Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr.

 

You might think that an arch-conservative who has used his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to send U.S. law back to the 1920s would take a victory lap and maybe chill just a bit. But no. Despite his success in helping to dismantle  abortion rights, attacking public-sector labor unions, elevating gun rights, promoting “religious liberty,” and destroying the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad, motivated by ideological extremism and a stack of personal grievances, some dating to his childhood in Trenton, New Jersey. 

Alito’s well-established pattern of outbursts was on full view during the court’s June 26 announcement of several late-term rulings. He set the tone for the session by reading a summary of his cruel 6-3 majority opinion that denied political asylum seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the U.S.-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado). 

Finishing quickly, he paused before moving on to summarize another of his opinions. Justice Soto Sotomayor apparently took the break in the action as a cue to read a synopsis of her dissent. Dissenters often refrain from reading their summaries, but there is nothing unusual about them opting to speak up, provided they give advance notice of their intentions.  

Sotomayor blasted Alito’s handiwork. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Her remarks apparently enraged Alito, making him look, in the words of NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nine Totenberg, like “he had just bitten into a lemon.” 

“There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” Alito said, uttering remarks that, in the staid confines of the nation’s most august judicial body, were veritable obscenities that prompted audible gasps from spectators and reporters in the gallery. A court spokesperson later clarified that Alito was in fact notified of Sotomayor’s plans, but to date, he has not publicly apologized. Like the president whose policies he almost always supports, Alito invariably overreacts and never recants. 

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad.

Who can forget Alito sneering on live TV during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, mouthing the words “not true” as the president decried the court’s Citizens United opinion and the impact it would have on future elections, including greater foreign influence? 

Since then, Alito has only gotten more unhinged and offensive, becoming a regular featured speaker at Federalist Society events, railing against the legalization of gay marriage, labeling the Second Amendment and freedom of religion as “unfavored” constitutional rights, and condemning liberals as a threat to civil liberties.   

In September 2021, Alito went ballistic after The Atlantic magazine staff writer Adam Serwer penned a column accusing the court’s right-wing majority of releasing a 5-4 shadow-docket ruling on Texas’ newly enacted vigilante abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at University of Notre Dame, he excoriated the press for portraying the court’s conservatives as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

In June 2023, Alito again went off the rails with an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that lambasted a ProPublica report that in 2008 he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer. The problem, according to ProPublica, wasn’t just that Alito had failed to recuse himself from reviewing lawsuits involving Singer’s hedge fund, but that he also failed to note anything about the excursion on the annual financial disclosure forms required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Claiming he had no duty to reveal the junket, he argued that his spot on the private jet “would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat” if he had not accepted the billionaire’s offer of a free ride, and that gifts of “hospitality” need not be reported. In a follow-up interview with the Journal, he added, “Congress did not create the Supreme Court” and “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

Alito’s official court opinions have been equally acerbic and hyperbolic. They arguably reached a crescendo in his 2022 majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). Not content with simply overruling the 50-year-old precedent on which U.S. women had come to rely as an essential part of their health care, he wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” 

When used by a high court justice, the phrase “egregiously wrong” is an insult and a sign of contempt. And to add further insult, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override Roe, citing the work of Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English cleric and judge who condemned abortions as homicide, and a 17th-century English jurist who sentenced at least three women accused of using witchcraft to death.

So many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land.

What’s behind Alito’s fury and habit of issuing norm-breaking invective? As Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall told The Wall Street Journal in an article published this month, “Alito thinks of the other side as the enemy.” And true to Segall’s observation, Alito unwittingly admitted as much at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in 2024, when documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor asked whether there was any way the country could overcome its terrible polarization, then surreptitiously recorded Alito’s answer that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” 

Like most extremists, Alito has views that derive not just from his abstract political beliefs, but from his lived experiences growing up in a predominantly white Christian community as the son of deeply religious Catholic Italian immigrants, and later as an out-of-place right winger at Princeton University and Yale Law School. 

In a revealing new biography, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, journalist Peter S. Canellos offers a compelling psychological portrait of Alito as a man dismayed by the demographic and secular changes that have transformed and, by his estimation, degraded the country of his boyhood. Alito has been on a mission to reverse those trends ex cathedra from his perch on the Supreme Court.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups — we all do — but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land. On June 30, NPR’s Totenberg erroneously reported that Alito planned to retire so that President Donald Trump might nominate a younger right-wing zealot to the bench. The story turned out not to be true and was promptly retracted. Too bad for her — and even worse for the country.

-Bill Blum, Truthdig

Reining in a Rogue Supreme Court: It is up to Congress to use its legitimate Article I powers to do so

At this American Celebration time, masses will visit the National Archives to see our founding documents, originals under bulletproof glass. Those who examine the Constitution, across several cases, will see clearly the Framers’ intent. Article I, on the Congress, is detailed in its descriptions of elections and powers, and is twice as long as Article II, on the Executive, which in turn is twice as long as Article III, on the Judiciary. Length alone does not fully describe the reality that Congress is first among equals in our three branches.

Among its powers are the key ones of any government: the power of the purse, to tax and spend, and the power to declare war. A president can veto bills passed by Congress, but Congress can override the vetoes, and the president cannot override the override. The Senate has the power to accept or reject treaties made by a president, and to accept or reject nominations for executive or judicial offices. Congress can remove a president through impeachment; a president has no power to remove members of Congress. And Congress has immunity from executive harassment.

As for the judiciary, the Constitution gives very limited original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court and gives Congress the power to decide what additional jurisdiction or roles it should have, including the power to decide the size of the Supreme Court — and to create other federal courts. And, of course, Congress can impeach and remove judges and justices.

These truths should be self-evident. But not to the Roberts Court. In a series of arrogant, ahistorical, anti-Constitutional decisions, the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself the power to defang Congress, undermine democracy, and unleash a corrupt, power-hungry, vindictive president with dictatorial powers (and few, if any, constraints), destroying the delicate checks and balances foundational to our political system.

The immunity decision was perhaps the most shocking. We went for well over 200 years evolving under presidents constrained by laws and traditions not to use official powers to corrupt or endanger people or law and order. On the occasions when they did — see Nixon, Richard — the system of checks and balances responded, both Congress and the Supreme Court. The reaction of Trump when Trump v. United States was announced — glee at being granted absolute power — revealed how reckless, misguided, and anti-constitutional it was.

That was compounded by Slaughter v. Trump. By enabling a president to fire at whim members of independent regulatory commissions who had been confirmed for fixed terms by the Senate, the Court effectively destroyed the independence and balance of these commissions, the first of which was the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1887. The numbers were expanded under President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the agency the Roberts Court just eviscerated, the Federal Trade Commission.

These agencies and others, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, were crafted with a delicate balance by presidents and Congress; independent, but with commissioners nominated by presidents and confirmed by the Senate, with a partisan balance and the ability of a president to remove only for cause. 

No longer. Even more unsettling, by flatly asserting that the president had total control over the executive branch, the Court threatened the existence of a career civil service and set the stage for a return to the spoils system that had plagued the country until the Pendleton Act of 1883 created the merit-based system that has been in effect for over 150 years.

Now, the powerful commissions, which include the Federal Communications Commission, can be used by presidents to intimidate, punish, and coerce people, corporations, and other entities; and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can now give a free pass to insider trading by Trump cronies. 

Even before this awful decision, the chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, misused his power to threaten broadcast entities and relax rules on behalf of Trump and his allies. Ironically, in an Alice in Wonderland twist, Justice Neil Gorsuch used Carr’s thuggery to justify giving Trump more unleashed power at the expense of Congress and decency.

This decision (blowing up the ruling in Humphrey’s Executor, which had ruled for 90 years) followed a 2024 decision, Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which overturned the Chevron doctrine. In a different galaxy, championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, this required judges to give deference (in regulatory decisions) to the expertise of agencies, as long as they followed the Administrative Procedures Act, showing careful and diligent work. Instead, the decisions could be made by judges alone, with no expertise, and enabled corporations to judge-shop to get favorable rulings.

The expansion of presidential power — and the overweening judicial power that engendered it—has come at the expense of the First Branch. But other decisions made by John Roberts and his cohorts have also undercut Congress while empowering corporations and billionaires. 

Monsanto v. Durnell, involving the pesticide Roundup gave chemical and agriculture companies protection against lawsuits claiming their products caused cancer or other ailments; an earlier decision, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, denied the possibility of a consumer class action from abuses by companies in the fine print of contracts, forcing individuals to use arbitration instead of the courts.

Then there is campaign finance. John Roberts said in his confirmation hearing that he wanted to avoid 5-4 decisions and aimed to get to 8-1 or 9-0 by relying on stare decisis. It did not take long for that to be proven a lie. The landmark Citizens United was a narrow case, brought on an as-applied basis, to enable the group to air its anti-Hillary Clinton film as a documentary free from campaign finance law regulating campaign messages. 

Instead of deciding it on that basis, Roberts and his allies pulled it back to broaden it — without any request from the plaintiffs and without briefs or hearings — and redo it in a way that would subvert over a century of established campaign law.

Roberts then produced a majority that not only upended the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Law that only recently had been affirmed (before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired), but also changed many decades of law that had blocked corporations from giving money directly to candidates, thereby opening up more avenues for big money to dominate elections, putting no limits on what corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could use for political ads “independent” of candidates. The result was an explosion of “Super PACs” and the sharply expanded involvement of billionaires using dark money to influence elections and policy.

That was followed by McCutcheon v. FEC, in which the Court removed limits on overall spending, allowing ultra-wealthy donors to write multi-million-dollar checks to joint fundraising committees, crowning the wealthiest donors the kingmakers in our politics and elections. And now a new one, NRSC v. FEC, blew up a 50-year precedent limiting coordinating spending between parties and candidates.

The result? Another gift to billionaires, allowing them to bypass direct candidate contribution limits by transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to party committees, which can channel funds directly to candidates. Are there any checks on this, or any meaningful regulations of big, dark money domination? Thanks to the Slaughter decision, the feckless Federal Election Commission, which is the regulatory authority, is even more feckless—and can be weaponized by Trump to harass and crimp Democrats while giving a free hand to Republicans.

Of all these moves to undermine Congress and democracy, none are more serious than the repeated Roberts Court attacks on voting rights. 

It started with the egregious Shelby County v. Holder, where Roberts used a remarkable display of faulty logic to take away a key component of the Voting Rights Act, Section V, which required pre-clearance by the Justice Department for voting jurisdictions to change voting laws if they had shown a clear pattern of racially-based discrimination. Roberts’ rationale was that while there had been discrimination, it was no longer present, so Section V was no longer needed. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened the logic to closing one’s umbrella during a driving rainstorm because you were dry under the umbrella.

The day after Shelby County came down, Southern states and counties leapt in to implement more discriminatory laws, which had no impact on Roberts. The Voting Rights Act had first been passed in 1965 after decades of Southern segregationists in the Senate using filibusters to block civil rights legislation. It was reauthorized numerous times, most recently in 2006, reauthorizing preclearance for 25 years after extensive debate, hearings, and fact-finding. The 2006 reauthorization passed the Senate unanimously and in the House by 390-33. Roberts gave that congressional mandate the middle finger. And waited to go even further.

Five years ago, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Alito and five others upheld two Arizona voting restrictions that banned the collection of absentee ballots by third parties and discarded ballots cast in the wrong precinct. It took a devastating swipe at Section II, with Alito rewriting the law to fit his viewpoint, proposing that just because a law creates a “disparate impact” on minority voters, it did not justify striking it. This made it harder to challenge racially discriminatory state-level voting restrictions in federal court.

The recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling effectively killed Section II, making it clear that if there were any other pretext for voting restrictions, such as partisan gerrymandering (which the Roberts Court gave a green light to in Rucho v. Common Cause), it did not matter if the result was racially discriminatory.

Louisiana had begun early voting under a map created after a Section II challenge that enabled two majority-minority districts. But though the Roberts Court had invented a “Purcell principle” (that no ruling should take effect close to an election — which it applied when Democrats won challenges to discriminatory maps), that “principle” was discarded to disallow votes already cast and use their prejudicial map for 2026. The most outrageous blow came two months later, in June. 

Even though multiple lower courts had offered voluminous evidence that Alabama had created a map explicitly designed for racial discrimination, meeting the steep standard of Callais, the Roberts Court cast aside its own standard to allow the map to be used in 2026.

After such a slew of decisions to end the Court’s term, the one that captured the most public and press attention was birthright citizenship, where — on the surface — 6 justices upheld the right. But underlying that decision was another troubling reality. Even though the Constitution and history made the right clear, four justices denied the plain language of our founding document, contorting it to fit their worldview.

A Supreme Court that flagrantly contorts decisions to geld Congress, flexes its self-aggrandizing Article III powers, and advances an extreme “unitary executive theory” that has no basis in the Constitution, or the view of the Framers needs to be reined in. It is up to Congress to use its legitimate Article I powers to do so.

Of course, there are reforms on the table, starting with expanding the court to 13 members to represent the 13 circuits (there were nine when the court size was adjusted to that number). Term limits are less controversial but also a powerful antidote — especially if they start immediately, moving all those who have served for whatever single term is set — 18 years if the court has nine members; 26 if it is expanded. But there is another, more far-reaching change to consider.

That is returning the Supreme Court to the original jurisdiction the Framers established. They did not see the Supreme Court as all-powerful, arrogating to itself key legislative powers and making Congress an inferior branch. That original jurisdiction was established to enable the Supreme Court to settle controversies between states, between citizens of different states, and between states and foreign entities or persons. 

Here is the key clause: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

In other words, Congress can take away the Supreme Court’s appellate authority in whatever areas it wants, except the narrow ones defining original jurisdiction. This includes regulating commerce, defining or adjudicating congressional and executive powers, voting rights and elections, individual rights, and more. 

Congress can create a new appellate court to handle those areas, perhaps one consisting of the chief judges of all the circuits. And Congress needs to mandate a stiff, meaningful code of ethics for the Supreme Court, including creating an Independent office consisting of former judges and legal ethics experts who would recommend sanctions for violations, with the judicial conference required to explain in detail if the recommendations are rejected.

We have a rogue Supreme Court, and it is time to consider more sweeping actions to restore the balance among the branches.

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Norman Ornstein is a renowned political scientist, frequent Contrarian contributor, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and the author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

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

 

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