The U.S. Supreme Court may be deeply conservative, but it is not simply a rubber stamp for President Donald Trump, Justice Elena Kagan said Thursday.
Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, told an audience of lawyers and judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit in Bellevue, Washington, that at significant times, on some big issues, “the court has checked the executive branch.”
The court has sided with the Trump administration in the vast majority of cases to come before it so far, including largely upholding his immigration crackdown and expanding Trump’s authority over federal regulatory agencies. But Kagan pointed to key rulings where the president did not get what he sought, such as decisions rejecting Trump’s sweeping tariffs and his efforts to strip birthright citizenship from the children of people who are in the U.S. illegally.
“Is this court very conservative? Does it do a bunch of things that are out of the playbook of the conservative legal movement that I think are deeply wrong? You know, yes,” Kagan said. “But is this court the kind of puppet for the current administration? I think definitely not.”
Polling has found public trust in the Supreme Court at historic lows in recent years, and a number of critics of the current court have suggested political motivations on the part of its justices. Trump has personally assailed justices who rule against him in stark terms. One liberal justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, said in May after the court struck down a majority-Black district in Louisiana and weakened the Voting Rights Act that the institution risked being seen as political.
