Harry Litman - Yes, the Supreme Court Rebuked Trump on Birthright Citizenship. That's Not the Real Story
By Monday evening, the storyline had already solidified: a mixed bag for Trump at the Supreme Court. A split verdict on executive power. The Wall Street Journal had the Court “expanding presidential authority” in one breath and “rejecting” Trump’s bid to fire a Fed governor in the next. Trump himself, never one to undersell, called it a “tremendous loss” on the mail-in ballot case and a “BIG WIN” on the firings, and even that whiplash got reported straight, as if he were just providing the scoop—a president taking his lumps along with his victories, proof the system is working as designed.
Don’t believe it. The last two days of decisions only advance the actual storyline: a radically conservative court consolidating its constitutional overhaul and leaving open the prospect of further radical changes to come.
Set against the real stakes of the cases the Court decided this week, this was a week to leave conservatives celebrating, topping off a term that was a conservative juggernaut. And the single most important thing that happened, by a wide margin, isn’t the birthright citizenship case that’s about to dominate the headlines today. It’s the essential consummation of a project this Court has been working on for sixteen years: the dismantling of the structural architecture that has insulated huge swaths of the federal government from raw presidential control.
Start with Trump v. Slaughter. Read the first paragraph of most of the coverage, and you’d think it was a wash—the Court let Trump fire an FTC commissioner, but it stopped him from firing a Fed governor in the companion case. Tossup, right? Wrong. Slaughter isn’t one beat in an even trade. It’s the demolition, and Cook is the small, fragile thing sitting, illogically, in the rubble.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/yes-the-supreme-court-rebuked-trump