Trump got many wins at Supreme Court, despite losing on birthright citizenship

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump suffered a defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court last Tuesday, when it struck down his executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, but the conservative-majority court provided him a series of legal victories this spring and summer that further expanded his executive powers, legal experts told Newsday.

While the birthright citizenship case was one of the most widely anticipated rulings, other consequential rulings throughout the session upheld the president’s hard-line immigration policies, expanded the president’s authority to fill federal agencies with political supporters and gave a boost to his congressional redistricting efforts ahead of the midterm elections.

"It was a very good session for the Trump administration — it was one that really continued the court's expansion of presidential power in really profound ways," said Jenny Breen, an associate professor of law at Syracuse Law School, who frequently writes about the Supreme Court.

The court — stacked with six conservative justices including three appointed by Trump — ended its latest session Tuesday.

Independent agencies

Trump, and future presidents, will have more authority to fire political appointees serving on a number of independent federal regulatory agencies and fill the vacancies with allies, after the court upheld Trump’s firing of former Federal Trade Commission board member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Breen said.

Slaughter was one of two Democrats Trump ousted last year from the panel meant to oversee the country’s antitrust and consumer protection laws. Slaughter, a Biden appointee, argued her firing was illegal in part because Trump never provided proper justification for her firing beforehand as required by federal law.

But Trump, in the Trump v. Slaughter case, argued Slaughter’s positions were "inconsistent with [his] Administration's priorities" and as executive he should have the authority of placing members on the panel who would be accountable to the priorities he was elected to deliver.

The court in a separate 5-4 ruling blocked Trump from firing Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook from her post, saying in part he never afforded the Democratic appointee due process before firing her in a social media post. But Breen said the 6-3 ruling in the Slaughter case will ultimately have the most long-standing reverberations.

"It really signals the end of independent agencies in government, which is something we've had blessed by the Supreme Court for nearly 100 years," Breen said. "It continues the trend of again, the court blessing the view that all of the executive power of the United States is held in the person of the president, which is a really formerly extreme view, that's now being embraced by the Supreme Court."

Immigration crackdown

Several parts of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies were upheld in a series of court rulings that could spur more deportations, said Georgetown Law professor Louis Michael Seidman.

In Mullin v. Doe, the court in a 6-3 decision allowed the Trump administration to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, designation for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians seeking refuge in the United States, many of whom have been living and working in the country for decades.

In a separate 6-3 ruling, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court also ruled that migrants must be on U.S. soil to seek asylum, and any petitions while waiting on the Mexican side of the U.S. border are invalid with no "legal entitlement" to asylum.

"You have hundreds of thousands of people who've been here a very long time who are now going to be deported to countries that are not functioning, where their lives are going to be at best extremely difficult," said Seidman, the author of several books on the Supreme Court and the Constitution.

Redistricting efforts

Trump, who has been pushing Republican state legislatures to make their congressional maps more favorable to Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, received a boost to those efforts when the court in a 6-3 decision struck down Louisiana’s congressional district map. The court said the creation of a second Black-majority district in the state was not required by the Voting Rights Act.

Legal experts contend the ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans voting laws and practices aimed at discriminating against voters. The ruling will make it harder for voters in minority communities to challenge redistricting maps they contend violate the act.

Soon after the decision, state legislatures in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee voted on new congressional maps that eliminated at least one minority-majority district.

"It certainly encourages political gerrymandering, and we should expect to see more of that," Breen said.

Voting patterns

This year’s session, which started in October with the court hearing oral arguments and ended on the last day of June, reaffirmed that court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, "truly is John Roberts’ court," said James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University.

"Chief Justice Robert was almost invariably in the majority in the term’s biggest cases," Sample said in a phone interview, adding that Trump found unyielding support from conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who did not rule against the administration’s position in any of the Trump cases before the court.

Trump's three appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — each crossed ideological lines at least once during the session to side with liberals against Trump. Barrett and Gorsuch voted against the constitutionality of Trump launching his global tariffs without congressional approval.  

The court also declined to take up Trump's case seeking the dismissal of a $5.8 million legal settlement he was ordered to pay former magazine writer E. Jean Caroll as part of a 2023 defamation lawsuit.

Trump, in a CNBC interview Thursday, took aim at some of the conservatives who did not always side with him, noting that the court’s three liberal justices — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — tend to vote as a block.

"I'm not saying it has to be a loyalty test, but it's much different — the three justices vote as a block," Trump said. "I think I can remember one time, but very, very seldom do they not vote as a block. Whereas our people, and we have six, but they move around a little bit, and they — for instance, birthright citizenship. I should have won that."

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.