The Supreme Court’s high-profile losses for President Donald Trump obscure a longer game the justices are quietly winning, a legal expert warned.
In a recent piece for The Atlantic, University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq argued that the Supreme Court’s recent defeats for Trump on birthright citizenship and global tariffs shouldn’t be read as a “moderate turn” or a sign of “true independence.”
Huq contended that the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts is following a plan of “deep constitutional change” that will “transform the First Amendment, eviscerate the equal-protection clause, and recalibrate the Constitution’s balance of powers.”
Trump only wins when his vision aligns with the Roberts Court’s, Huq argued, adding that “the justices have little patience for impulsive, erratic swerves by a president who will be gone in three years, especially when accommodating his whims undermines their longer-term constitutional vision.”
According to Huq, Roberts wrote the Citizens United v. FEC decision, years before Trump took office, to interpret the First Amendment to invalidate limits on corporate election spending. That was advanced this term with National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, which invalidated long-standing laws limiting parties’ spending in coordination with candidates, Huq noted.
Huq sounded the alarm on the Roberts Court’s moves against the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, writing that it’s “being repurposed to do the opposite of what it was intended.” Huq noted that the Roberts Court is moving against equal protection and “essentially neutered” the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
He also warned that the court “gave the president near-absolute power to fire officers,” and “as a result, Congress can no longer create offices to durably pursue statutory goals regardless of who’s in the Oval Office.”
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