuals from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and other countries who are being stripped of their status to remain in the US; immigrants singled out for deportation to war-torn third countries where their lives are in danger.Legally, the consequences are also profound. Several of Trump’s actions given temporary go-ahead are of dubious legality, violating congressional or international laws and running roughshod over fundamental tenets of the US constitution.By conceding to Trump’s wishes, the justices have for now approved what Vladeck has called “a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch”.The liberal-leaning justice Sonia Sotomayor has sounded a similar alarm in a series of increasingly despairing dissenting opinions. Her conservative peers on the court, she has written, are “rewarding lawlessness”, and undermining the bedrock principle that America is a “government of laws, not of men”.All of this has put Roberts, 70, in a strange and uncomfortable position. Just as he should be celebrating the completion of his 20th year at the pinnacle of the US judiciary, he is being accused of betraying the very legal edifice he is supposed to protect.Prominent jurists have held Roberts responsible for emboldening Trump’s drive towards an authoritarian presidency. J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.In Luttig’s view, the court under Roberts is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness. And it is doing so without briefing, without argument, without deliberation – and without even a single word of explanation of its decisions.”For Luttig, this is more than just the 6-3 supermajority of the court expressing its conservatism. This is a fundamental distortion of the American legal system.“The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”When it comes to assessing the chief justice’s record, Luttig has special standing. He was himself a one-time contender for a supreme court seat, and has known Roberts as a friend since they worked together in their 20s in the Reagan administration. Roberts asked Luttig to be a groomsman at his wedding in 1996.“I have had four decades of knowing and respecting him,” Luttig said.Having had a ringside seat for so many years, Luttig has no doubts about how the chief justice is conducting himself in the current fraught moment.“John Roberts knows exactly what he is doing,” the judge said, “and he knows exactly the message he is sending to America.”Luttig’s characterisation of Roberts as a disciplined individual with absolute self-awareness chimes with the chief justice’s reputation as someone who cares deeply about public image. His attention to detail is legendary: he is known to rehearse his questions and fine-tune his jokes before oral arguments.He speaks so smoothly – and disguises his inner convictions so thoroughly – that he has been able to straddle political and personal divides. As one lawyer who has presented before Roberts at the supreme court put it: “There is no person I would rather deliver my eulogy, even if I knew that he hated me.”The roots of Roberts’s controlled conservatism lie in Buffalo, New York, where he was born on 27 January 1955, and in north-west Indiana where his family moved when he was 10. He was brought up in a devout Catholic well-to-do family enjoying the benefits of the post-war boom.His parents came from Johnstown, now a struggling hollowed-out town in western Pennsylvania but then one of the world’s great steel-producing centers. His father, John Glover “Jack” Roberts Sr rose to be a manager of a steel plant and moved the family to Long Beach, Indiana, a heavily segregated white enclave on Lake Michigan.As a teenager, Roberts imbibed a fusion of Catholic morality and a powerful work ethic. He went on to attend an elite Catholic boarding school, La Lumiere, that had been recently founded by local businessmen.“I have always wanted to stay ahead of the crowd,” he wrote in an application letter to the school at age 13. “I’m sure that by attending and doing my best at La Lumiere I will assure myself of a fine future.”Harvard and its law school followed. He remarked in 2006 that the culture shock of being an Indiana boy surrounded by liberal students protesting against the Vietnam war helped cement his conservatism.“I didn’t view myself as conservative until I went there and kind of reacted against the orthodoxy,” he said.Joan Biskupic, who wrote a 2019 biography of Roberts, describes him as having emerged from Harvard with a “flawless veneer” and an eye for appearances. In The Chief, she writes: “He has always shown a keen interest in how he is portrayed in the media. Even as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he demonstrated an awareness of the importance of messaging.”The message for which Roberts is most famous was deployed during his Senate confirmation hearings for the role of chief justice in 2005. In a speech dripping with faux humility, he presented himself as the impartial arbiter of the law.“Judges are like umpires,” he said. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them … Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”Over the past 20 years he has honed that umpire character, modelling himself as a modern institutionalist. He has kept his personal convictions largely hidden, shrouding himself and his leanings in mystery; as Biskupic puts it, he is “his own enigma”.Meanwhile, the court he leads has marched – through Trump’s three nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – in an ever more rightward direction. Over time, the gulf has steadily widened between Roberts’s media representation as a moderate conservative and the increasingly extreme actions of his court.“Supreme court reporting has been generous to Roberts, and has reinforced the idea that what is happening in his court is a sort of normalcy, when it is not normal at all,” said Lisa Graves, the former chief counsel for nominations for the Senate judiciary committee and founder of True North Research, a watchdog investigating rightwing groups that undermine democracy.Graves has reappraised the chief justice’s 20-year record and come up with a very different narrative than that of Umpire Roberts. Her conclusions are laid out in her forthcoming book, Without Precedent, which will be published next month.In it, she argues that Roberts is anything but the modest judge he claims to be. Rather, he has used his power as chief justice to promote a rightwing agenda from the moment George W Bush placed him in the court’s central seat in 2005.View image in fullscreen“He has consistently shown hostility towards civil rights, trade unions and environmental protections, approaching the law with the rigidity of a rightwing ideologue. That was true from the time when as a young man he chose to clerk for the most regressive supreme court justice, William Rehnquist, and it remains true today,” Graves said.Roberts cut his legal teeth not in the wood-panelled setting of a federal court, but in the executive branch as an eager young pup in the Reagan administration. He began in 1981 working for Ken Starr, then chief of staff to the US attorney general (and later Bill Clinton’s bete noire), before joining the White House counsel’s office where he became friends with Luttig.Those early days of Ronald Reagan’s first term bear comparison with Trump’s second. Both presidents wielded a strong media presence, both were vitriolically dismissive of liberals whom they blamed for destroying America, both were committed to radical tax and spending cuts and slashing what they regarded as the bloated federal government.Roberts adopted Reagan’s mission with zeal. “I felt he was speaking directly to me,” he once recalled about listening to the newly ensconced president’s 1981 inaugural speech.Within the Reagan administration, Roberts began to formulate rightwing passions that have endured through his years on the top court. They included hostility towards civil rights and voting protections for racial minorities, and skepticism of racially based affirmative action.View image in fullscreenAt the justice department he wrote a series of spiky legal memos in which he let down his mild-mannered guard. Out came a stream of aggressive and combative missives designed to boost Reagan’s power and stature.The memos make for a chilling read in the context of today. Roberts lambasts fellow government officials whom he accused of standing in the way of the Reagan agenda – an echo of Trump and Doge’s war on the “deep state” civil service. He railed against affirmative action programs seeking to redress the balance for women and Black people – a view that was made manifest in 2023 when his court put an end to affirmative action in universities.The future head of the US judiciary went so far in his memos as to berate federal judges for what he called “unwarranted interference” in executive branch affairs. Fast forward four decades, and we now see the Roberts court repeatedly overturning the rulings of lower court judges who have resisted Trump’s lawless actions.Just how far federal courts should go in reining in presidents is a perennial question that has divided jurists and politicians for years. What disturbs some supreme court watchers about the present moment is the context in which this wrangling is happening: with Trump so brazenly challenging the rule of law, is now the time for the top court to be clipping the wings of federal judges struggling to hold him back?As Graves points out, Roberts’s approach to lower court judges would be more understandable if it were consistently applied – or to put it another way, if he actually did behave like a neutral umpire free of political motives. “When a Democrat was in the White House, the chief justice went out of his way to block student loan debt relief, which was a modest effort by the Biden administration that in no way compares to the extreme actions that Roberts is now greenlighting for Trump.”Roberts’s early musings on the importance of a strong executive in the White House, so evident in those Reagan memos, run as a theme through his jurisprudence. It culminated with him authoring Trump v US.That was last year’s shattering ruling that gave Trump absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official presidential acts.The chief justice justified this extraordinary decision to shield the president from basic accountability by invoking the desire of the framers – the men who drafted the US constitution – for a “vigorous” and “energetic” executive.He conveniently overlooked the framers’ other core executive requirements: “responsibility”, and an obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.Trump has repeatedly ignored that duty over the past six months. He has disregarded congressional laws, such as the 1974 Impoundment Control Act which limits the president’s power to withhold funds approved by Congress from federal agencies.He has also violated constitutional laws such as birthright citizenship – a right that is written in plain, unambiguous English into the 14th amendment.Graves believes that Roberts’s immunity ruling has had devastating consequences. “It paved the way for Trump’s return. It sent a signal to some sections of the American people that not only did Trump do no wrong, he could do no wrong – that if he returned to power, he would be above the law.”When Trump did return to the White House on 20 January, Roberts was widely seen as the last great hope for constitutional government. The chief justice would draw a line in the sand that Trump, thirsting for supremacy, would not be allowed to cross.Initially there were signs that such hopes might be founded. At 1am on 19 April – in the early hours of a Saturday morning – the supreme court issued an order that could be deemed to draw precisely such a line in the sand.It barred the Trump administration from deporting undocumented Venezuelans summarily to a notorious prison in El Salvador. The Roberts court had struck a blow for due process and, yes, the rule of law.The rosy glow of that pre-dawn intervention did not last for long. Since then the supreme court has used the shadow docket to grant Trump virtually his every wish, trampling over the separation of powers in the process.The most recent emergency order from 23 July allowed Trump to fire without cause three Democratic members of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. The decision was a direct affront to Congress, which had created the agency and only permitted the president to fire its commissioners on grounds of neglect of duty, or malfeasance.Just days earlier, the justices cleared the way for Trump to eviscerate the federal education department even though, as Sotomayor pointed out in one of her withering dissents, only Congress has the power to do so. And a week before that they gave the green light to the mass firing of thousands of federal workers, delivering a potential death knell to the US government as we know it.The court’s most egregious shadow docket rulings relate to cases in which Trump has not only violated the law, he has done so in open defiance of federal judges. On 23 June and 3 July the justices released two emergency orders which had the combined effect of allowing the Trump administration to deport people to third countries such as South Sudan, a nation devastated by civil war and with a shaky human rights record.Federal judges in lower courts had expressly forbidden the deportations, ordering that the individuals had to be given a chance to prove they faced torture in those destinations. Under the international Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, it is prohibited to expel people to places where they might be subjected to such illegal treatment.The Trump administration ignored the court rulings, deporting the individuals regardless.Roberts’s willingness to preside over a court that sides with Trump over the judiciary itself, even in cases involving brazen defiance of federal judges, has profoundly shocked the legal world.“The supreme court is the ultimate guardian of the rule of law, and it appears to have abdicated that role,” said Amrit Singh, director of the Rule of Law Lab at New York University. “The court has clearly indicated that it is willing to tolerate the Trump administration’s violation of federal court orders.”Singh’s charitable interpretation is that Roberts was trying to “appease the Trump administration to avoid direct confrontation”. Were that the case, she said, the chief justice was pursuing an “extremely dangerous strategy”.“He is letting the Trump administration get away with it. When district court orders are ignored, and the supreme court turns a blind eye, then the rule of law has already been sacrificed.”Some supreme court watchers have cautioned against assuming that the justices’ emergency rulings are their final word. Bob Bauer, Barack Obama’s White House counsel who co-chaired Joe Biden’s presidential commission on the supreme court, has pointed out that the court has yet to rule on several of Trump’s biggest provocations.They include birthright citizenship, and the use of the Alien Enemies Act under which third-country deportations are being carried out. “There is yet no final resolution of these issues,” Bauer has written in his Substack, Executive Functions.It is true that, if and when those issues are fully addressed by the supreme court, Roberts could surprise us once again. He could dust off his old umpire’s uniform, revisit his carefully crafted posture as a moderate institutionalist, and confound us all – Trump included – with nuanced rulings.But for his longtime friend Luttig, that is besides the point. The price of what Roberts is doing here and now, in the legal darkness of the shadow docket, is just too high.“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said. “The chief justice has no higher obligation than to protect the federal judiciary from attacks by this president, and in my view he has utterly failed.”

      This article was amended on 21 August 2025 to correct that John Roberts administered an oath of office to Donald Trump; he did not take the oath as previously stated. More