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Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
There is much to be relieved about in the US Supreme Court term that ended this week. Chief Justice John Roberts marshalled a shifting coalition of justices to block President Donald Trump’s most outrageous power grabs. These included his abuse of emergency tariff powers, blatant rewriting of citizenship requirements and shocking effort to fire US Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.
America’s top court has made clear that Trump cannot single-handedly rewrite laws or the Constitution to fit his pro-tariff and anti-immigrant agenda. It has also shored up the independence of the world’s most important central bank. But the votes were worryingly close — 5-4 on Cook and on the constitutional basis of birthright citizenship, and 6-3 on tariffs — and the three liberals are the only consistent votes against overweening presidential power.
The six Republican appointees continue to push the US right’s decades-long project to reshape the government by hobbling the administrative state and concentrating power in the executive. Their willingness to jettison generations of case law and to undo key parts of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement is less conservative than reactionary.
Although the court protected Cook, it allowed Trump to fire Federal Trade Commission Rebecca Slaughter without cause. That landmark decision overturns a 90-year-old precedent and kneecaps Congressional laws protecting the independence of federal watchdogs. The result will be more politicised and less predictable regulation, creating uncertainty for everyone from banks and dealmakers to pharmaceutical companies.
This term also saw decisions giving Trump broad discretion to change immigration policy and expel settled asylum seekers, and cleared the way for political parties to co-ordinate spending with their candidates. The majority took another giant whack out of the seminal 1965 Voting Rights Act with a ruling that makes it much harder for minority voters to challenge legislative maps. Combined with earlier rulings that greenlight political gerrymandering, these rulings open the door to all manner of monkeying with the American electoral process.
Global experience with would-be autocratic leaders shows that free and fair elections and courts willing to check presidential power are critical to protecting a democratic future. In Brazil and South Africa, among others, high courts have held leaders accountable for misdeeds done on their watch. Strongmen elsewhere understand this. China’s Xi Jinping and his proxies have denounced the “false western ideal” of an independent judiciary.
The Roberts court’s record so far is mixed. The 2024 decision that granted Trump immunity from prosecution for official acts in his first term has empowered the president to take even more extreme positions now that he is back in office.
This term’s decisions suggest that constitutional guardrails continue to hedge Trump in. But they are fragile and being undermined by the rightwing campaign to shift power to the presidency at the expense of Congress and independent regulators.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the Slaughter case is chilling. Observing that the independent agency structure has been accepted since the early 1930s, she writes “the Court discards that democratic regime in favour of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control. The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before.”
As the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of throwing off the yoke of monarchy, it is a shame that the Supreme Court majority seems bent on recreating one.
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