Some housekeeping at the top: Today is the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, and we’re expecting some blockbuster opinions, especially on the matter of Donald Trump’s unilateral attempt to end birthright citizenship. So instead of starting right at 10:00 a.m. EDT for Morning Shots Live as usual, Bill, Andrew, and Sam will be planning to go live as soon as that case drops and we’ve had a bit of time to chew it over. Watch this space! Happy Tuesday.

The Court Is (Kinda) on Trump’s Side

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump has never been what you might call a subtle thinker, and his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Trump v. Slaughter was characteristically blunt.

“90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed,” the president exulted. “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”

Many Trump foes have come to view this Court as a doormat for the president. This is dramatically overtorqued: The Court hasn’t been afraid to cross Trump on some of his biggest priorities, from the 2020 election to his signature “Liberation Day” tariffs to his mass deportation regime. Just yesterday, in a separate case, SCOTUS dealt Trump a major loss on the issue of mail-in ballots, ruling that he could not prevent states from accepting ballots postmarked by election day where that practice is consistent with their laws.

But there’s no question that this conservative Court has one ideological priority that aligns perfectly with Trump’s own. They see the independent agency structure—in which Congress impanels some regulatory body, gives them broad policy-setting and enforcement authorities, and insulates them from political accountability by setting up mechanisms that make their members difficult to fire—as inherently dubious under the Constitution.

Their decision in Slaughter yesterday, which greenlights Trump’s firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, is the culmination of this view: Wherever Congress carves off portions of the executive power and enshrines it in regulatory bodies,¹ the president must have the broad ability to hire and fire at those bodies, since the Constitution stipulates that he is the individual in which the executive power rests. Moreover, the logic goes, if the president is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” as the Constitution requires, he must have the power to remove people who are not faithfully executing the laws.

Trump, of course, cares little for these constitutional niceties. His view of presidential power has always been simple: The more the better. “I have an Article II,” he famously said in 2019, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Whether the Court’s theory of the unitary executive is faithful to the Constitution or not, it’s plain that it sets this president up to do even more damage in the immediate term—and it’s hard to fault too much those who feel that the Supreme Court should look down from the horizon a bit to put up a little more hashtag #resistance to the would-be authoritarian we’ve got right this minute.

Still, the president’s exultation may not last long. He is, of course, too solipsistic to see it, but he isn’t going to be the president forever. In his shortsightedness, he has grown obsessed with changing the direction of the country via executive power alone. Twice now, he has come into office with Republican supermajorities in Congress, poised to remake the nation’s laws in durable ways. What does he have to show for it? A couple of tax-cut bills, one per term. Trump continues to show remarkable disdain for the sausage-making and horse-trading of the legislative process; just yesterday, he dismissed his own administration’s housing bill as “a yawn.”

But after he leaves office, his laws will be all he can count on remaining. Yes, the Supreme Court has made it easier for Trump to remake the government in his image for now. But they’ve done just as much to make it easier for the next Democratic president to blot out that image once he’s gone.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Who Gets to Claim 1776? If the republic is to last another 250 years, Americans need to see themselves in its origin story, argues LINDSAY M. CHERVINSKY (who will be joining MONA CHAREN for the next episode of the