SCOTUS: A glimmer of independence?

The order sends an important message that the Trump administration can’t 'end-run the existing legal order to do whatever it wants'

(Image credit: Damian Dovarganes / AP)

“The Supreme Court has proved its mettle in its first important confrontation with the Trump administration— barely,” said Noah Feldman in Bloomberg. Last week, the court ruled 5-4 that President Trump cannot freeze $2 billion in USAID payments to U.S. contractors who had already completed their work before he took office. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the three liberal justices to affirm a district court’s order that the Trump administration must make the payments immediately. In doing so, they “effectively repudiated Trump’s unlawful executive order that froze all foreign aid spending” in January. That sends the important message that the Trump administration can’t “end-run the existing legal order to do whatever it wants.” But the bad news is that the other four conservative justices dissented, thus signaling to Trump that they’re willing to “side with him in his unlawful behavior,” no matter how extreme.

The other important news is that the Supreme Court’s six conservatives are not “an ideological monolith,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “The court is far from predictable.” Barrett’s willingness to stand up to Trump earned her vitriolic denunciations from the angry MAGA camp, who denounced her appointment to the court as a “DEI hire” and a “mistake.” I think Barrett was wrong in this case, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but she is a “terrific justice” and a true originalist whose opinions brim with intelligence, independence, and nuance. The claim that she must automatically vote in favor of the president who appointed her “strikes me as corrupt.” Perhaps her critics have forgotten “the proper role of the judiciary.”

But will Barrett and Roberts consistently stand “as a bulwark” against Trump’s authoritarian power grab? asked Nicholas Bagley in The Atlantic. That’s unclear. Although the two justices sided with the liberals in this case, their ruling was narrow and based on technicalities, and did not explicitly repudiate Trump’s assertion that “he has the constitutional authority to impound federal dollars and ignore Congress’ spending commands.” That claim will be tested again in a much broader way in the near future, as Trump seeks unilateral power to gut agencies and run the government as if it were his private fiefdom. If he can get a fifth vote from the Supreme Court, “expect him to exercise that power again. And again. And again.”