A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes with Little Justification

In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court.

These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent. 

The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked — and has done so with little to no explanation. 

These emergency decisions have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent. The outcomes have been consequential: The high court has used the process to limit federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions and diminished Congress’ authority over federal agencies, and it has allowed for the detention of American citizens by immigration agents. 

ProPublica analyzed over two decades of Supreme Court rulings, which cover all of the years under Chief Justice John Roberts and go as far back as the online archives allow. We found that when the last court term ended, justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, as opposed to 56 orders on the more traditional merits docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions. Legal scholars and court watchers were shocked by our finding. They told ProPublica it’s likely the first time in modern history that so many consequential decisions were made in secret by its nine members. 

“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst. He said that our findings reinforce the appearance that the justices are voting on their political preferences.  “That’s the real blow to the court’s credibility,” he said. Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to a detailed list of questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House wrote, “President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the Administration’s lawful agenda. President Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives on which he was elected.”

For the First Time in Two Decades, Decisions on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Outnumber the Merits Docket.

There are two ways to get a decision from the Supreme Court. One is to exhaust your appeals to lower courts and ask to argue your case in front of the high court. The justices determine whether to take the case on, and if they do, lawyers argue their case in front of them. The other is to petition the justices directly via the emergency docket — to freeze a lower court ruling or government policy while the case goes through appeal.

The appeals to the emergency docket have long outnumbered those to the merits docket, but most are procedural requests or requests to stay execution for capital offenses. When those are removed, what’s left is known as the shadow docket — cases that seek to skip the usual order of things and ask for a quick ruling from the court’s justices.

The modern shadow docket was born in 2016 when the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, experts say. Papers obtained by The New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with longtime precedent. The conservative justices, meanwhile, forcefully argued that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway and that it would put too much of a burden on the energy industry.

Driven by its numerous losses in lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action on its appeals. The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed just eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration filed 32 in 2025 alone, an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found.

The increased willingness of the Roberts court to intervene on Trump’s behalf — as well as in other issues that favor conservatives and Trump allies — has upended American life, said Donald Ayer, a former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. “On many subjects of real importance to our future, they’ve demolished what used to be the law,” he said.

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Public scrutiny of the shadow docket ramped up in September 2021 after the Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph, unsigned opinion that further rolled back abortion rights established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In the order, the court refused to block Texas’ Senate Bill 8, the “Heartbeat Act,” which banned abortion after an embryo’s cardiac activity is detectable, typically at six weeks of pregnancy and before many people know they are pregnant. Protests erupted nationwide, and the Senate held a hearing on the shadow docket.

In an unusual public acknowledgement, Justice Elena Kagan referenced the shadow docket by name in her scathing dissent, accusing the majority of green-lighting a “patently unconstitutional law” with only a cursory review in less than 72 hours. “In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend,” Kagan wrote.

That an opinion was even issued and that four of the justices signed their names to it was uncommon. On the shadow docket, justices do not have to make their votes known. In rare cases, their votes are revealed in terse indications that they grant or deny the application, or even more rarely, as an opinion. We found that just 17% of votes cast had any sort of public record of a vote or opinion.

Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito contended that the court isn’t to blame for the rise in shadow docket cases. “We do not file these emergency applications,” he said. “Parties file them.” The debate has continued. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently green-light harmful acts that do real damage,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during an April speech on the shadow docket at Yale Law School.

Until this past Supreme Court term, emergency applications fluctuated year to year but showed no clear upward trend. The applications are given first to a single justice, who decides if a case is worth referring to the full court. In recent years, justices have referred more of such appeals for a review and vote by the full court. Last term, when there were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, the appeals to the shadow docket finally overtook those to the merits docket.

Emergency Applications Referred for a Full Court Vote Have Risen Sharply.

Total applications have varied over the last two decades, with a surge last term under President Donald Trump.  The cases were consequential. On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.

Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.”

Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.

And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives — an effort touched off by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.

Roberts once signed on to a Kagan dissent that assailed the shadow docket. But our analysis found that he has referred more substantive cases for a vote by the full court than any other justice, going from just one in the 2005 term when he joined the court to nearly half of all referrals in the last term.

There is an additional difference between the shadow docket and the merits docket. After the court holds public argument, the justices’ ultimate merits decisions are closely watched and extensively covered by the press. The summer’s “decision season,” when the final and most significant rulings come down, has a predictable cadence that ends when the justices go on summer recess. Not so with the shadow docket. Increasingly, the justices are making big decisions after they’ve issued their final merits docket decision, when public attention has waned.

A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., have sponsored legislation to make the shadow docket more transparent. Raskin told ProPublica that the court’s legitimacy has fallen with every significant decision made without “real opinions or analysis.”

“Lower federal courts have been deciding against the Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases with weighty and well-reasoned opinions,” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things get to the twilight zone of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court is overturning 100-page opinions with a flippant sentence or two.” He added, “The result is a body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court rubber stamping the madness and folly of the Trump Administration.”

“The jurisprudence of the Roberts Court today is as murky as the green algae water in the Reflecting Pool.”

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How We Reported This Story:

To compare the number of cases on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to the traditional merits docket, we compared emergency applications listed on the court’s online docket search with counts of decisions compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025 Release 01). For the merits docket, we counted only signed decisions in argued cases, the typical format for those rulings.

The court’s online docket goes back to the year 2000, but our analysis looks at Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025, where emergency applications are easily identified by the letter “A” in their docket number.

We identified more than 27,000 emergency applications during that period, including thousands of requests that are not commonly understood to be a part of the shadow docket. Most appeals to the emergency docket are the type of requests that were traditionally handled there: procedural requests, such as extending the time to file, and requests to stay execution for capital offenses. The remainder are the focus of our reporting.

Substantive Shadow Docket Cases Are a Small Fraction of All Emergency Applications.

Note: The COVID-19 lockdown impacted applications for filing relief in the 2020-21 term.  We defined a substantive application on the shadow docket as any filing where the full court was asked to intervene in the traditional appeals process, such as staying a lower court’s order. 

Most of the cases we excluded are decided by just one justice, each of whom oversees one or more federal circuits and has the power to refer filings to the wider court. When the cases are referred to the full court, they are the subject of a vote by the justices. We ran our approach by multiple experts; all of whom found it sound.

A filer can appeal to another justice if their application is denied. The next justice to receive the application always refers it to the full court. We did not include these renewed applications because our analysis found the court has never granted one.

The court has labeled capital punishment cases only since the October 2017 term. To identify them prior to that, we flagged applications for stays of execution. We then manually reviewed every case referred to the full court. For applications decided by a single justice, we used an AI model to flag potential capital cases by examining the parties on the application and the relief requested. The model flagged over 60 possible capital cases, and those were manually reviewed. Despite our effort, it is possible some capital cases may still be included in our final tallies before the 2017 term.

Although rulings on the shadow docket are typically unsigned and do not include vote breakdowns, we were able to identify how a justice voted in some cases. The analysis is based on either the opinions issued by the justices, most of which are dissenting opinions, or if the justice indicated they would have granted or denied. In some decisions, the justices issued a statement not attached to either a grant or denial. We did not record these as votes.

- ProPublica

-Ken B. Morales/ Nick McMillan contributed data reporting.

The sad inevitability of Justice Alito’s birthright citizenship dissent

In 1913, Antonino Alati left southern Italy to find a better life in a land where many people regarded him as little better than scum. He joined millions of his fellow countrymen in the United States, where the press vilified Italians as poor, swarthy, violent Catholics who had too many babies, refused to assimilate and could never possibly be considered “white.”

Politicians were already working to shut the door on them. A congressional report released two years before Alati’s arrival cited southern Italians as evidence that “the new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old.” They came to the U.S., the report asserted, “with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country.”

Alati wouldn’t let bigotry win. He soon sent for his wife and children, including his infant son Salvatore. Alati turned to Alito, Salvatore became Samuel. A generation later, the family had a Supreme Court justice in Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the second Italian American, after Antonin Scalia, to sit on the highest court in the land.

During his 2005 confirmation hearings, Alito praised his father as an “extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties” to ensure a better life for him and his sister. By then, Italian Americans were established as an essential part of this country’s fabric, from music to politics to food.

It’s the most American of tales — which is why it’s so surprising, yet not, to read Alito’s blistering dissent in the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision rejecting President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship.

If there’s one constant in this country besides death and taxes, it’s how quickly descendants of immigrants, and sometimes immigrants themselves, forget how loathed their ethnic group was and how they proved the haters wrong. Too many become uncharitable to the policies that helped them and the immigrants who followed.

But Alito’s stance against birthright citizenship goes beyond just forgetting his roots. His 39-page opinion describes the supposed impact of undocumented migrants on the U.S., using words — “overran,” “soared,” “exploded,” “massive,” “a stream,” “huge” — that read like the same invective used against Italians in his grandfather and father’s time.

The justice channels anti-Italian conspiracies of the past by casting doubt on the national allegiances of the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants — the same patriotism test that Italian Americans faced generations ago when xenophobes questioned their Catholicism. 

Alito claims without evidence that millions of agricultural workers were able to apply for American citizenship after President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty “at least in part because of fraud” — a charge also leveled against Italians who sought to naturalize back in the day.

And so it goes, each passage a jumbled argument dressed up in judicial interpretations largely rejected by his fellow Catholic Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Coney Barrett signed on to the majority opinion that Roberts wrote, and Kavanaugh concurred.

I know how quickly families forget their own immigrant histories. Yet I look at people like Alito and wonder how they ended up thinking the way they do, because I could never imagine doing the same. My maternal grandmother was born in Arizona to parents who fled their home country during the Mexican Revolution, becoming an American citizen by birthright. My father, who crossed the border in the trunk of a Chevy, legalized his status in an era when it was far easier to do so.

Like Alito’s paisans, my Mexican family was also demonized for supposedly being insufficiently American and posing a threat to national unity. They also sacrificed their own dreams so their children and grandchildren could achieve theirs.

And just like Alito, some members of my family have forgotten our history and support Trump or favor some of his immigration policies, dismissing new arrivals as criminals or lazy. That’s why I will always side with undocumented people and welcome anyone who gives birth in this country with the hope that their newborn finds a better life.

It seems from his dissent that Alito somewhat agrees with me. He posits that millions of Americans who were born in this country to parents without papers “have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the land where they grew up.” Congress “can and should address their situation,” he writes.

The justice blasts birth tourism, where women from China and other countries travel to the U.S. to have a baby, then return home, benefiting from our generosity and offering nothing in return.

I agree that’s a mockery of what being an American should be and ruins it for people who want to contribute to building a better nation. But Alito throws out the baby with the bathwater by failing to recognize that Trump’s attempt to erase birthright citizenship via executive order is presidential overreach based on bigotry, not rule of law. He’d rather cut up the Constitution to spite something he doesn’t like. Thank God his side lost, yet it’s sad that Trump’s pathetic attempt to define who can be an American went as far as it did.

Alito concludes by stating that the court’s decision to uphold the 14th Amendment is “a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”

What new immigrants might inflict on this country is the perpetual worry of immigration restrictionists — and yet history keeps proving them wrong. Alito’s family did; so, did mine. Only in these United States can the progeny of people once portrayed as parasites and invaders side with those making the same argument about the latest batch of newcomers.

History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never wanted them here in the first place.

-Gustavo Arellano

LA Times

 

"Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows"

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP meme coin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

The president’s finances, which had been something of a mystery, highlight a conflict in his crypto business: Mr. Trump is a major crypto industry operator and its top policymaker.

It is hardly the only issue to arise from having a businessman serve as president. The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though in the past, Mr. Trump has noted that he is exempt from federal conflict of interest laws. Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a recent statement that Mr. Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”

Although the report released on Tuesday offered revenue figures for Mr. Trump’s crypto and real estate ventures, it did not reveal whether all of the businesses turned a profit or a loss, which is consistent with his previous filings.

The report also offers little clarity on the president’s net worth, much of which is tied to estimated property values and the fluctuating paper worth of crypto assets and his stock portfolio. For his largest assets, including cryptocurrency and real estate, Mr. Trump reported a minimum valuation of $50 million with no upper limit. 

The president’s shares in his own publicly traded social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, are worth about $875 million, according to other public filings, representing one of the single greatest sources of the president’s net worth. (Those shares have plummeted over the last year, eroding some of his net worth.)

But it was Mr. Trump’s crypto business that proved to be a top revenue stream. Once an outspoken skeptic of crypto, Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail in 2024 and started a series of ventures that have reaped enormous sums. With his three sons, he helped create World Liberty, a crypto firm that sells a digital currency called $WLFI.

Last year, World Liberty marketed its coin to investors around the world, with 75 percent of each sale allocated to a Trump business entity, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing the president would make money even if the value of the token declined. The president received about $500 million from those sales last year, according to the filing, compared with $57 million in 2024.

World Liberty enriched the Trump family in other ways, as well.

In January 2025, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty, raising a slew of ethical concerns. Soon the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips that power artificial intelligence.

The filing released Tuesday did not explicitly refer to the deal, but it mentioned unnamed investments that generated more than $200 million for Mr. Trump.

The other major source of Mr. Trump’s crypto wealth was his meme coin, a novelty currency known as $TRUMP that he started selling days before his inauguration. He earned more than $600 million from sales of the coin, according to the filing. The coin’s price shot up briefly, before plummeting, with its price recently hovering around $1.67, a roughly 80 percent drop from a year ago.

The Trump family also continued to pull in chunks of money from real estate branding deals, the new report showed, including some in the Middle East that generated a minimum of $35 million in revenue last year. Deals in Vietnam and Romania, as well as older ones in India, Turkey and Indonesia, combined to bring in at least another $20 million.

And the president’s major real estate holdings in the United States, like Trump National Golf Club near Miami, pulled in $122 million in revenue, while his Mar-a-Lago club generated a total of $77 million for him, the report said.

Now that Mr. Trump is flush with cash, and now that he has eliminated some of his long-running legal problems, he has reduced the liabilities on his balance sheet, including after an appeals court overturned a nearly half-billion-dollar legal judgment stemming from a civil fraud case in New York.

The disclosure report shows that Mr. Trump still owes more than $50 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually abusing and defaming her. The Supreme Court on Monday declined the president’s request to review one of the judgments Ms. Carroll secured against him.

The financial disclosure captured several other legal wins for Mr. Trump, including payouts he collected from media and technology giants like ABC News, Paramount and Meta. ABC settled a defamation lawsuit, while Paramount agreed to pay him over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” Meta settled a lawsuit he filed over the suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

The disclosure also captured gains in Mr. Trump’s investments in the financial markets. While these numbers appear in wide ranges, making it difficult to decipher meaningful trends or specific amounts, they suggest that Mr. Trump continues to get richer as president.

At the end of last year, the disclosure shows, he held investment assets of at least $857 million, compared with a minimum reported value of $236 million the year prior.

-NY Times

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.

Andrea Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to make sense of complex topics.

Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.

David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry for The Times from New York. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com.

 

Your $7,000 Limit, Their $551,300 Check. The Supreme Court Made Sure of It Today

Six justices struck down the limit on party spending and the door to buying a senator swung wide open.  Here's what happened and what to do about it. How does a $7,000 limit become a $551,300 weapon in the hands of one wealthy donor, with nobody breaking a single law and nobody facing a single charge? You are about to learn the answer, and the answer should make you furious. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case called National Republican Senatorial Committee versus Federal Election Commission. The name sounds sleepy. The result is a wrecking ball.¹ Six justices erased one of the last guardrails standing between your vote and the open purchase of your government. I read every page of the opinion and every page of the dissent. As a trial lawyer who has spent decades watching how power moves through a courtroom, I am telling you plainly. Your voice in American elections got smaller today, and the checkbook of the wealthy got a direct line to the people who write your laws. What the Court Did Today Federal law sets a hard ceiling on how much money one donor hands a single candidate. $7,000 per candidate for the whole election cycle. That ceiling comes from the Federal Election Commission. The cap runs $3,500 per election, and the primary and the general count as two separate elections, so $3,500 plus $3,500 gives you the $7,000 total. Congress built more walls behind that ceiling. One of those walls limited how much a political party spends in direct coordination with its own candidate. Picture the party and the candidate sitting at the same table, planning ads, moving as one operation. The law capped how much the party pours into the joint effort, because a party check spent hand in hand with a candidate works exactly like cash in the candidate’s pocket. The Supreme Court knocked that wall down. In a six to three ruling, the majority declared the cap on coordinated party spending a violation of the First Amendment. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett signed on. Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. The majority overruled a precedent called Colorado II from 2001, a decision where this same Court looked at the same wall and upheld the cap as fully constitutional. The Math They Hope You Never Run. Run the numbers with me, because the numbers tell the whole story. You, an ordinary citizen, hand your candidate the legal max. $7,000. A wealthy donor wants to move far more to the same candidate. The old rules blocked the easy routes. Today the donor walks through a door the Court swung wide. Here is the play. The donor does not write the candidate one giant check, because a check that size breaks the $7,000 cap and breaks the law. The candidate builds a different tool, a single collection account that holds a stack of committees at once. The legal name is a joint fundraising committee. Give it a friendly label, like the John Smith Victory Fund. The fund links 52 separate committees under one roof. The candidate’s own campaign, the national party committee, and the party committees of all 50 states. Each committee carries its own legal limit, and the fund lets one donor max out all 52 with a single check. These three limits come straight off the FEC’s 2025 to 2026 chart: -Candidate, $7,000. The most one donor may give a candidate for the cycle. -National party committee, $44,300 per year. This figure rises with inflation, and $44,300 is the current number. -Each state party committee, $10,000 per year. This figure is fixed in the statute and has held at $10,000 for years. Now watch the total climb. Fifty state parties at $10,000 each comes to $500,000. Add $44,300 for the national committee. Add $7,000 for the candidate. One donor signs a single check for $551,300 and never hands any one committee a dollar more than the law allows. Then the money moves. Federal law lets a party shuffle unlimited sums between its state and national committees. So the 50 state parties wire their $10,000 shares up to the national party, often the very same day. Stack those transfers on the national committee’s own $44,300, and the national party sits on $544,300 from one donor. The candidate already pocketed his $7,000 directly. Here is what changed today.  The old rules let the party spend only a small, capped amount in coordination with the candidate, so most of that $544,300 had to flow into other party work. The Court removed the cap. The national party can now spend the full $544,300 backing the candidate. Ad buys. Polling. Office rent. The catering for a campaign event. Every dollar lands where the candidate needs the money. So, a $7,000 limit becomes a $551,300 pipeline to one candidate. Around 80 times the cap Congress wrote. Justice Kagan laid out this exact math in her dissent, step by step, and the majority brushed past it. Here is the door the Court left standing open.  The candidate makes the ask. A senator sits across from a billionaire and says, max out my victory fund. The donor needs no earmarking words, no written instruction, nothing the rules would flag. A naked deal, your money for my official act, stays a federal crime, one now nearly impossible to catch with the guardrail gone. The Court calls the gratitude protected speech. You and I call the result the wealthy buying a government. Here’s what you actually need to remember. Forget the legal maze for a second. One donor used to be capped at $7,000. That same donor can now move more than half a million dollars to one candidate. That’s it. That’s the whole story. How We Got Here, and Why I Despise Citizens United. None of this happened in a vacuum. Today’s ruling is the newest brick in a wall the Court has been building against you for sixteen years, and the foundation stone has a name. Citizens United. In 2010, in Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, five justices decided corporations and outside groups hold a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums influencing your elections. I have detested this decision since the day the Court released the ruling, and time has proven every fear right. Citizens United, paired with a lower court ruling months later, birthed the Super PAC.  Suddenly a handful of billionaires and corporate interests poured oceans of money into races and drowned out the voice of the ordinary voter. The 2024 cycle tells the tale in cold figures. PACs raised more than fifteen billion dollars. The parties raised under three billion. Big money owns the field, and your single vote started to feel like a whisper in a hurricane. Four years after Citizens United, the Court struck again in a case called McCutcheon. The justices erased the overall ceiling on how much one donor gives across an entire election cycle. Remove the ceiling, and the joint fundraising committee I described becomes a loaded weapon. In 2022, the Court kept chipping in a case called Cruz. Today the demolition reached the party coordination wall. Each of these rulings sounds technical. Every one of them moves money in the same direction, toward the people who already hold the most of it. The majority dressed today’s ruling up as fairness. Parties deserve a chance to catch the Super PACs, the Court said. Read the logic twice. The same Court built the Super PAC era, and now points to the imbalance the Court itself created as the reason to knock down one more guardrail. Justice Kagan caught the circular game in her dissent and called it out cold. The Fingerprints on This One. Here is the detail you deserve to sit with. When a federal law gets challenged in court, the government usually defends the law. Stands up for the rule Congress wrote. The people’s lawyers argue for the people’s statute. The Trump administration refused. Donald Trump’s Justice Department had already stopped enforcing the cap on party coordination, the cap protecting you from half million-dollar end runs around the contribution limit. Then the administration walked into the Supreme Court and argued the cap should die. The government’s own Solicitor General stood with the people tearing the law down. The Court had to reach outside and appoint a private lawyer to defend the people’s statute, because the President’s lawyers would not. Sit with the meaning of this move. The administration that swore an oath to uphold the laws stood aside and let one more wall protecting your democracy collapse, and the wall happened to protect a system the President and his donor's profit from. One of the original challengers carries a familiar name too. JD Vance filed as a Senate candidate back when the suit began. He sits in the Vice President’s chair today, and his old candidacy paperwork kept the case alive long enough for the Court to rule. The people who brought this fight now run the executive branch. The people who refused to defend the law now run the Justice Department. Connect the dots, and the picture comes into sharp, ugly focus. What This Means for You. Strip away the legal vocabulary, and the ruling lands in your living room. Your government grows more responsive to the people writing the biggest checks and less responsive to you. A megadonor now buys a level of access and gratitude you will never afford. When a billionaire funnels half a million dollars to a senator through the party side door, the senator remembers. The next time a vote touches the billionaire’s business, the billionaire’s taxes, the billionaire’s industry, the senator returns the donor’s call first. Yours waits. You feel the result everywhere. In the prescription drug prices nobody reins in. In the tax loopholes nobody closes. In the industries nobody holds accountable. Money talks in Washington, and the Court keeps handing the wealthy a louder microphone, and your kids and grandkids inherit a government tuned to the frequency of the rich. I worry about them constantly. I worry about the country we leave behind. A democracy where a half million-dollar check outweighs ten thousand ordinary voices stops being a democracy and starts becoming an auction. What Happens Next. Brace yourself, because the wealthy and the operatives around them read these rulings the day they drop, and the planning starts immediately. Expect the joint fundraising committees to balloon. Both parties will build them bigger, link more state committees, and chase the largest checks in the land. The Federal Election Commission, already toothless and now stripped of one more enforcement tool, steps further back. The flood of money through the party channel grows. The arms race accelerates. Watch the next targets too. Justice Kagan, in her dissent, flagged a warning every voter should hear. The same logic the majority used today points like an arrow at the remaining guardrails. The rule treating a donor’s coordinated spending as a capped contribution sits in the crosshairs. Even the base contribution limits, the seven thousand dollar line itself, look more fragile tonight than they did this morning. This Court has shown a steady appetite for dismantling campaign finance protection one case at a time, and the appetite has not been satisfied. Justice Kagan summed up the wreckage with a line I will carry for a long time. Years ago, Justice Breyer warned that an earlier ruling left the nation’s campaign finance laws a hollow remnant. Kagan looked at what survived after today and called the result a remnant of a remnant. She is right. Brick by brick, the wall built to protect your vote from open corruption keeps coming down. This Is Where You Come In. I refuse to treat today as the end of the story. The Court wrote the latest chapter. You write the next one. Money found new lanes into our politics. Your power lives in the one place no billionaire outspends you. The ballot box, and the organized voice of an awake public. A megadonor buys access. A movement of informed voters buys outcomes. They are counting on you to feel small, to shrug, to look away as the auction runs. Prove them wrong. Learn the names of the candidates who take these mega checks and the names of the ones who refuse. Back the leaders fighting for real reform and a constitutional amendment to undo this entire rotten line of cases. Vote in every race, the small ones included, because the operatives bankrolling this machine pray you skip them. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your kids. Make this your dinner table conversation. Then do one more thing today. Share this piece with one person stuck in the fog and pull them into the fight. The wealthy already know how this system works, and they have stayed quiet about the mechanics on purpose. Your job, starting right now, is to make sure everyone you know understands the game and refuses to sit out. They built this for the few. We take it back for the many. Let’s go. -Mitch Jackson, Esq.

 Jon Mitchell “Mitch” Jackson is a senior partner and founding attorney of Jackson & Wilson He has represented clients in the Orange County area for over 30 years, and he is committed to providing the trustworthy and skilled legal representation people need during the most difficult times of their lives – after a serious accident or the loss of a loved one. He has met with considerable success in this endeavor, recovering millions on behalf of the injured, including numerous multimillion-dollar settlements and verdicts.

 

The huge expansion of presidential power and the court’s embrace of the unitary executive theory would surely surprise our founders

In the week when we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which was very much a protest against executive power, the Supreme Court on Monday significantly expanded the powers of the president. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before.”

Actually, the Supreme Court decided three cases of great interest to the Trump administration on Monday and ruled against it in two of three. But these decisions were not of equal significance. The most important was Trump v. Slaughter — and that was a huge victory for the president in allowing him to fire seemingly almost anyone in the executive branch of government and in the court’s embrace of the “unitary executive theory” of presidential power.

Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat, was nominated to the Federal Trade Commission by Trump in 2018, and the Senate unanimously confirmed her. In 2024, Slaughter was reappointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate for a second term. A federal statute provides that FTC commissioners can be fired only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Trump fired Slaughter — and the heads of many other federal agencies — without any claim of cause.

This should have been an easy case for the court. Ninety years ago, in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the court unanimously held that Congress could prevent the president from firing commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission unless there was just cause for the firing. The court stressed that Congress, to carry out its policies, could limit presidential removal of commissioners unless there was good cause for the firing.

The Supreme Court followed this principle in many subsequent cases. In Wiener v. United States (1958), the court went further and held that even without a statutory limit on removal, the president could not remove executive officials where independence from the president is desirable. Wiener involved the president’s firing a member of the War Claims Commission. 

Unlike the Federal Trade Commission Act in Humphrey’s Executor, the statute creating the War Claims Commission did not expressly limit the president’s removal power. However, the court concluded that the functional need for independence of the War Claims Commission limited the president’s removal power. The court explained that Congress’s intent was for the War Claims Commission to award claims based on merit rather than on political influence.

In Morrison v. Olson (1988), the court, in a 7-1 decision, held that Congress could authorize the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the president or high-level executive officials and could limit firing to where there was just cause. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a staunch conservative, wrote the opinion for the court and explained: “In Humphrey’s Executor, we found it ‘plain’ that the Constitution did not give the President ‘illimitable power of removal’ over the officers of independent agencies. Were the President to have the power to remove FTC Commissioners at will, the ‘coercive influence’ of the removal power would ‘threate[n] the independence of [the] commission.’”

Quite significantly, the court expressly rejected the unitary executive theory. This is a theory of presidential power developed by young lawyers in the Reagan administration, including John Roberts and Samuel Alito. When Alito went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearings in January 2006, a primary ground for opposing his confirmation was his embracing of this expansive view of presidential powers. In Morrison v. Olson, Rehnquist emphatically rejected this theory and wrote, “we have never held that the Constitution requires that the three branches of Government operate with absolute independence.”

But in Trump v. Slaughter, the court expressly overruled Humphrey’s Executor and effectively overruled Wiener v. United States, Morrison v. Olson, and many other cases. The court explicitly embraced the unitary executive theory. The court concluded its opinion: “To ‘discharg[e] the duties of his trust,’ the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.... Neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.”

But the assumption of that statement is that commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission and similar agencies are “exercising the President’s power.” Quite the contrary, they are exercising Congress’s authority under the Constitution. As Sotomayor explained, this was to precent these “agencies becoming mere political instruments, which could be turned against political enemies with one hand and used to grant favors to allies with the other.”

For decades, Congress has relied on Humphrey’s Executor when creating myriad federal agencies — the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Communications Commission, National Labor Relations Board, to name just a few — with commissioners who can be fired only for cause. This was to provide the commissioners some degree of independence from the president.

And, in Slaughter, the court again overruled longstanding precedent. As Sotomayor said, “[n]inety years of precedent and 140 years of consistent political practice should have been more than enough to resolve this case.”

The court decided another case on Monday about presidential removal power and ruled against Trump, but on very narrow grounds. In Trump v. Cook, the court held that Trump could not fire Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, without providing her the notice and opportunity to be heard, as required by a federal statute.

Cook was appointed to the Board of Governors in 2022, at first to complete the final two years of an unexpired term. A year later, however, Biden nominated Cook to a full 14-year term, and the Senate again voted to confirm her. Cook’s term on the Federal Reserve is set to expire in 2038. As with the Federal Trade Commission, federal law allows removal only for good cause. Trump fired Cook, claiming that she had engaged in mortgage fraud. No court or agency has found that Cook did anything wrong.

In a 5-4 decision, with the majority opinion again written by Roberts, the court ruled for Cook. The court stressed the unique role of the Federal Reserve Board, tracing its history back to the first Bank of the United States during the presidency of George Washington. But the court’s ruling was on the narrow ground that under the federal statute “Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond prior to her termination.”

Finally, the court ruled against the position taken by the Trump administration in Watson v. Republican National Committee. Mississippi law, as in many states, allows the counting of absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days later. 

The challengers, supported by the Trump administration, argued that federal statutes setting the day for federal elections requires that ballots be received by election day. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision with the majority opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, came to the commonsense conclusion: “The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.” 

In fact, the only surprise is that four conservative justices — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh — came to the opposite conclusion because nothing in the federal law, explicitly or implicitly, prevents a state from counting absentee ballots mailed in a timely fashion.

Perhaps when a scorecard is done of Trump’s wins and losses in the Supreme Court, June 29 will be regarded as mixed. But that would overlook the huge expansion of presidential power in the court’s embracing the unitary executive theory and allowing the president to fire almost anyone in the executive branch of government. 

Those who drafted the Declaration of Independence deeply distrusted executive power and would surely have recoiled at this Supreme Court’s approach to it.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

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Supreme Court expands presidential firing power, overturning 90-year-old ruling

 

Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission are unconstitutional and overturned a 90-year-old decision that allowed Congress to shield members of certain independent agencies from being fired by the president at will.

The decision from the high court expands the president's power over many independent boards and commissions, which Congress had insulated from political pressure by saying their members could only be removed by the president for cause.

In a 1935 decision in a case known as Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which involved removal protections for the FTC, the Supreme Court said Congress could restrict the president's ability to fire officials from multi-member agencies at will. But the ruling from the high court's conservative majority in the case Trump v. Slaughter overturns that 90-year-old decision and marks the culmination of a years-long weakening of the New Deal-era precedent.

The court's ruling

The ruling was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, joined by the other conservative justices. The three liberals dissented, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent from the bench, a rare occurrence that signals strong disagreement with a decision. Roberts wrote that limits on the president's ability to fire those who wield executive power on his behalf infringe on his constitutional authority.

The FTC of today, the court's majority found, "unquestionably" exercises executive powers and therefore must be under the president's control. "Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work," Roberts wrote. "Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."

The decision is likely to have ramifications beyond the FTC. Congress has created more than two dozen multi-member agencies led by officials who can be removed by the president only for cause, which typically means instances of inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. Among those agencies likely to be affected by the Supreme Court's ruling are the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor warned that while those agencies remain, they now take on a new form that differs from what Congress intended when they were created. "Put simply, today the majority reshapes our government. Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands," she wrote.

President Trump cheered the decision as the "Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!"

The Slaughter case

Mr. Trump has sought to test the bounds of his executive power since returning to the White House for his second term in January 2025, including by firing a slew of officials appointed by Democratic presidents at multi-member boards and commissions without cause. Among those was Rebecca Slaughter, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the FTC during his first term. She was reappointed to the trade commission by President Joe Biden.

Slaughter was informed in March 2025 that her service on the FTC was "inconsistent" with the Trump administration's priorities and was fired from her post without cause. That clashed with the law that established the FTC in 1914, when Congress said commissioners could only be removed for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.

Slaughter filed a lawsuit challenging her removal and argued Mr. Trump broke the law when he fired her. A federal district court ruled in her favor and ordered Slaughter to be reinstated to her post. The U.S. appeals court in Washington, D.C., eventually agreed that she could continue in her job at the trade commission, but last September, the Supreme Court allowed Mr. Trump to fire her while it considered the legality of removal protections for FTC members.

Before agreeing to decide Slaughter's case, the Supreme Court had also cleared the way for Mr. Trump to oust members of the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission. But the high court has so far spared two other officials from removal while litigation continues: Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, and Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights.

The justices heard arguments in January over whether to allow Mr. Trump to fire Cook from the Fed Board. The Supreme Court has indicated before that it views the Fed differently than other independent agencies, calling it a "uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks."

In an opinion also authored by Roberts, the high court rejected Mr. Trump's attempt to fire Cook while the challenge to her removal moved forward. The Supreme Court reiterated in its ruling involving the FTC that it does not implicate the constitutionality of the Fed's removal restrictions. It also stressed that the decision does not address tenure protections for judges on the U.S. Tax Court or the Court of Federal Claims, with Roberts writing that the justices are leaving "those questions for another day."

"All we do today is recognize what has been clear for a century — that those who fall within the President's 'general administrative control' must be removable by the President at will," he wrote.

The high court's decision in Slaughter's case is the latest in a line of recent decisions that chipped away at Humphrey's Executor and expanded the president's power over independent agencies. The Supreme Court invalidated removal protections for the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2020 and the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2021.

-Melissa Quinn, NewsBreak

Humphrey's Executor: Humphrey's Executor v. United States | 295 U.S. 602 (1935) | Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center

"Whatever Trump is doing is a failure and whatever he says is a bald-faced lie"

No amount of media sane washing can convince Americans that Donald Trump is rationally prosecuting the Iran war or accurately relating the terms of a (sort of) deal. No matter how many times Trump repeats his outlandish lies on matters big or small — e.g., vandals at the reflecting pool! She begged me for a photo! — or tosses out bacchanalian distractions, or seeks refuge in hapless propaganda (none creepier than Vice President JD Vance’s pro-Nixon spin), he cannot arrest a growing national consensus: whatever Trump is doing is a failure and whatever he says is a bald-faced lie.

Trump’s inability to snow over the public with his blizzard of deceit bodes well for Democrats’ chances to trounce Republicans in the midterms. Candid after his primary defeat, Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn let on: “The jury’s still out whether this MAGA populist movement can survive the midterms.” But widespread agreement that Trump is an inveterate liar offers the opportunity for something beyond a midterm victory, which would be nothing less than a reality reset.

In the late stages of any authoritarian crack, the degenerating despot’s spin, lies, and excuses eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Each additional fabrication only reinforces exasperation with his galling mendacity. That, in turn, may whet the public’s appetite for some unvarnished truth-telling and public accountability.

Wall-to-wall lies

Trump’s horrific polling results are not simply a measure of widespread discontent with his performance. Increasingly, they serve to gauge public recognition that he is pathologically dishonest. Voters overwhelmingly express not just disapproval of what Trump is doing, but in the face of Trump’s determination to lie to their faces — on Iran, the economy, his health, the Epstein files, etc. — reveal a rise in understanding that he has been engaged in a massive, nonstop campaign of disinformation. 

The Quinnipiac poll, which found that “60 percent of voters think the U.S. military action against Iran was not worth it,” amounts to an emphatic statement that the majority of voters realize that Trump’s blather about a great victory is just blather. Voters see through the constant flim-flam and bravado, and the consistent drumbeat of phony triumphal accomplishments (the Strait is open! It’s always been open!).

Likewise, the 59 percent of the public know Trump is covering up damaging facts about his health or the Epstein-pedophile files. Likewise, Americans’ disapproval of Trump’s performance on the economy repudiates the lies he has been peddling. Prices are not going down. Voters’ day-to-day challenges tell them Trump has made their lives harder.

If the goal of strongmen is to control the information environment and persuade voters not to believe their own lived experience, and thereby inoculate themselves from accountability, then widespread rejection of state propaganda and willingness to declare “the emperor has no clothes” are sure signs the autocratic regime is unraveling.

Democrats would be wise to make Trump’s duplicity a key feature of their midterm campaign message. That would not only reaffirm voters’ own convictions that the economy is awful, but would help pre-bunk future lies, cut off excuses (it’s all Biden’s fault!), and prepare the public for the array of election shenanigans that Trump has launched to undermine the legitimacy of his loss. It would also lay the foundation for the great post-election reckoning.

Preparing for an accountability bonanza

If Democrats win the majority in one or both houses, the most extensive oversight and anti-corruption probe in history will get underway. Never have we seen any presidency so rife with financial corruption, self-dealing, self-enrichment, cronyism, and misuse of public funds for private purposes. “Following the money” will require Congress to track billions in crypto “investments,” corporate donations to Trump family pet projects, and foreign “gifts” used to gain influence. It will no doubt necessitate the most massive insider trading and market manipulation probe in history.

How much money are we talking about? Who gave it, and who got it? What government decisions were influenced? And most importantly, how can the public be made whole and the damage be undone? It may take years, but the undertaking is essential if we are ever to return to a semblance of clean, democratic government that punishes those who abused the public trust.

However, it would be a mistake to think of accountability purely in favor of the misuse and abuse of public funds. There is not a department or disgraced operation of government (including ICE street violence and murders of detainees and bystanders; weaponization of the Justice Department against presidential enemies; the Pentagon’s participation in extrajudicial killings, gross incompetence in war planning, discriminatory promotion decisions; and the full-scale assault on our public health and scientific research systems) that should escape scrutiny.

Only when we quantify the damage in lives and dollars lost, in institutional reputation and in lost human capital, can we begin to address the hundreds — if not thousands — of flawed decisions and ameliorate the impact of malicious, incompetent MAGA rule. Once we do that, we can begin to reset the expectation for all administrations going forward: Regardless of ideology and policy preference, every presidency must be held accountable for competent, transparent, fact-based decision-making; and every administration must operate within the nonpartisan civil service’s rules. Any oversight or accountability project must emphatically reject the Project 2025 mentality that instilled a nihilist bent on destroying expertise and undermining commitment to follow the law and uphold the Constitution.

MAGA’s war on truth, namely its obsessive reliance on lies and conspiracies — no matter how outlandish — to maintain its grip on power, is breathing its last gasps. The Trump regime’s credibility is in tatters, as voters thoroughly reject its policies and the artifice of lies it has relied upon. If Democrats do their job, the MAGA movement will be swept under in a blue midterm wave sufficient to dislodge it from power. With a decisive electoral win and a national commitment to oversight, we could ensure that we never again cede power to those who see government as a vehicle for personal revenge, pecuniary gain, or full-scale assault on pluralistic democracy.

In that regard, the midterms must not only be about cleaning the decks of MAGA scoundrels, criminals, and bullies, but restoration of faith in competent, good-faith self-government, where public interest must predominate.

-Jennifer Rubin

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(Photo Credit: Mike Maguire, via Wikimedia Commons)