Friday US — The Supreme Court Ends Its Term Sparing Birthright Citizenship but Expanding the President’s Reach
The Supreme Court closed its term this week with the kind of split scorecard that lets everyone claim a win and misreads what actually happened. On the last day, the justices upheld birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, and over the term they blocked the President’s emergency tariffs and declined — for now — to let him remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. Yet the same court cleared the administration to strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. Read together, the rulings tell a quieter story than the headlines: a term that constrained the President at the edges while leaving the presidency itself larger than it found it.
The Rulings That Went Against Him
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote all three of the major decisions that cut against the White House, a distribution that is itself a message. The court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause means what it has been understood to mean for more than a century, rejecting the executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship. It struck down the use of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs, returning that authority to where the Constitution assigns it. And it spared Lisa Cook, at least provisionally, declining to bless the removal of a Fed governor before the underlying question is fully argued. Each is a real limit, and each was written by the institutionalist at the court’s centre rather than by its liberal wing.
The Ruling That Went With Him
Against those checks sits the TPS decision, which is the one that will change the most lives fastest. By allowing the administration to end temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians, the court handed the executive branch a tool it will use immediately, affecting people who have built years of lawful residence on a status the government may now withdraw. It is the clearest example of a pattern that ran through the term: the court is willing to police how the President exercises power, but far more reluctant to say that whole categories of power do not belong to him at all. Process was defended; scope was conceded.
The Branch That Shrank
The institution with the weakest term was not the presidency but Congress. As one Washington tally put it plainly, the legislature grows weaker every year, the executive gets stronger, and the country waits to hear from the strongest branch of all. Even the decisions that limited the President did so by returning questions to a Congress that has shown little appetite or capacity to answer them — a tariff power handed back to a body unlikely to legislate, a removal question deferred to a future that lawmakers will not shape. When the court restrains the executive by invoking Congress, and Congress does nothing, the restraint is often notional.
Ethics in the Background
Running underneath the term is a question the court did not resolve and may yet have to: the President’s own financial entanglements. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter argued this week that Mr Trump “stands alone” in the scale of his conflicts of interest, noting that for any other executive-branch official the same arrangements “would be a violation.” That is not a matter the justices addressed, but it frames the stakes of a term spent defining how much a President may do — and how little anyone else can do to check him.
What It Sets Up
The term that just ended will shape the one that follows and the midterms between them. Birthright citizenship is settled; the tariff fight moves to whether Congress will act; the TPS ruling moves to the enforcement agencies that must now carry it out. The court has drawn its lines for the year, and they run in two directions at once — which is exactly why both sides will spend the summer insisting the term was theirs.