As a new term begins, the justices have continually failed to provide a check on presidential power – with disastrous consequences
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wo 0f the world’s best-known authoritarian leaders – Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president – have each had at least 15 years at their country’s helm to pack the courts with loyalists and to pressure and intimidate judges. And no surprise, judges in those countries have repeatedly done what Orbán and Erdoğan want.
Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the US supreme court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the court’s nine justices. Nevertheless, the court’s conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office. The six conservative justices have fallen into line much like Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges, even though the supreme court’s justices have life tenure to insulate them from political pressures.
With the court’s new term beginning on Monday, many Americans are dismayed that the conservative justices have been so submissive to Trump, the most authoritarian-minded president in US history. Notwithstanding the US’s celebrated system of checks and balances, the justices have utterly failed to provide the checks on Trump that many legal scholars had expected. In ruling for Trump, the chief justice, John Roberts, and the other conservatives have let him gut the Department of Education, fire Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board members, and strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The rightwing supermajority has also let Trump halt $4bn in foreign aid, fire tens of thousands of federal employees despite contractual protections and deport people to countries where they have no connection.
