The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) The Supreme Court is, without question, a political court. The October 2025 term just ended proves it beyond any doubt.
Conservative law Professor William Baude, conceding that Trump’s abuse of power is “outrageous,” argues the court is no rubber stamp. He says it’s hard to recall when “a court with six members appointed by the president’s party and three of his own appointees ruled against him on at least three different things he seemed to care a lot about in one term,” referring to the birthright citizenship, tariffs and voting by mail cases.
Legal commentator Elie Honig argued in Café last week that some of this term’s 6-3 or 7-2 decisions are attributable more to differences in judicial methodology than to politics. His argument cites the National Guard and Mifepristone as cases which went against Trump (at least, on a temporary basis), glosses over the asylum and Temporary Protected Status cases and ignores the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance and defeated claims of transgender athletes, cases Trump is happy about.
But liberal law professor Stephen Vladeck analogizes the rare swivels of the court’s conservative majority to “the arsonist who shows up with a fire extinguisher.” Vladeck concludes that the term just ended was “bleak,” and I agree with him.
The October 2025 term was about as supremely partisan as they come. Vladeck noted in a social media post that there were 20 total rulings in cases argued this term that split the court 5-4 or 6-3, and the Democratic appointees were all on the same side in 19 of them.
True, some of the court’s biggest rulings of the term didn’t put all six Republican appointees in the majority and all three Democrats in dissent, but far more did than last term or the term before. That one or two Republican appointees sometimes crossed over doesn’t prove a lack of faith so much as it suggests that there are some legal bright lines even they as lawyers wouldn’t dare cross.
Nevertheless, there is a cold comfort. Chief Justice Roberts formed a shifting coalition of justices to block Trump’s most outrageous power grabs, including the abuse of an emergency tariff statute, unconstitutional rewriting of citizenship definitions and a plainly pretextual effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
But the votes were disturbingly close — 5 to 4 on Cook, 6 to 3 on the constitutional basis for birthright citizenship and 6 to 3 on tariffs, with the three liberals the only consistent votes against overwhelming presidential power.
A five-justice majority in Trump v. Barbara reaffirmed the longstanding principle that any person born in the United States is a citizen. But perhaps the most striking feature of the case was that in what should have been a 9-0 or at least a 7-2 decision, Trump lost by a whisker. This is the most unconstitutional thing Trump has done. And it came razor close to succeeding.
The birthright citizenship ruling comes with a sigh of relief. Roberts wrote a cogent majority opinion about why the history of the 14th Amendment provides citizenship to almost everyone who is born here, regardless of whether their parents arrived legally or illegally. We now can breathe easy about the executive order signed by Trump his first day in office.
Justice Samuel Alito called the majority ruling “a serious mistake.” Mistake? At one point, Roberts said that the only support for a key aspect of the dissent’s theory is a funeral oration for Lincoln, calling Alito’s arguments essentially nonsensical.
Then there are the cases of Slaughter and Cook. Slaughter overturned a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent. The six conservatives sacrificed the will of Congress and a lot of careful scholarship on the altar of the longstanding conservative goal: a unitary executive.
Now, Trump is now free to fire any of the heads or members of most independent agencies and regulators, with a “bespoke” exception for the Federal Reserve. We don’t need to speculate about what it means for Trump to exert direct political control over the day-to-day operations of executive branch agencies. Consider his malign influence on the Department of Justice, or military promotions at the Department of Defense. And I could go on.
Slaughter empowers the president to do outrageous things like when he pressured ABC to muzzle Jimmy Kimmel and ordered CBS to fire Stephen Colbert because they were critical of him or his wife — except now he can wrap himself in the Constitution when he does so.
Then there is Louisiana v. Callais, eviscerating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The opinion preceded the shadow docket order in Allen v. Milligan greenlighting Alabama’s use of a map that the lower court had found was the result of intentional racial discrimination. Bottom line, Blacks disenfranchised in the South.
How do I assess the entire term? The Supreme Court voted for the Republicans and Trump whenever it had a chance to do so and checked Trump where it had no plausible alternative but to do so. At the end of the day, it vastly expanded his ability to abuse his authority, “a power unknown even to the English crown against which the Founders revolted,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her Slaughter dissent.
James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and a published legal analyst.
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