From presidential immunity to abortion rights, critics of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 right-wing supermajority have accused the justices of being overly deferential to President Donald Trump. Yet Trump is furious with the High Court for parting company with him at times, including key rulings on tariffs, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and birthright citizenship.
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And according to the Washington Post, he is ramping up his campaign to get around SCOTUS rulings he doesn’t like.
“Over the past few weeks,” journalist Julian Mark reports in the Post, “President Donald Trump has made it clear that he will not take Supreme Court decisions as the final word on some of his most cherished priorities. The president has introduced new tariffs, renewed efforts to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued new executive orders to limit birthright citizenship. While experts said the moves do not signal outright defiance of the High Court, they nonetheless push the limits of the rulings that Trump lost earlier this summer.”
Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts just outside Boston, told the Post that “without question,” Trump is “challenging the bounds of theCourt’s opinions.”
Mark notes that Trump “is not the first president to look for ways around adverse Supreme Court rulings.” Former President Joe Biden, for example, was disappointed when the Roberts Court “struck down” his “plan to forgive student loan debt” — and wasted no time announcing a “separate plan to forgive the debt.”
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But David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, told the Post, “Most presidents treated Supreme Court rulings as dispositive of the issues involved rather than as technical documents to be evaded…. The second-term President Trump appears to have much less regard for the other branches of the federal government than the first-term one did.”
Mark points out that former President Barack Obama was highly critical of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, he did so in a “more genteel manner” than Trump — whose administration has “a tense relationship with the federal judiciary more broadly.”
“A Washington Post analysis last year found that Trump and his appointees were accused of flouting the courts in more than a third of the 160-plus lawsuits against the administration in which a judge had issued a substantive ruling,” Mark observes. “The administration has also sparred with the judiciary over Trump’s picks to lead federal prosecutor’s offices.”
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