Republican majorities in the Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court are ceding power instead of protecting it, giving President Donald Trump more and more control over what the Constitution separated in three.
Congress is supposed to declare war
But Republican lawmakers cheered when Trump launched an air offensive against Iran rather than balking that many were kept out of the loop.
House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t seem to mind reports that the White House would be limiting its information-sharing with lawmakers. His response suggested concern about leaks than about guarding lawmakers’ duty to oversee the executive.
A similar story with tariffs
Regulating international trade is something the Constitution puts on lawmakers’ plates. A series of laws over the past hundred years slowly gave power over tariffs to the president, but Trump has taken that authority and weaponized it to make demands of other countries, as he did Friday when he cut off trade talks with Canada, the latest twist in a trade war he engineered and is scripting like a reality show.
Now, the Supreme Court has clipped the power of lower courts
Conservative justices limited the ability of district court justices to issue nationwide injunctions against executive policies.
“This really brings back the Constitution,” President Donald Trump said without a whiff of irony at the White House on Friday.
The decision also literally lets him ignore the plain language of the 14th Amendment, at least for now.
Rebalancing of US powers
“This is a fundamental shift in the balance between the powers of the presidency and the powers of the courts,” said Elie Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst. “This ruling that we just got impacts everything about the way that the presidency exercises power.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said there is no precedent in US law for nationwide injunctions. She harked back to English law and the “judicial prerogative of the King” in a very technical and history-based decision that, she said intentionally “does not address” the issue of birthright citizenship in either the 14th Amendment or the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Justices might ultimately rein in Trump’s new view of birthright citizenship
“This is as clear as the Constitution gets about questions,” said Deborah Pearlstein, a constitutional law professor at Princeton, appearing on CNN Friday.
But the case won’t get to the court this year.
The short-term result of the decision could well be that at least some babies born in the US may not have US citizenship, despite the very clear language in the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court told lower courts to take another look at the cases and reassess their injunctions. The court also seemed to invite class action lawsuits against Trump’s executive order.
Trump’s allies cheer the end of an “imperial judiciary”
Nationwide injunctions from district court judges have bedeviled presidents of both parties, but Trump’s brash view of his power has made for a record number of actions by lower courts.
Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the decision as a reclaiming of power from lower court judges in liberal districts.
“They turned district courts into the imperial judiciary,” she said.
‘Executive lawlessness’
But the liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that this is the type of slippery slope that puts the entire US system of government at risk.
“I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” she wrote. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional republic will be no more.”
Ever more power for presidents that Trump will use
Conservative justices last year bought into Trump’s argument that presidents should be afforded a kind of super immunity from prosecution for nearly any action they take while in office. Chief Justice John Roberts said the court “cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.” Rather, it had something larger in mind.
“Enduring separation of powers principles guide our decision in this case,” he wrote.
That decision all but ended Trump’s prosecution during the Biden administration for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He subsequently won the 2024 presidential election.
If granting Trump immunity was meant to preserve separation of powers, it was a whiff, since, as CNN’s Joan Biskupic has written, Trump is using that decision almost as a blank check. He “boasts of his ability to define the law,” she wrote.
Redefining the 14th Amendment, at least for now
“That was meant for the babies of slaves; it wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation,” Trump said of the 14th Amendment at the White House on Friday.
The 14th Amendment was actually enacted after the Civil War as an answer to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, an ugly blot on the court’s history that declared Black people ineligible for citizenship.
By not addressing the issue, the court at least seems open to allowing Trump to change the amendment’s meaning, for now, without going through the process of changing the Constitution or passing legislation through Congress — which is a hard thing to square with Roberts’ idea of separation of powers principles.
In part because Trump does things like issue executive orders that plainly seem to violate a constitutional amendment and intentionally sets up court clashes over laws like the Impoundment Act, which are designed to limit presidents’ ability to ignore Congress, his actions have led to a record number of nationwide injunctions.
Now, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, he will try to move forward with a laundry list of stalled agenda items he read off at the White House Friday:
“Including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries, and numerous other priorities of the American people,” he said.
If the Supreme Court gives him power, he’ll use it.
