If President Donald Trump has wielded his executive power like a Mack Truck over the last months, plowing ahead with a velocity unseen in his recent predecessors, his win at the Supreme Court on Friday could act as high-octane fuel in his tank.
By setting new limits on federal judges using nationwide injunctions, the court freed Trump’s hand to pursue his already sweeping view of presidential power in ever more expansive ways. The morning decision punctuated what has been an extraordinary week for the president, both at home and abroad, as he approaches the six-month mark of his second administration.
For a president who continually rails against unelected judges exceeding their mandate by blocking his policies, Friday’s Supreme Court ruling amounted to a form of vindication.
And after a string of presidents chafed against judges who blocked their policies from taking effect, Trump now finds himself freed from some of the burdens his predecessors faced.
“In practice, he has now become a more powerful executive than he was before this decision came down,” said Shira Scheindlin, a former US District Court judge. “But I will say that many presidents have been very unhappy with these national injunctions. It started under George W. Bush, then Obama, then Biden, and of course, Trump,” she said. “It depends whose ox is being gored.”
White House officials were quick to cite a line in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion as bolstering Trump’s criticism of judges he thinks rule beyond their remit.
“When a court concludes the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power too,” wrote Barrett, whom Trump appointed during his first term but had recently been the subject of his frustration — at least before Friday’s ruling.
The ostensible issue at hand in the ruling was birthright citizenship, and there could be immediate repercussions on who is eligible to become a citizen in at least some states. Some Democrats and immigrant rights groups warned of pending bureaucratic chaos, where a baby’s birth state would determine whether they qualified for US citizenship.
But the citizenship issue itself won’t be decided by the court until later. And when Trump emerged in the White House Briefing Room on Friday morning, the matter appeared almost secondary to the larger win that erases one of the checks on his executive authority.
“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” an ebullient Trump said from the White House podium.
Aside from the birthright citizenship issue, he listed ending funding for “sanctuary cities,” suspending refugee resettlement, freezing federal funding and blocking taxpayer funds for transgender medical care as examples of areas where the administration now plans to use the ruling to unblock Trump’s orders.
“We have so many of them,” Trump said. “I have a whole list. I’m not going to bore you.”
There are other avenues plaintiffs could pursue to block Trump, including class action lawsuits. And while Friday’s ruling could slow his orders from being blocked, many may still ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.
But at least for Friday, Trump was in a celebratory mood.
The president not only took great delight in the court’s ruling, but in the court itself. He walked into the briefing room wearing a smile of satisfaction, the capstone of one of the most remarkable weeks since returning to power.
His hourlong news conference played out as a victory lap not only for his birthright citizenship executive order but also for his decision to launch military strikes on Iran, despite not knowing the ultimate outcome of either.
The court has yet to rule on the merits of the immigration question and the long-term fate of the Iranian nuclear program is still in question.
“Well,” Trump said Friday as he stepped to the lectern, “this was a big one, wasn’t it?”
He was referring to the Supreme Court opinion handed down less than two hours earlier, but the words also served as a metaphor for the past weeks of his presidency, one that is forever shaped by his first term in office.
Not only does Trump enjoy the luxury of an obedient Republican Party, he also has the enviable benefit of a high court majority shaped by his hand.
Trump is only the latest occupant of the Oval Office to test the powers of the executive branch of government. The court’s ruling on Friday will almost certainly be applauded by future presidents of either party.
“These injunctions have allowed district court judges to be emperors,” Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, standing alongside the president, said Friday. “They vetoed all of President Trump’s power, and they cannot do that. This has been a bipartisan problem that has lasted five presidential terms. Five different presidents and it has ended today.”
But the fact that he had the good fortune of nominating three Supreme Court justices in his first term and is back to see the fruits of their conservative labors makes him somewhat distinct from nearly all presidents who have come before him.
“I’m grateful to the Supreme Court for stepping in and solving this very, very big and complex problem, and they’ve made it very simple,” Trump said. “I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly, as well as Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Great people.”
That is not how he was describing Barrett in private over the last several months. Behind the scenes, the president had griped about some of the Supreme Court justices he appointed during his first term, believing they were not sufficiently standing behind his agenda.
In private, some of Trump’s allies have told him that Barrett is “weak” and that her rulings have not been in line with how she presented herself in an interview before Trump nominated her to the bench in 2020, according to sources. Many conservatives were apoplectic in March when Barrett voted to reject Trump’s plan to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid.
“It’s not just one ruling. It’s been a few different events he’s complained about privately,” a senior administration official told CNN in June.
Now, however, Barrett — along with the court’s other five conservatives — handed Trump a win in the most prominent case of the term.
As another Supreme Court term comes to an end, questions will inevitably rise about potential retirements on the bench. The prospect of Trump gaining another appointment is far from certain, but hardly out of the question. White House lawyers have developed an early roster of contenders should a vacancy occur, a standard practice for all administrations.
The president decided to forego a trip Friday to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, opting to spend a rare weekend at the White House as Senate Republicans work through an impasse over a monumental tax-and-spending bill that contains virtually all of Trump’s domestic agenda. He once again called out those who are raising concerns about the measure, describing them as “grandstanders,” and although he initially suggested his July 4 deadline was not “the end-all,” he later upped the pressure on Truth Social.
“The House of Representatives must be ready to send it to my desk before July 4th — We can get it done,” he posted.
As Trump turns toward the second half of his first year in office, myriad challenges await him and his party as the early stages of the midterm election campaign begin taking shape.
Republican pollsters have privately warned party leaders of the potential political fallout from the megabill, particularly the proposed deep cuts to Medicaid and other social safety-net programs to help pay for the extension of Trump’s tax cuts. The president has repeatedly pledged to not touch Medicaid, a promise that may well be litigated in the 2026 campaign.
But Trump offered no signs of anxiety that many of his fellow Republicans in Congress have expressed – particularly about funding for rural hospitals – arguing again Friday that his bill would be beneficial to all Americans.
“It’s a great bill. It’s a popular bill,” Trump said. “But we’ll get no Democrats, only because they don’t want to vote for Trump.”
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