The U.S. Supreme Court left some of its biggest decisions for last this session. Justices delivered a series of major opinions with consequences that will impact nearly every corner of the country.

Guest

Carolyn Shapiro, professor of law and co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Stephen Vladeck, professor of Federal Courts at the Georgetown University Law Center.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I 

AMORY SIVERTSON: This was a Supreme Court term that kept returning to the same fundamental question: how much power should the president of the United States have? In its final days of decisions for this session, the Court delivered a series of consequential rulings that have reshaped the balance between the presidency, Congress and the courts.

On immigration, the justices reinforced constitutional protections for birthright citizenship, but cleared the way for the administration to pursue some of its most aggressive border and deportation policies. On civil liberties, the Court issued rulings with lasting implications for individual rights, privacy, and the limits of government authority.

And in a decision that has left some legal experts particularly concerned, the conservative majority dramatically expanded presidential power by giving the White House the authority to fire the leaders of independent federal agencies, overturning nearly a century of precedent, redrafting the architecture of the administrative state, and blurring the boundaries of the executive office.

Today On Point, we’re looking at the larger story of this Supreme Court term and what this latest batch of decisions will mean for the government and the people of this country moving forward. Joining me are two eminent experts on the Court. Carolyn Shapiro is a professor of law and co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Carolyn, welcome to On Point.

CAROLYN SHAPIRO: Thank you so much for having me.

SIVERTSON: And Stephen Vladeck is here as well. He’s a professor of law and of federal court specifically at the Georgetown University Law Center. Stephen, welcome to you.

STEPHEN VLADECK: Thanks for having me.

SIVERTSON: So we have this whole program to dig into the decisions that make up this Supreme Court session, but just to set the stage, I’m curious to hear from each of you, your reactions to this Supreme Court session in a word.

Stephen, what about you?

VLADECK: I guess the word is bleak. And I guess we can we can elaborate on why as we go.

SIVERTSON: We shall. We shall. Carolyn, how about you?

SHAPIRO: I would say destructive. Okay. And again, I can certainly elaborate on that.

SIVERTSON: Okay. We will. Bleak and destructive. Okay. Many of the major decisions this session fall into categories more or less, so we’re going to take those categories one by one, starting with immigration.

In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the court upheld birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, striking down an executive order signed by President Trump on day one of his second term that’s been seen as part of his immigration crackdown. And this order tried to bar citizenship from people born in the U.S. to parents who are either entered the country illegally or who don’t have permanent status, such as people living and working here on temporary visas.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the decision, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights. The Framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.” Carolyn, was this decision a surprise in any way?

SHAPIRO: The outcome was not a surprise.

It is not actually; it should not have been a hard case. This 14th Amendment is quite clear in its language. We have well over 100 years of precedent and 150 years of practice understanding that the 14th Amendment means what it says. If you’re born in the United States, you’re a citizen of the United States.

What was a surprise to me is just how close it was. There were three justices who would have upheld the executive order, and Justice Kavanaugh, who agreed with the outcome, disagreed with the majority as to whether or not the Constitution allows the executive order. He said it was prohibited by statute, but not by the 14th Amendment itself.

SIVERTSON: And so Stephen, remind us, how did we get to the point of the highest court debating a nearly 160-year-old amendment?

VLADECK: Yeah, I think part of the issue is that President Trump has been successful in putting on the wall an argument that really was off the wall as recently as 10 years ago.

It was only because he adopted this executive order on the first day of his presidency that called that Supreme Court precedent into question, and that frankly was inconsistent with multiple statutes Congress has enacted. That executive order never went into effect. It was blocked by a whole bunch of lower courts.

The Supreme Court paused those rulings last summer on procedural grounds, but then they just re-blocked it. And we got here because of a concerted effort by the Trump administration to move the conversation on this topic pretty sharply to the right. And even though the executive order was struck down by the court yesterday, I agree with Carolyn entirely, the real headline to me is that it was this close, that four justices think the Constitution doesn’t mean what the Supreme Court said in 1898.

That’s a radical shift in what I would have thought as recently as 18 months ago.

SIVERTSON: We have a clip here from the oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, which took place back in April. We hear first from the US Solicitor General D. John Sauer arguing on behalf of the government, followed by Chief Justice John Roberts.

D. JOHN SAUER: We’re in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to you, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.

JOHN ROBERTS: It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.

SAUER: It is, and as Justice Scalia said, I think in the case that Justice Alito was referring to you’ve got a constitutional provision that addresses certain evils, and it should be extended to reasonably comparable evils. He said that about statutory interpretation. I think the same principle applies here, and I think we quote that in our brief.

SIVERTSON: So Carolyn, you mentioned Brett Kavanaugh saying that he sided with the majority, but he dissented on the idea that Trump’s executive order violated the Constitution. Trump has now suggested that Congress could undo birthright citizenship.

Could that happen?

SHAPIRO: Not without a constitutional amendment, unless the personnel of the Supreme Court changes. So no based on this opinion, Congress does not have the power to change birthright citizenship. President may feel otherwise, but that doesn’t make it.

SIVERTSON: Stephen, where do you expect the birthright citizenship debate to go from here?

Could this deepen the political divide?

VLADECK: I think the political divide will obviously deepen. We’re seeing a ton of messaging by President Trump and his supporters over the last 24 hours trying to continue to fire up the base about this. But I think the larger point is not so much to actually make a dent in the law governing birthright citizenship, as it is to really just animate voters when it comes to immigration more generally.

And that’s where I think it’s really important to not talk about yesterday’s decision in the birthright citizenship case in a vacuum. Really, there have been a host of immigration decisions by the Supreme Court this term, almost all of which President Trump won. So I think the larger point is that you have a court that is endorsing most of President Trump’s aggressive immigration policies, and even when it doesn’t, it’s only blocking those policies and rejecting the arguments by the skin of their teeth.

SIVERTSON: Okay, let’s go to another one of those decisions. 6-3 decision last Thursday, the court’s conservative majority ruled in Mullin v. Doe that the president has the ability to end temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti and Syria. But the implications are much broader than that Stephen?

VLADECK: Much, much broader. So it’s 350,000 Haitians. It’s another 6,000 to 8,000 Syrians, but actually we’re talking about upwards of 17 different countries and more than 1.5 million people, Amory, who, as of last Wednesday, were in the United States in a context in which they were allowed to be free.

They were allowed to work. But all of a sudden because of the Supreme Court decision, now they’re vulnerable to being arrested, deported, and removed, notwithstanding no change in what they’ve done. It really is a remarkable shift in the amount of unreviewable discretion the president has to basically grant this temporary status and then take it away even for the most arbitrary or seemingly racist reasons.

I would put that ruling up there with the birthright citizenship ruling in terms of importance, even if it’s not garnering the same kind of public attention.

SIVERTSON: And the question of whether, how much race had to do with this did come up. This was a big question about, is racial prejudice at the center of Trump’s motivation to end TPS for Haitian migrants?

Justice Samuel Alito wrote that there was insufficient evidence of this, but in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, she cited specific comments from Trump about Haiti, referring to it as, quote, “an [expletive] country” and mentioning Trump’s unfounded accusations during the 2024 election that Haitian migrants were eating their pets.

We heard some of this pushback as well during oral arguments. We hear first from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, followed by the government’s attorney, D. John Sauer, and then a response from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: This is whether a race-based classification can be or should be permitted to be a motivating factor.

SAUER: I strongly disagree with that. Regents assumed that Arlington Heights would apply, and it said these kinds of statements are unilluminating. They raise no plausible inference of discriminatory animus.

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: And what about poisoning the blood of Americans?

SAUER: If you look at those statements in context, again, they’re clearly talking about problems, like crime.

JACKSON: What about bad genes? Bad genes, quote-unquote.

SAUER: Again, poverty —

JACKSON: Also, not racially?

SAUER: They presented them wrenched from context. You can look at each one of those statements. They’re talking about problems of crime, poverty, welfare dependency. Again, problems that have been emphasized again and again by not just President Trump, not just the secretary, but many others who favor a tough immigration policy.

And if the position of the district courts here —

JACKSON: So the position of the United States is that we have to have an actual racial epithet that we don’t, we aren’t allowed to look at all the context to include the president’s insistence that immigrants from certain countries, largely, if not almost exclusively, countries with African immigrants Black African immigrants, are not allowed and calling these sorts of names and the types of things he said about Haiti.

SIVERTSON: Carolyn, part of what’s at odds here is the word temporary, the idea that people from countries with TPS were never meant to be here permanently. El Salvador, for example, has a temporary protected status since 2001, 25 years. So are the optics of a seemingly not so temporary program working against it here?

SHAPIRO: I think that may be a political problem for the program and it’s one of many parts of our immigration system that would benefit from some reform, although certainly not the reform that, I would not support the reforms that the president would. But what’s important here is that the law provides for the president to decide when this country that the folks have come from is safe enough for them to return. Because the whole premise of TPS is that they came from somewhere that’s unsafe.

The fact that they’ve been here for 25 years doesn’t change the question, is it safe for them to go back? And the law requires revisiting that question periodically every six months, every 18 months, depends on the specifics. The law also provides that at the end, if the president does choose to, either way, to end TPS or not, that final decision can’t be reviewed by courts, but there’s a whole bunch of steps that the president is supposed to go through along the way, a bunch of consultations, which with different parts of the administration, for example, gathering information, figuring out is it really safe?

And here the court says, “Yeah that’s basically optional now.”

Part II

SIVERTSON: So in a 6-3 ruling last week, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the Department of Homeland Security can turn away people who are seeking asylum at the U.S. border. Now, in asylum applications, the process requires the applicant to be physically present in the U.S., but U.S. Customs and Border Protection have implemented a metering policy in which officers stationed at the border can prevent asylum seekers from stepping onto U.S. soil.

So this case questioned what it means to arrive in the U.S. and where asylum seekers are expected to go if they’re turned away. Here’s Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Assistant to the Solicitor General Vivek Suri in oral arguments back in March.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: The UN obligation is if you’re a refugee who’s arriving at the port of entry, if you’re knocking on the door and I’m staring you in the face, you have an obligation to at least listen to my application. And you can tell me to wait. You can put me in a safer place to wait. You can do a bunch of different things. What you can’t do is just turn me back from the border.

VIVEK SURI: And the second answer is we’re not shipping people back to Haiti or whichever country the person might be coming from —

SOTOMAYOR: No, you’re just telling them walk back.

SIVERTSON: Stephen, this approach, limiting the number of people who can actually apply for asylum, this predates the Trump administration, right? Where did this start?

VLADECK: Yeah, it did. It goes all the way back actually to the late Obama administration when we really were facing a crisis at the border with regard to just how many folks were trying to get into the United States.

And I think what this really underscores is that not all of our immigration problems in this country are simply a feature of the Trump administration, even if President Trump has been aggressive. Really, what this case underscores, like so many of the other immigration cases the Supreme Court gets, is how little Congress has done actually to respond, going back to what we were talking about before the break, to any of the hard policy questions that these changed circumstances raise.

Amory, it’s been 40 years since Congress passed a statute that did comprehensive immigration reform. And so what that means is that you have presidents of both parties left to adopt increasingly strained interpretations of these old statutes, and it puts the Supreme Court in a position where the justices’ own preferences and their own ideology ends up being able to play more of a role, because the relevant statutes are so old and so ill-fitted for the times in which they’re being applied.

I think this is just another example of that.

SIVERTSON: So Carolyn, how dramatic of an impact do you think this ruling will have on the number of migrants who receive asylum or much less are given the opportunity to even apply for it?

SHAPIRO: It depends on how the Trump administration decides to move forward.

The metering program has actually stopped. In fact, there was some argument about whether or not this case was even moot because of that. But it does give the president permission essentially to put up gates, or fences or post border guards outside, just outside the border and as Justice Sotomayor was describing, say to people, “No, you can’t come in, and because you can’t come in, we don’t have to listen to anything you have to say.”

At least the metering program did contemplate that at some point some people would be able to make their case. Nothing in this opinion suggests that’s a necessary requirement, that it could be just a total, a ban on allowing people to enter the country if they’re going to ask for asylum.

SIVERTSON: Okay. I want to shift gears now. We have so much to talk about. So I’m going to shift gears to Supreme Court decisions that had to do with voting and elections. Starting with one that had to do with redistricting. A 6-3 decision, this was back in April, the court struck down a new congressional map for a majority Black district in Louisiana.

Justice Alito called the map a, quote, “unconstitutional gerrymander,” but others have said that this decision leaves the Voting Rights Act, which protects against racial discrimination in elections, hollowed out and toothless. Stephen, explain that for us.

VLADECK: Sure. So the way that the majority in the Callais case came to the conclusion that Louisiana’s second map was unconstitutional was by holding that the first map that had been basically the one that led the courts to redraw it, the one that provoked the second map, basically to hold that the first map was not itself unlawful, even though it diluted the votes of Black voters.

And by saying that, the Voting Rights Act didn’t actually invalidate the first map, the court removed the justification for drawing a second majority-minority district in the second map by changing the standard, Amory, by basically saying it’s not enough to show that a map dilutes the votes of minority voters.

You have to show that was actually the specific intent of the legislators. And if their intent was only to dilute the votes of the other party, which in states like Louisiana is often the same thing, that’s fine. That was a massive shift in our understanding of the Voting Rights Act. It’s one that is going to have massive consequences for vote dilution for the protection of minority voters across the country.

But Amory, it’s also really important to highlight that the Supreme Court went out of its way to make sure that ruling went into effect immediately so that those consequences were not just long-term consequences, but actually ones that we’re going to feel in the middle of and during this midterm election cycle.

That is just as important a part of the story because of how unusual it was on the justices’ part.

SIVERTSON: Yeah. So Carolyn, say more about the implications. Who will feel the effects of this ruling the most? This ruling is going to be felt by minority voters throughout the country, and it’s going to be at least as significant at the state and local level as at the congressional level.

And it’s not just the fact that it hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, it’s also that in a follow-on case involving Alabama the court basically said, “We’re going to make the standard for proving intentional discrimination, which is still illegal, so high that it’s really not going to be possible for most plaintiffs to ever meet it.”

So for example, if you live in a place where you have a city council made up of, say, a multi-member council, if the town decides to shift now from having districts which allow for some minority voters’ preferences to have to serve on the city council, they might decide to switch to an at-large district, if they can say we just think that’s more efficient, even though that will have the effect of making it impossible for minority voters to have representation on that city council, as long as they don’t say the word race or comparable words, the Supreme Court has basically said, that’s all fine.

It doesn’t violate the 15th Amendment. It doesn’t violate the Voting Rights Act.

SIVERTSON: So can states do anything to push back against this?

SHAPIRO: That’s I think somewhat left to be seen but not all that much, in the sense that the Court has basically said if you’re trying to protect minority voters, that’s race discrimination.

So they’ve essentially turned on its head the 15th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act to make trying to protect minority voters, being conscious of that, thinking hard about how to do that in an appropriate way. If that’s your goal, and if you’re saying that’s your goal, that’s race discrimination.

That’s unconstitutional, and so that would, that really restricts a state’s options here.

VLADECK: … We already have one example of the Supreme Court doing that. We tend to focus on the cases that get full argument and briefing and decision from the Supreme Court, but there was a really important ruling on the emergency docket back in March in the case of New York Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, where a state court had interpreted New York’s state constitution to require many of the same things that the Voting Rights Act used to require.

And the Supreme Court, in what really was the first of its kind jumped in and blocked a state trial court ruling before the state supreme court even had a chance to consider the question for exactly the reasons Carolyn articulated. Justice Alito’s concurrence in that case specifically said the state trial court’s ruling was itself a violation of the federal Constitution.

So really what’s needed at this point is a complete overhaul at the federal level of the Voting Rights Act, but also a Supreme Court that is going to, I think, be less inconsistent in how it views both the purposes and the powers that Congress is allowed to provide.

SIVERTSON: And that emergency docket that you mentioned is a whole other can of worms that we might have a chance to discuss here, but let’s keep going on elections.

There was another decision having to do with mail-in ballots. The Court upheld a law in Mississippi saying that mail-in ballots that are postmarked on Election Day have to be counted even if they’re received days later. And then there was a decision about campaign finance. The Court’s conservative majority struck down a federal law limiting the amount of money that political parties can spend on a candidate for office for things like advertising and other campaign expenses.

Brett Kavanaugh said the ruling will allow political parties to, quote, “participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process.” Stephen, your take?

VLADECK: In one sense the second ruling, the campaign finance ruling is the bigger of the two, and also the not entirely surprising given the trajectory of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence.

But I also think it’s right, as other folks have said online, that this is the most important campaign finance decision by the Supreme Court since Citizens United. It’s worth stressing the wall that the Supreme Court just removed. It used to be the case that a candidate and a national committee or a PAC could not coordinate their expenditures.

They could not plan together, for example, how they would run attack ads against the candidate’s opponent. Now they can. What that does is it opens up a huge coffer of national money to individual candidates who might have been struggling to fundraise on their own, basically increases the value of the big dollars that billionaires and corporations can give to the national committees, and then lets the national committees figure out where to spend them.

That would be problematic enough on its own, Amory, but in the process, the court had to overrule a 25-year-old precedent in which the same Supreme Court had held exactly the opposite, that those kinds of limits were generally consistent with the First Amendment. An, I think this is a good example of just how willing the current court is to just shrug its shoulders at precedents when those precedents get in the way.

I think the campaign finance case was the second time in two days earlier this week that the Supreme Court overturned an old precedent just because it wanted to. That’s not how this is supposed to work.

SIVERTSON: And so Carolyn, how are voters going to feel the result of this decision? What will it look like in practice?

SHAPIRO: It’s hard to say how much voters will feel the difference. There’s already, although coordination has been prohibited, what it means to coordinate, that definition has been pretty watered down. And it’s not, it hasn’t been that difficult for PACs and parties to figure out what a candidate might want them to do, even if they’re not technically coordinating.

But I think what we might see in particular in primaries is where there’s a sort of an upstart candidate, like for example, some of the candidates from New York who are challenging incumbents. It’s possible that in those types of cases we’ll see a lot more party money flowing into those races.

SIVERTSON: Okay. We’re gonna shift gears again now to decisions that had to do with personal liberties, if you will. There was a 6-3 decision on Tuesday that the Supreme Court upheld two state laws, one out of West Virginia, another one out of Idaho, that ban transgender women and girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools.

More than two dozen other states have similar bans, which are now also upheld by this decision. And Carolyn, Title IX is at the center of this case. This is the law that bars sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal money. And this law is still very much in place, but opponents of these state bans on transgender women and girls in sports say this ruling is sex-based discrimination.

So is there a future of any common ground here?

SHAPIRO: There are actually two holdings in the case. There’s a holding related to Title IX and a holding related to the Equal Protection Clause. And the justices agreed that at least as the case is presented to the court, the Title IX claim failed.

And in part it fails because of some very specific aspects of Title IX related to authorizing sex-based distinctions in sports. And then the dissenters or the partial dissenters or the liberals would have left open some possible arguments that weren’t made in this case.

But that was the Title IX piece. The more significant, to my mind, analysis was the Equal Protection argument. And on the one hand, the court treated this like a sex-based distinction because it is. And purported to be using the kind of heightened scrutiny, what’s called intermediate scrutiny, where basically the state is supposed to provide a good reason, an important state interest that is substantially related to the restriction that’s being challenged.

That’s what the court said it was doing. What it actually did was quite deferential to the states. And that’s the point on which the liberal justices dissented. But I think most important there is the question that’s left open, is whether, what’s going to happen when cisgender girls or women challenge the states that do allow transgender girls and women to play on their teams? Because there’s already litigation along these lines where some of these cisgender athletes are saying, “It violates my rights, either under Title IX or under the Equal Protection Clause, to have to compete against these transgender athletes.”

And Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, which went on at some length and pretty passionately about how important sports are and how every time, and how they are a zero-sum game. So if there is a transgender athlete who wins, it means there’s a cisgender athlete who loses. I think he’s opening the door certainly to be very sympathetic to those claims.

SIVERTSON: So Stephen, there isn’t great data on just how many people will be personally affected by this ruling. It’s presumably a fairly small number. But this issue has seemingly played this outsized role in the culture war between the two parties. Is that why this case made its way to the Supreme Court?

VLADECK: I think it’s absolutely part of it, and it’s the second term in a row that the court decided a major case about transgender rights. Last term it was gender-affirming medical care in Tennessee. The court has already added an important transgender rights case to its docket for next term. I think there’s also, there’s a cause and effect point here, which is, the justices don’t live in a bubble.

And I think just so many of us live in what are increasingly media echo chambers. I think the justices do, too. And for the Republican appointees, they are awash in the kind of anti-trans rhetoric that you see and hear in right-wing media that you might not see on networks and outlets that are more left leaning.

That means they might over-exaggerate how big of an issue this is, and they might give states more authority and highlight interest that states have in dealing with a problem that’s been made out to be much bigger than it is. But that’s how the Supreme Court rolls. And I think part of the issue, as Carolyn points out, is, does the court really mean to leave this to the states, or as we’re already seeing in the abortion context where that was the promise in Dobbs, what’s the court going to do if and when red states try to actually make it harder for blue states to have different rules?

Part III

SIVERTSON: The job of the highest court has always been to interpret the laws, not to make them, not to get political. The landmark 1803 case Marbury v. Madison is required reading for legal scholars and American history buffs alike. That’s when the Supreme Court officially established the doctrine of judicial review, cementing its role as the ultimate interpreter of the U.S. Constitution.

A quote from then Chief Justice John Marshall speaking unanimously for the court in that decision is literally etched into the walls of the Supreme Court. Quote, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

Today, some Americans might feel like that duty has fallen more into the hands of the executive branch, especially President Donald Trump, who said this in February of 2025.

DONALD TRUMP: Are you not going to comply with it?

MILLS: I’m complying with state and federal laws.

TRUMP: We are the federal law.

SIVERTSON: That was in the first few weeks of President Trump’s returning to the White House when Maine Governor Janet Mills sparred with him over an executive order that barred transgender athletes from playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.

And I’m here with Carolyn Shapiro, professor of Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Stephen Vladeck, professor of the Georgetown University Law Center, digging into these Supreme Court decisions. And I want to turn now to this question of executive power. There were two cases on the Supreme Court’s docket that took a special look at this, especially executive firing power.

So in a 5-4 ruling on Monday, the court prevented President Trump from removing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors after accusing her of mortgage fraud, which Cook denied and sued the president for, or sued the president for her removal. Justice Kavanaugh cited the importance of the Federal Reserve’s independence.

Carolyn, Lisa Cook’s job isn’t necessarily safe at this point though, right?

SHAPIRO: No, her job is not necessarily safe. What the court said is, the president can say, “I’m firing you because of mortgage fraud,” and then she has the opportunity to contest that. Whether or not ultimately he goes forward with firing her, which I presume he will, whether that decision then will be reviewable and whether or not if it is reviewable it will be upheld or overturned are still open questions.

But I will just say the reason I think it’s notable that Chief Justice wrote that opinion is because he also wrote the opinion in Trump v. Slaughter, which I assume we’ll also be talking about, that allows the president to fire almost any executive branch official, and the two opinions are just completely inconsistent with each other in their reasoning.

SIVERTSON: That’s right. So let’s turn to that other decision. This was a 6-3 decision on Monday. The Supreme Court overturned a 91-year-old case, a unanimous case, mind you, that had been foundational to agency independence. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. This was this landmark decision from 1935 ruling that Congress could limit the power of the president to fire certain government officials.

But here’s what government lawyer D. John Sauer said about the Humphrey’s case during oral arguments last December.

SAUER: Humphrey’s must be overruled. It has become a decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions. It was grievously wrong when decided, and cases from Morrison to Trump have thoroughly eroded its foundations.

The Court has repudiated Humphrey’s reasoning and confined it to its facts, but it continues to generate confusion in the lower courts, and it continues to tempt Congress to erect, at the heart of our government, a headless fourth branch, insulated from political accountability and democratic control.

SIVERTSON: So yes, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in this decision that, quote, “Such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”

Stephen Vladeck, help me understand this. You have a unanimous ruling in 1935 saying that executive firings at independent government agencies violate the separation of powers, and now in 2026, you have a ruling saying that blocking executive firings violates the separation of powers. What is going on here?

VLADECK: The text of the Constitution didn’t change. What changed was who was on the Supreme Court. And I think what’s so striking about the Slaughter decision is that the Chief Justice’s opinion is based on a historical claim, Amory, that’s just not true that it was always understood at the founding that the president had this uninterruptible removal power has been, I think, repudiated by a whole bunch of law professors over the 20 years that folks on the right have been trying to make this argument.

But I think the even larger problem is the one that Carolyn pointed out, which is at literally the same moment the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that said the president absolutely positively has to have the power to fire every single head of a federal executive agency, it dropped another ruling saying, “Oh, except for the Federal Reserve,” because, the Fed’s too important.

And Justice Kavanaugh, in his concurrence in the Federal Reserve case, even said that part basically out loud. Amory, we might all agree that the Federal Reserve is really important and that preserving its independence is a really good thing, but you can say that about a lot of other federal executive branch agencies.

The unitary executive theory, the argument on which the Slaughter case is predicated, doesn’t really make a lot of sense if there are exceptions, and yet that’s what we got on Monday from the Supreme Court. And we should say the firing here was of Federal Trade Commissioner member Rebecca Slaughter.

That’s the Slaughter in the Slaughter case that we’ve been referring to whom Trump fired in January of 2025 without cause.

SIVERTSON: Carolyn, does this decision basically give the president permission to fire at will moving forward, or are there guardrails still in place?

SHAPIRO: We have no idea what, if any, guardrails there might be because we don’t know just how many people the court thinks the president should be able to fire in terms of how low down within the executive branch.

But certainly, as Steve says, the president is now able to fire the heads of virtually every executive agency except Fed. And there are numerous such agencies. They have bipartisan commissions, multi-member commissions where the commissioners are supposed to serve a term of years, they’re only supposed to be fired for cause.

The point of that is that Congress thought it was important that those entities be somewhat insulated from the daily back and forth of partisan politics, which, that the court said, is true for the Fed. It should be insulated. But Congress thought that was important in numerous agencies, and now there will be arguments about some specific agencies.

Is this one somehow entitled to an exception? But by and large, the president will be able to fire them all, and certainly this president will, I think, flex that muscle as strongly as he possibly can.

So I expect to see quite a firing spree. What this really means, it’s just really important to emphasize, it’s not just the overruling of this 90-year-old precedent. It’s overruling a 90-year-old precedent against which Congress has been legislating, creating agencies on this understanding for decades.

And it’s telling Congress it just doesn’t have the power to do this. Even if Congress thinks that this is the best way to set up an agency, that this is the best way to make sure that its policies that it gets to set are properly executed, too bad. They simply don’t have that authority, and that’s pretty massive shift of power from the legislature to the executive.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so I do wanna mention a decision from back in February when the court ruled 6-3 that President Trump’s tariff policies imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional. Stephen, that was a huge blow to the president at the time, but still it seems like this Supreme Court session has given President Trump a lot more power potentially than it’s taken away.

Is that fair to say?

VLADECK: Oh, I think it’s unambiguously true, Amory. And I think part of why that’s the case is because of the different implications of these different rulings. Yes, the court ruled against President Trump on tariffs, but that was based on a very specific interpretation of a single statute.

Contrast that again with the ruling in Slaughter about the president’s power to fire everybody. That’s going to disempower Congress going across the board going forward. The same could be said about the birthright citizenship case, right? A big sort of optical loss for President Trump, but actually, put in the context of all of the immigration cases he’s won this term, actually really just a drop in the bucket from the perspective of the impact on people on the street.

And I think this is the trick and why it’s so good to have an hour to talk about the Supreme Court term, which is if you have two minutes or if you have one news story, it’s really hard to cover the whole waterfront. But the whole waterfront is a term at the end of which the executive in general has a lot more power than it did at the beginning, and a term at the end of which President Trump has been remarkably successful, not just in getting his policies through, but in shifting the national conversation on many of these questions much farther to the right than we might have expected even with this Supreme Court.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so before we zoom out even further, I am curious for both of you, was there a decision this session that hasn’t gotten as much attention that you think is worth underscoring? Or maybe there’s some, there are potential consequences to a decision that we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around just yet.

Carolyn, I’ll start with you.

SHAPIRO: Yeah. I want to go back to the voting cases and in particular to the way that the court and in particular Justice Alito has really upended the notion of what is race discrimination and also how it can be proven. So there are two big important points I want to make here.

One is that he has said not only is it legitimate for partisan gerrymandering to motivate a legislature. He’s basically said, If they say that, then we don’t look, really look any further. If they say we’re doing this because we want Republicans to win, we just, as the courts, we’re just not gonna look any further.

That’s never before been how we evaluate whether there’s discriminatory intent. In addition, he’s insistent that we credit these, any kind of what he considers to be a neutral justification. And we’re, I think, gonna see this cascade into other areas of discrimination law, in particular employment discrimination.

We’re going to, the Trump administration has issued an opinion from the Department of Justice. It doesn’t have the force of law, but they basically are saying that long-standing Supreme Court precedent and statutory law prohibiting practices that have a disparate impact on minority employees or applicants is now, must be rewritten. That is inconsistent with these voting rights cases, and the court is going to have to revisit those and say something similar, which is as long as the employer can say with a straight face, I think this’ll be useful, this practice, or even not with a straight face that’ll be good enough.

So it’s incredibly destabilizing.

SIVERTSON: Okay, Stephen, what about you? A case that you would wanna underscore.

VLADECK: Yeah, I wanna go back to where Carolyn’s answer started, which is beyond the big voting rights cases, there are these series of rulings on the emergency docket where the court affected, as they were unfolding, redistricting in a number of states.

I mentioned New York earlier. We’ve talked about Louisiana. There’s also Alabama and Texas. And the court had for 20 years largely adhered to something called the Purcell principle, the idea that federal courts should not intervene in the middle of elections in context in which those interventions might cause confusion and chaos.

That principle went out the window this term, and it went out the window in two respects. First, all of these emergency docket orders where the court stepped in Texas and New York and Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana those are all interventions that should have waited for the next election cycle under Purcell, but the court hustled into this one, oh, coincidentally in a way that benefits Republicans.

But second, a case that was decided very early in the term that hasn’t gotten really any attention called Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections radically expands the aperture of who can sue to challenge election results and to challenge the rules of elections to include, quote, any candidate, unquote, whether or not they can show a concrete injury.

So you have these two developments at once where the court has basically signaled a willingness to step in the middle of elections, and when it has also made it a lot easier for folks to bring lawsuits in the middle of elections. And my concern is how those two intersect the next time we have very close elections, whether it’s coming down to control of the House of Representatives or control of the Senate, or even in 2028, control of the presidency.

This is a Supreme Court that is showing itself not remotely troubled by the principles of judicial restraint that used to define even the conservative majority we’ve had for most of my lifetime.

SIVERTSON: Okay, this is a question for both of you. In the last month leading up to America’s 250th birthday, on this program, we’ve been exploring the idea of America, where we’ve come from and who we are, what defines us.

In your minds, what does this latest round of decisions from the Supreme Court say about our current idea of America, who we are now, and maybe where we’re going? Carolyn?

SHAPIRO: That’s a pretty big question. But I guess I would start by saying that it’s important to note that the makeup of the court is not really representative of how Americans have voted because of the combination of life tenure, strategic retirements strategic refusals to consider nominations.

We have six justices appointed by Republican presidents including justices appointed by Republican presidents who didn’t win the popular vote for the term in which these justices were appointed. And likewise, justices who were confirmed by the votes of senators who collectively represent millions of Americans fewer than the votes, than the senators who voted to confirm.

So it’s a minoritarian court in a really important way. So I reject the premise that what the court says right now tells us who we are as Americans. I think that is really up to us, and there are plenty of ways to try to get our people’s vision that may be different from what the Supreme Court is doing to make that effective.

And the conservative legal movement has succeeded in implementing their vision of the sort of citizen.

SIVERTSON: Carolyn, I’m sorry to cut you off, but we just have a minute here left, and I wanna give Stephen … a chance to respond, too. But I hear your point. Stephen, what about you?

VLADECK: So the late Harvard law professor Paul Freund had a quote about the Supreme Court.

He said, “The justices should be immune to the weather of the day, but they should be sensitive to the climate of the age.” The idea was that judicial independence meant that in any one case, the justices should be able to vote without fear or favor, but that they should generally be accountable to the rest of us.

The Supreme Court we have today is perfectly happy with the former and doesn’t recognize the latter. And when we think about what is America in our 250th year, I would say America is a Supreme Court that has become completely unaccountable, and that can be fixed only by making it accountable again.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.