By admin 
At the annual Supreme Court Historical Society dinner in June, Chief Justice John Roberts opened with a customary toast to the president of the United States.
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In past years, the dinner ritual held in the court’s marble-columned Great Hall occurred without any disclaimer. But this year, the executive director of the Historical Society rose first to explain that the toast was part of a historic tradition, carried out through the decades for all who inhabit the White House.
Only then did Roberts raise his glass and say, “To the president of the United States.”
In the decade since Donald Trump was first elected, the judiciary has been roiled by tensions with the president. At the same time, the Supreme Court has demolished guardrails on the presidency, benefiting Trump in significant ways.
The court, steered today by a conservative supermajority, gave Trump substantial from criminal prosecution. It curtailed lower court judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions against potentially unlawful policies. And it allowed Trump to bar foreigners from this country when his action reflected some religious animus, as during his first term, or , as more recently.
Just last month, it to fire the heads of independent agencies such as those overseeing workers’ rights, consumer protection, and nuclear regulation.
Roberts has attempted to stress that the Supreme Court is empowering the presidency, not this particular president and has tried to counter any narrative that the bench is under the sway of Trump.
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Even early on, when the court upheld Trump’s travel ban affecting certain majority-Muslim countries in 2018, despite Trump’s comments against Muslims, Roberts declared from the bench that, “The entry suspension at issue here is an act that could have been taken by any other president.”
And last month, when Roberts issued the opinion providing new power to fire independent regulators, favoring the Trump position, Roberts delivered a separate decision blocking Trump from immediately removing , a governor on the Federal Reserve.
Breaking from usual court procedures, the two opinions, one giving Trump a win, one a loss, were published simultaneously on the court’s website. In the press room, the distributed opinions were held together by a rubber band — another conspicuous move to ensure that one was not read without the other.
The message went beyond protection for the Federal Reserve, which the country’s financial markets had been watching. The first opinion, subjecting most independent agencies to the president’s new firing power, had already suggested the Fed would be exempt because of its “distinct historical tradition.” In a involving independent-agency removals, the court similarly referred to the “uniquely structured, quasi-private” Federal Reserve.. The pairing appeared to be a way to highlight Roberts’ message of independence.
That has been a theme of his public comments, too.
“The people on the court were appointed by five different presidents,” Roberts said when he appeared at Rice University in March. “The notion that we carry forward the views of the people that appointed us is absurd.”
As an illustration of the separation between the executive branch and judiciary, Roberts referred to his experience in 2005 when named by President George W. Bush: “Secret Service people had protected me during the nomination. Once I had been confirmed and taken the oath, it’s in the White House, you walk out the door, it’s the Supreme Court police, right there, no more Secret Service. …. The idea that I’m carrying out, or that they’re carrying out, some different agendas, is really fallacious.”
Trump and the court don’t adhere to precedent
A tendency exists to assess the Supreme Court by each of its annual terms. But a look at the court through the continuum of its Trump-related cases offers a fuller picture of the America-changing pattern underway.
The conservative court majority has largely aligned with Trump to embolden the presidency and transform social policy, as the court has fulfilled its own priorities.
The Roberts Court has, for example, long sought to bolster executive power and eliminate racial remedies for discrimination in voting and higher education. One of the most consequential decisions of the recent term significant Voting Rights Act protections for Blacks and Latinos as state legislatures draw new congressional districts.
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Vanderbilt Law professor Brian Fitzpatrick, who has backed the new direction on racial policy, said the justices are acting independently of Trump yet nonetheless in sync with him.
“The one thing that I think is especially apparent about the current court, compared to past courts, is they are not as keen on stare decisis,” Fitzpatrick said referring to the traditional adherence to precedent.
“This lines up very well with the president, because the president has no regard whatsoever for protocol,” Fitzpatrick said. “And he will just try anything if he thinks it’s the right thing to do. So, you have a president who is willing to try anything. And you have a court that says, we want to get the right answer, we’re not as interested in following the wrong answers as we used to be. Those two things do line up in a lot of cases in the same direction.”
Within the marble walls, the Trump effect has stoked tensions among individual justices, who increasingly air their differences in public. While the liberal justices have called out Trump’s transgressions, including on his anti-immigrant agenda, conservatives have turned away from them.
That happened in the recent allowing Trump to end “temporary protected status” for Haitians in the US who had fled turmoil in their home country. Trump had earlier disparaged Haiti, calling it a “shithole country” and “filthy, dirty (and) disgusting.”
Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent noted that Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, couldn’t bring himself to repeat such language.
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The night before the court heard oral arguments in that case of Mullin v. Doe, the six Republican-appointed conservative justices attended a formal dinner at the White House in honor of King Charles III of the United Kingdom. They went that April evening without the three Democrat-appointed liberals, whom Trump declined to invite.
Roberts did not respond to questions from CNN regarding the justices’ attendance at the event.
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The Supreme Court has put some limits, to be sure, on Trump’s unconventional presidency over the years. The court in 2019 when the administration tried to add a citizenship question to the US Census.
This year, in rulings on two of Trump’s most extreme moves, the justices prevented him from and from unwinding centuries of tradition on .
Yet there’s no denying that the court began empowering Trump early on. The first legal showdown over a Trump Executive Order started in January 2017, seven days into his presidency, when he issued a travel ban affecting a group of Muslim-majority countries.
During his campaign Trump had vowed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” That vow remained on his website after his election (it was taken down in May 2017). And as lower courts were hearing initial challenges to the ban, Trump warned of “a threat from radical Islamic terrorism.” After an appeals court ruled against the administration in February 2017, Trump wrote on social media, “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SEUCRITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”
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When the third version of the travel ban reached the Supreme Court in 2018, Roberts wrote the opinion upholding it, saying “there is persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility… .”
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The court’s then-four liberals dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor offering a harsh assessment of the majority’s decision. “It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns,” she wrote.
The Trump administration, in the recent case involving temporary protected status for Haitians, cited the Trump v. Hawaii travel ban ruling.
“There, like here, the challengers invoked extrinsic campaign statements and in-office quotes from the President as proof that unconstitutional animus infected official action,” Trump lawyers wrote, adding, “There, as here, the Executive action was ‘facially neutral’ and involved ‘national security.’”
The court majority ruled that, as a threshold matter, lower court judges lack the authority to review most challenges to the removal of TPS, as it is known.
Regarding the challenge based on an alleged discriminatory purpose, Alito wrote, “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary (at the Department of Homeland Security) was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.”
Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the conservative justices chose to ignore Trump’s statements.
“The majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision,” Kagan wrote. “But the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.”
Trump’s ‘conclusive and preclusive’ powers
Justice Clarence Thomas penned a separate opinion in the TPS case that referred to another seminal Supreme Court ruling involving Trump, the decision that gave him substantial immunity from criminal prosecution as he was trying to regain the White House in the 2024 election.
Roberts, in that decision, declared an especially broad interpretation of a president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers, beyond the context of a criminal prosecution.
“Congress cannot act on, and courts cannot examine, the President’s actions on subjects within his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority,” the chief justice .
In , Thomas quoted sweeping phrases from that Roberts’ decision and asserted in the TPS dispute over racial animus, “(C)ourts cannot examine the President’s actions on subjects within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority, regardless of whether he violates the Constitution in exercising that authority.”
Roberts himself has not cited Trump v. US since 2024 as his colleagues have. The decision, which spared Trump trial for election subversion tracing to 2020 and has become something of a blank check for the executive, was arguably Roberts’ most controversial opinion in the last decade. For him, it appears enough that he put it out there, and others have run with it.
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Trump’s lawyers have also repeatedly relied on that 2024 milestone. In the case testing his firing of the heads of independent agencies, including at the Federal Trade Commission, they invoked the “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority.
“That conclusive and preclusive removal power includes the authority to remove at will the presidentially appointed heads of multimember administrative agencies, such as the FTC,” Trump lawyers wrote, as they defended his firing of a FTC Democratic appointee, Rebecca Slaughter, before her seven-year term had expired.
Roberts, who wrote the opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, emphasized that it is the president “with whom the buck stops.” He said Slaughter served as Trump’s “subordinate” at the FTC, and he was entitled “to cut her tenure short.”
The Roberts majority created an exception in Trump v. Slaughter for the Federal Reserve, because the Central Bank, he wrote, “follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States—both of which influenced monetary policy and neither of which were subject to plenary Presidential control.”
Explaining the court’s readiness to reverse a 1935 precedent (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States) covering a swath of regulators, Roberts said the case had been effectively undermined by court decisions from 2010 and 2020, which he also penned.
“Humphrey’s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time,” said Roberts, who since his work in the Ronald Reagan administration had sought to enhance executive authority.
Public is not on the court’s side
This term, the chief justice was equally confident as he rejected two of Trump’s most radical actions, involving his wide-ranging tariffs on imported goods and his effort to restrict the 14th Amendment guarantee that any child born in the US is automatically a citizen, irrespective of the parents’ immigration status.
Detailing the centuries-old American history of birthright citizenship, Roberts concluded, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community We keep that promise today.”
That case and the tariff controversy splintered justices on the conservative wing and saw most justices adding their individual views in separate statements.
The 6-3 tariff decision produced seven separate statements over 164 pages.
The birthright controversy yielded a total of six opinions over 189 pages. The chief justice’s opinion for the majority offered a commanding yet concise review of America’s birthright legacy. In the end, though, he was able to draw only the bare minimum of justices to join him for a majority in Trump v. Barbara: fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett and liberals Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson.
The case testing what had long been regarded as a fringe notion against birthright citizenship was surprisingly close.
Roberts has struggled to persuade colleagues on his right, especially Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who most consistently favor the Trump administration. In the birthright citizenship case, however, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who often partners with him, made a point of breaking off.
Public approval of the Supreme Court has plummeted in recent years. Much of it was fueled by Democratic dissatisfaction.
But Gallup in a new poll to be released Tuesday found a steep drop in Republicans’ backing of the court since last year. Gallup speculated that might be traced to the tariff and birthright citizenship decisions. Overall, Gallup said Americans’ approval of the court has fallen to a record low of 33%, from 39% last year, and — since 2000, the year of Gallup’s initial reading — 62%.
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In the birthright citizenship case, the chief justice likely wanted a stronger majority and more forceful public signal on this Trump challenge. Still, with five votes, he got what he needed.
After he read a brief oral summary of the ruling from the courtroom bench on June 30, he looked relieved. His final remarks of the sitting, recognizing retiring staffers, were lighthearted.
The decision in the birthright case closed out a turbulent 2025-26 session, in the second year of Trump’s second presidency.
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Two more years to go.