The surprising ways the Supreme Court curbed Trump’s power

**David Greene** (0:04)
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm David Greene, in for Shumita Basu. Today, how the Supreme Court really operates.
The Supreme Court is on summer recess after a busy term, dropping major decisions on issues from presidential power to voting rights to birthright citizenship. And we are now starting to grapple with how their rulings will play out and potentially reshape the country as we've known it. And those decisions weren't easy for the court to make.

**Sarah Isgur** (0:41)
These are hard questions of law, and they struggle and they vote and they write, and sometimes the votes change.

**David Greene** (0:48)
That is Sarah Isgur. She is a legal analyst and a Supreme Court watcher.

**Sarah Isgur** (0:53)
So it can be contentious and heated and all of those things, but they are colleagues. Justice Barrett has said, it's an arranged marriage with no option for divorce.

**David Greene** (1:03)
Sarah is the editor of SCOTUSblog, the co-host of the podcast Advisory Opinions, and the author of a book called Last Branch Standing, a potentially surprising, occasionally witty journey inside today's Supreme Court. She also represents the conservative viewpoint on a public radio podcast I host called Left, Right, and Center. I always love talking to Sarah, and I wanted to sit down with her to unpack what some of these decisions we've been seeing in the headlines actually mean, and why, in her view, the court has actually limited presidential power more than people might think.
Is there a dominant theme coming out of this term that you think we should all think about and remember as the headline from this last year in the Supreme Court?

**Sarah Isgur** (1:49)
I think we may look back at this term as being the high water mark of the difficulty level for the Roberts Court, for the 21 years that it has existed, and for however much longer he stays on the court. There's a few reasons for that. One, when Donald Trump comes into office, he really turns up the amp to 11 in terms of trying to run the government by executive order, and moving his base to attack the court when they don't vote the way he wants, which, if you go back and look, was basically on everything, everything for him.
Right? Alien Enemies Act, federalizing the National Guard, tariffs, birthright citizenship, federal reserve, he loses and he loses and he loses.
Now, there are cases that he won, but those weren't things he cared about compared to tariffs and birthright citizenship and federalizing the National Guard. So you have that going on. You also have this trend line of presidents taking power from Congress that starts, I mean, it starts 100 years ago, but it really picks up during the Obama administration and continues through Trump and then Biden and then Trump again, and the court is more and more pulled into these culture war battle lines because Congress isn't actually doing its job, it's not doing the compromise and the negotiation and the hard work to produce stable legal outcomes. So presidents keep stepping in and when presidents step in, they don't really have the authority to do that, and so then the court gets dragged in. So you have the Roberts Court feeling like the last word in all of these political fights. You have Donald Trump attacking the court from the right, including his own nominees and the chief justice in very personal terms. And you have the left saying that it will now be a litmus test for their candidates about packing the court, about fundamentally changing what that institution is. And so I think this term was vitally important as a check on executive power against presidents, this one, the next one. But like if you're coming in as the next president of the United States, you would be an idiot to try to do everything by executive order because they have now been very consistent in striking down executive orders from Biden on student loan debt forgiveness, to clean power plan, to eviction moratorium, to vaccine mandate, and then of course, Donald Trump, birthright citizenship, tariffs, all of those things.
So surely they've proven the point now, and we've seen a real downtick in those executive orders from Donald Trump. So that interim docket and all of that has, everything has slowed down at this point.

**David Greene** (4:35)
So this court, you're saying, even though it was an incredibly difficult term for all the reasons you're describing, you think has sent a message in some ways to both the other branches of government. Like executive branch, don't think that you can run the country by executive order, a message to Donald Trump and future presidents, and Congress, do your damn job because we're not going to be here to fix things all the time and don't want that role.