The Supreme Court could finally be preparing to challenge Donald Trump's presidential power grab this year, according to legal analysts tracking the high court's trajectory.
Matt Ford, staff writer at The New Republic, wrote Wednesday that while the conservative majority has largely rubber-stamped Trump's agenda in his second term, recent decisions suggest the justices may be ready to draw some lines. A telling sign came just before Christmas when the court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago for immigration enforcement. The ruling forced the president to withdraw National Guard units from multiple cities.
"The Illinois ruling is a hopeful sign for those who want the nation’s highest court to aspire to something higher than greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s half-hearted would-be dictatorship," wrote Ford, noting that, "more importantly," the decision proved the high court "can contain Trump when it wishes to do so.
"If the court isn’t careful, people might actually expect it to act like a coequal branch of government once again," Ford chided.
The court's biggest test comes in Trump v. Barbara, he wrote, which will determine whether the president can unilaterally strip birthright citizenship from children of some immigrants. The case hinges on the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause.
"It is hard to trust the Supreme Court to get this case right. The conservative majority’s track record is far from comforting," he warned. In 2024, the justices "butchered" a clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to allow Trump to seek a second term despite the Constitution banning officeholding for insurrectionists, he noted. And a few months later, the conservative justices handed down the concept of "'presidential immunity' out of thin air."
"The court’s sloppiness runs so deep that the justices cannot be trusted to get it right even if Trump loses," Ford warned. "Some of its worst decisions have been framed as compromises: Roberts’s immunity ruling took pains to reject Trump’s view of the matter, as if he was staking out some sort of median position, while the court also invented a custom exception for the Federal Reserve when it effectively overturned ninety years of precedent in May."
As such, he noted the stakes in Barbara are "much higher," as any compromise could strip citizenship from millions of people, exposing them to deportation and "destroying their lives."
