Trump Day at the Supreme Court

Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t the only Republicans who’ve jettisoned their ties with the party in recent days. On a far larger scale, so has Donald Trump.

As my colleague David Dayen noted earlier today, Trump’s abrupt refusal to sign the bipartisan housing bill until and unless Congress enacts a bill allowing Trump to winnow the electorate in the upcoming midterms to the remaining MAGA faithful strikes a blow against Republican prospects vastly exceeding whatever damage the Carlson and Greene defections may inflict. The housing bill was the only piece of legislation that congressional Republicans could bring before the public with the claim that it actually begins to address the economy’s dysfunctions. Trump’s interest, by contrast, has narrowed exclusively to Trump himself, to self-preservation. Understanding that both houses of Congress will likely go Democratic if an unfettered electorate is permitted to vote, and that a Democratic Congress is likely to investigate and impeach him (conviction, which requires 67 Senate votes, is another story), his one and only priority is to seize control of the election through the SAVE America Act, which would enable his election takeover, but which does not have the votes to pass. To that end, Trump has insisted that Republican senators vote to abolish the filibuster, in the hope that the SAVE Act can pass if only 51, rather than 60, votes are required to enact it. But many Republican senators are opposed to abolishing it, and have thereby become the targets of Trump’s 3 a.m. social media rants.

More from Harold Meyerson

Trump hasn’t confined his lambasting of Republicans who fall short of his commands to members of Congress. He’s occasionally lashed out at Supreme Court justices who now and then fail to see all of creation through Trump-colored lenses. Today, however, as the Court’s current term winds down, those justices delivered a string of Trumpian victories. In a string of 6-to-3 rulings that divided the justices along ideological and partisan lines, the right-wing Court majority ruled that the Trump administration could end the Temporary Protected Status of people who fled here to escape the mayhem in their homelands (such as Haiti), and also ruled that Trump could keep asylum seekers from entering the U.S. It struck down a Hawaiian law that required gun owners to get permission from property owners in order to bring their guns into private establishments open to the public, such as restaurants, supermarkets, and shops. (So much for the rights of property.) Additionally, it struck down a jury award for damages to a gardener exposed over many years to the weed killer Roundup—a ruling, to be sure, not specifically Trumpian, and more in line with the Court’s 150-year practice of favoring corporations over consumers, workers, and bystanders.

That all four of these decisions came down on the same day is open to two opposed interpretations. The first is that the Court is Trump’s, to do with as he pleases. The second, which I’m inclined, however optimistically, to believe, is that the Court is poised to deliver at least one major decision that will infuriate Trump (not that it takes very much to do that) and sought to inoculate itself by its rulings today.

The one upcoming ruling that would likely most outrage Trump (and nativist supremo Stephen Miller) would be the Court’s affirmation of birthright citizenship. On the other hand, the one major ruling that Trump would welcome would affirm Trump’s support for the “unitary executive” doctrine by overturning Humphrey’s Executor, a 1935 ruling that forbade the president from removing the commissioners or board members of the independent agencies established by Congress, such as the Federal Trade Commission or the National Labor Relations Board, before the conclusion of their fixed terms. Court conservatives have signaled that they’re willing to give the president that power—but not necessarily the power to do the same to the fixed-term governors of the Federal Reserve, which will be the subject of another ruling still to come before the Court adjourns its term. (The only way to explain this contradiction is that Court conservatives’ support for capitalism’s guardians exceeds their support for mere presidential powers, not to mention that of the fixed-term leaders of other presumably independent bodies who, by protecting the interests of workers and consumers, might actually mitigate and even oppose some policies of capitalism’s guardians.)

Indulging in its capitalism über alles proclivities, the Court has already struck down Trump’s tariffs in this term. Most devastatingly, it has also effectively struck down the Voting Rights Act, which has long been a priority of the Republican right, and a through line in Chief Justice Roberts’s decades-long career as a lawyer opposed to the power of racial minorities.

But striking down birthright citizenship, I think, will be a bridge too far for all but the Court’s most blood-and-soil nationalists, as it’s been a hallmark of American life and law since our founding. I’ve been wrong so many times that you shouldn’t take this as anything worth betting on. But if I’m right, today’s quartet of Trump propitiations should be seen as an effort to calm down our vengeful midnight howler before an upcoming ruling sets him off.