WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has taken his wins, and more notably his losses, at the U.S. Supreme Court quite personally.
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It is a court he shaped with three nominees during his first term and he has frequently expressed admiration when the court rules his way, only to turn sharply critical when it delivers him a defeat.
On Monday, the court rejected his administration’s planned restrictions on mail ballots for the midterm elections and by the morning on Tuesday, Trump took to social media to denigrate the decision and the justices he had appointed who rejected Trump’s argument.
None of the three justices wrote about their rationale for joining the majority opinion, though Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated he might see things differently if the election wasn’t coming up so quickly. Of the nine-member court, only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito fully agreed with the administration.
Trump’s rebuke also resurfaced his frustration over losses on tariffs and birthright citizenship — two other issues where the conservative majority court has checked the power of the Republican president.
The court has let Trump move ahead with much of his agenda
The justices have handed the president nearly two dozen victories in emergency appeals, often lifting lower court orders that had blocked key aspects of his boundary-testing second-term agenda. While technically temporary, those decisions have largely allowed his administration to push ahead with his crackdown on immigration, ban on transgender people serving in the military and dismantling of the Department of Education.
He also got significantly more power over federal regulatory agencies that Congress had created to operate independently when the court found presidents can fire those leaders at will. Another ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act allowed his call for redistricting for partisan advantage to proceed.
Those decisions, though, achieved longtime goals of the conservative legal movement. “They’re the kind of cases that, for the most part, it doesn’t matter what administration would have brought them, the court would have come out the same place,” said Erin Murphy, an appellate attorney who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. She spoke at a Tuesday panel at Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute.
Trump also has been dealt high-profile losses
Trump’s record has been more mixed, though, in cases where the court has gotten a full briefing and heard arguments. The justices struck down his far-reaching tariffs on nearly every other country, his restrictions on birthright citizenship and put the brakes on his push to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board.
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His administration is still pursuing those goals in new ways, but for Trump the losses have rankled. On Tuesday, he assailed the justices “for shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
He referenced his own role in appointing three of the nine justices, writing that “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”
The missive came after a high-profile loss on the emergency docket: the high court’s rejection of his proposed restrictions on mail ballots before the fast-approaching midterm elections. Trump has long targeted mail voting even while using it himself, falsely blaming it for his 2020 election loss despite a lack of evidence of fraud.
“I think it’s certainly right that this is not a MAGA court. The court is asserting its independence from the president,” said Don Verrilli, a former Solicitor General under President Barack Obama, also speaking at Georgetown.
The justices have twice rejected Trump-backed cases ahead of the midterms
The mail ballots decision was the second time in as many weeks that the court rejected a Trump-backed appeal related to the election. The high court also refused to allow Missouri to use new elections maps redrawn at Trump’s urging to help Republicans gain an extra seat in the U.S. House.
The high court’s majority didn’t explain either decision in detail, as is typical on their emergency docket. But taken together, the decision seems to signal an unwillingness to intervene in election litigation before the pivotal November contests.
“My guess is there’s a robust majority that doesn’t want to be the decision maker allowing the chaos to happen,” said attorney Roman Martinez, another former Roberts clerk who frequently argues before the court.
The court will likely end up being drawn into election litigation again, though, before or after the votes are cast. “As the rest of this electoral cycle unfolds, I think there is going to be a lot of turbulence around these issues,” Verrilli said.
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