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Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said Thursday that while the nation’s highest court has a conservative majority, it is not a “rubber stamp” for President Trump despite multiple rulings in his favor in major cases.
Speaking at a judicial conference hosted by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Kagan said the court has maintained its independence by checking executive power in a number of cases.
“I don’t see this as a court that is just like, ‘We’re just going to rubber stamp what the current administration does.’ You know, quite the opposite,” Kagan said at the conference in Bellevue, Washington. “I think that that is a bad rap.”
The liberal justice pointed to decisions striking down Trump’s sweeping tariffs and rejecting his efforts to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented migrants.
“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.”
She described the court’s invalidation of Trump’s tariffs as one of the most consequential rebukes of a sitting president.
“Tariffs are probably the key policy issue for this president. I mean, something he campaigned on, he ran on, he cared an enormous amount about,” she said. “I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a sitting president.”
Kagan acknowledged disagreeing with many recent decisions, including rulings she said “eviscerated” the Voting Rights Act.
“You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration,” she said.
The justice also reflected on Trump’s attendance at oral arguments over his birthright citizenship order earlier this year — the first time a sitting president attended Supreme Court arguments.
“He was just like a person who came in and sat down and then had to listen to an argument,” Kagan said, adding that many in the audience could not see him.
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