The NPR Politics Podcast - This Supreme Court term gave presidents a lot more power

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

The U.S. Supreme Court term that ended last week greatly expanded power not just for President Trump but for future presidents, too. It also gave Republicans an advantage in this year’s midterm election. We discuss the biggest cases and look ahead to cases the court plans to hear in the fall.This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, Supreme Court and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and senior political correspondent Tamara Keith.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Another Supreme Court term ended last week. And it was pretty monumental. The court made decisions on cases affecting elections and voting, presidential power over federal agencies, immigration and transgender rights. So what can we take away from all of this? And what's coming when the court returns this fall? Let's talk about it. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I'm Ashley Lopez. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Supreme Court. And I'm Tamara Keith's senior political correspondent. Carrie, I want to start like broadly here. I'm curious if you saw any through lines or themes that connected some of the decisions this term. Like so much in Washington, it was about executive power, the power of the president. The Supreme Court, in a few cases, ruled against President Trump, cases that really mattered to him. But mostly it was a big term for executive power that the court handed, not just to Trump, but also to future presidents.

I'm thinking here of several of the immigration cases. Like the court's victory that it handed Trump over his decision to end temporary protected status for people from Haiti and Syria and potentially with aftershocks for some of the other TPS programs too. And also the decision which basically got rid of a 90-something-year-old precedent, which gave the president a whole bunch more power over agencies, federal agencies we used to think were independent. And I'm talking here about a case involving the former federal trade commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, who was fired by Trump. He didn't give any cause. He basically just said under his Article 2 power under the Constitution, he could get rid of her. The Supreme Court said that's fine by them. Yeah.

And it's not just that they were thought to be independent. They were created by Congress to be independent. They were structured in that way. But the court said, nah, that infringes on the president's article. two powers. Well, the court majority also said that basically if somebody is exercising the power of the executive branch, the president shouldn't be saddled with people in those kinds of jobs that he doesn't want to work with or doesn't want working for him. Yeah, I want to stick with the Rebecca Slaughter case. And I want you to give me examples of like what some of the bigger effects of this could be. These

agencies do a lot of things, do a lot of regulating and they were made independent for a reason. What could be the ramifications of this ruling? Well over a dozen, agencies, some of which are very important, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency that regulates nuclear power, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which, among other things, assesses children's toys for their safety and effectiveness. In all of these agencies, the president could be able to fire members without giving any cause at all. And there's an argument to be made that the logic, the court majority, used here, in the firing of the single federal trade commission member could extend all the way down the

federal bureaucracy into many, many more positions. Yeah. And I think one of the questions is if these people are not independent, if these commissioners are not independent, if they have to worry about being fired by the president at any given moment, will they make difficult decisions? Will they do things that they know will upset the president? And, you know, traditionally going back, yeah, sometimes these commissioners, because they're appointed on staggered terms and they're definitely holdovers, sometimes they do make decisions that the president wouldn't like because that was their responsibility. And one other potential implication. I'm hearing a lot of law professors and other people who are experts in the government talk about this. You know, the structure of many of these boards is that Congress allowed for.

for several members to be the same party, political party as the president, and others to be of the opposing party. Is it possible, for instance, for President Trump to fire all the Democratic appointees on a board, keeping in place just the Republican appointees? And how would that work over time? And then you get whiplash, right? So you have a Republican president now. He says, I want all these people to reflect my view. Then three years from now, two years from now, you could end up with a Democratic president. who's like, all right, let's get rid of all of them and I'll put all my people in. And the sort of

stability that the business community talks about wanting, you wouldn't have it because it would just there'd be that whiplash. Yeah. But they would have more influence. Yes, the business community, depending on who the president is, would have more influence. But you could get a very liberal president who could make dramatic changes in the other direction. And then the business community wouldn't like that at all. Yeah. Well, Carrie, I do want to gut check here because the court has been expanding executive power for some terms now. I mean, in terms of like the last few sessions of the Supreme Court, how does this sort of rate? Is it moving more in the direction of executive power? Is this sort of like, like, where does it fall on the continuum, I guess is my question.

Yeah. So as you noted, the court's been moving in this direction for a while now. It's really been a long time project of several of these justices who actually worked earlier in their careers in the executive branch, either for the White House or in senior roles at the Justice Department. I'm thinking here of the Chief Justice, John Roberts, of Justice Sam Alito, even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was occupied an important job in the George W. Bush presidency. All these people have a pretty strong conception of executive power, and they've been moving toward this idea that there should be a unitary executive, you know, that the executive branch really is more important and more politically accountable, they would argue. But one interesting theme of this term in part is that the Supreme Court has been grasping more power for itself. It's actually been, in some cases, throwing out the findings of lower courts, very detailed findings, and moving pretty fast to reject some of what the lower courts have found and impose its own authority. This is Howard University Law Professor Sherilyn Eiffel speaking in an event last week.

You know, we are in the midst of an absolute power grab by this court, an absolute power grab. Not as though the Supreme Court didn't have a lot of power already. It is the 800-pound gorilla. And the president, in terms of power, he was pretty happy with this court term in a social media post about the slaughter decision. And there are actually several of them. He writes, this decision gives tremendous additional power back to the presidency where it belongs. Yeah, I do want to talk about elections, though, because the court issued a few rulings that shape either this upcoming midterm or future elections. And notably, that would be Louisiana versus Calais, which effectively dismantled what remained of the Voting Rights Act.

Carrie, can you remind us what this ruling did? Yeah, remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was perhaps the most important piece of legislation in American history. people marched and bled for that law to come about. The Supreme Court back in 2013 dismantled part of the Voting Rights Act, and then this term, they also made it much, much harder to sue under a second part. This is Section 2 of the law that deals with majority minority districts. These are districts where racial or ethnic minorities make up more than half the population. And in this case, Justice Sam Alito found that the maps that Louisiana was trying to draw amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. He basically says that you can't take race into account in that way.

And the decision makes it a lot harder to prove that a state engaged in some kind of discrimination in the line drawing because the plaintiffs would need to prove under this new standard. that there was intentional discrimination on the basis of race. And because of a whole bunch of other Supreme Court precedents in recent years, it's hard for courts to assess a partisan gerrymanders. In other words, the court has basically thrown up its hand and said, if you do this for partisan political reasons, it's not our business. So people who want to draw these maps in ways that may be discriminatory can argue they did it for political reasons, not for racist reasons. And it's going to be difficult for future citizens and lawmakers to challenge

discriminatory maps as a result. I think it's also just really important to note the timing here because this decision came down earlier than many of the other decisions in this session. And it came down early enough that several red states were able to redraw their congressional district lines to reduce the number of minority and majority districts and increase the number of likely Republican districts. They were able to do that in time for these midterms because they were given that opportunity by the court issuing their decision early enough. Maybe worth noting this case actually was on the docket last term. It actually got re-argued. So in terms of acting early, some people would argue they acted late.

Secondly, this court created a principle over itself called the Purcell principle, thank you, basically saying that judges should not tinker with election, rules and processes too close to an election because it'll cause chaos. Actually, you do with the south of time, right? Well, in Louisiana, they had already set out ballots. So the House elections that were already underway, especially if you're an absentee voter, got canceled. So a lot of votes were just thrown out. And this is the reason that that even exists is it creates a lot of chaos for voters. Yeah. And so what this Louisiana case involving the Voting Rights Act has come to stand for, according to some election law experts, is that the Purcell principle may apply to lower court judges, but it sure as heck doesn't apply to the Supreme Court, which can do mostly whatever it wants. But, you know, the Republican Party and President Trump didn't run the table on voting in election cases. Actually, I know you were looking at. one in particular. Yeah. So there was a case regarding like grace periods for mail ballots. That was a case that was actually brought by the Trump campaign in 2024 and the Republican National Committee. This is

something that Republicans have been angry about for a while, which is that does it, about a dozen states, little more than a dozen states, give all their mail-in voters the ability to like have their vote counted, even their postmarked, I should say, mail ballot counted, even if it comes in a little late, which is just like a way to help voters out. If there's bad weather, things happen. Republicans have been mad about this for a couple of years. And now on the court said, you know, we have no problem with this for now. I mean, I think a good thing to know about the court is sometimes they sort of wait for better times to move in a more conservative direction. But yeah.

All right. We need to take a quick break more in a moment. And we're back. And I do want to talk a little bit more about some cases that didn't go President Trump's way. Let's start with a case that upheld birthright citizenship. Carrie, did anything surprise you about this ruling? Yes, that it was so close. Remember, until about 10 years or so, nobody serious was talking about the idea that babies born on American soil, not being Americans.

And then came a bunch of lawyers allied with the Trump administration and the MAGA movement, kind of chipping away at the text of the 14th Amendment and getting a case all the way up to the Supreme Court. And Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority decision here saying, no, the 14th Amendment says, What it means. There are only a few exceptions, tiny exceptions for things like the children of foreign diplomats on American soil. But otherwise, babies born here are Americans. That said, the holding on the Constitution was five to four, five to four for an idea that's been basically universally accepted for over 100 years. And that is what struck Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. He was speaking. speaking in an event last week here in Washington. Given the United States history, given the text of 14th Amendment, given the precedent from 1898, given tradition, it should have been unanimous. On the other hand, keep in mind here that justices Thomas and Alito have not once voted against the Trump administration in any of the cases.

You know, there's been a lot of back and forth among legal analysts and experts about how conservative this court is, how ideological it is. And we have a little bit more evidence based on the numbers from this term. There are something like 13 cases in all where the court ruled six to three along ideological lines, including some very important ones, not birthright, but many others that were important to the administration and people were at large. Yeah, the court looking more like Congress. Which if you go way back is surprising. But in the modern time, I think that the expectation that the court is somehow floating above partisan politics, that has really gone away. And we now know the center of the court based on the people who are in the majority, most often this term, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney-Barrant.

Well, I do want to talk about some places where Trump may not have fared well before the court, but some conservative principles might have. the vast majority of Trump's tariffs were ruled illegal. And the court said for, at least for the moment, that Trump can't fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook. I mean, what do you guys make of these exceptions to the expansion of presidential power? I think they're significant in part because they mattered so much to the president. The president has been verbally beating up his own nominees on the court for ruling against him on tariffs and other issues. And he took it very personally. That being said, as the president knows, the court may have invalidated his use of a specific law to impose these sweeping tariffs, but there are other laws on the books he could use and is using to issue tariffs. The second case involves Lisa Cook, the firing of Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook. Well, that's on pause for now, but really to be determined because the court has left the president some room to come up with a theory.

under which he could fire Lisa Cook. He's been arguing she engaged in some kind of mortgage mail feasance. She says that's just flat wrong and she didn't get an opportunity to defend herself or contest those claims. Well, she's going to get an opportunity to contest those claims moving forward. But the president may well try again. Yeah, I mean, the court certainly gave him a potential roadmap in both of these cases to make another run at it. Trump likes to win. He does not like to lose.

he loses. He doesn't like to admit that he's losing. And so in this case, as well as the mail and ballot case, he immediately was talking about workarounds, which isn't surprising. The other thing I would just note about these two cases, the tariff case and as well, the Federal Reserve Board case, both of those sort of lean on the side of the business community and lean on the side of the stability of financial markets lean on the side of essentially the bond market would be happy with these decisions. And you also had another case involving Monsanto. That is the company behind the pesticide roundup. And in that case, Monsanto came out ahead. Yeah. Well, Carrie, I want to look ahead to the fall before we go. What cases are you watching that the court has said it will hear in the fall? Yeah, two early ones are on my radar. The first.

are cases involving bans to AR-15 assault-style rifles. These are enormously popular weapons around the United States. They've been used in way too many mass shootings, including the massacre of little children and their teachers at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut many years ago. A second case that's on my radar is out of Arizona. It involves a law that says voters need to show some kind of proof. of citizenship when they're voting. And there are also some implications there for maybe efforts to purge voter rolls close to an election. We know that's been a priority of many Republican secretaries of state around the country. And finally, because the court has a very active emergency or interim docket, the term may have ended, but I'm expecting more to happen over the

summer and before they've returned in October for sure. Oh, yeah, while their conversation is the shadow docket. No rest of it. for the weary. All right, let's leave it there for today. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Supreme Court. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics as well. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.