The conservative majority gave Trump almost everything and laundered three losses as proof of independence.
The case the Journal’s editorial board makes, in its strongest working form, runs like this. The Constitution assigns distinct powers to each branch, and the Justices have a duty to enforce those boundaries when a President claims authority the text and history do not support — emergency tariff powers Congress has not delegated, an end run around the Citizenship Clause’s plain text, removal of a Federal Reserve governor absent the statutory cause the Federal Reserve Act requires. Three such rulings in one term, on questions of institutional architecture, are not evidence of capture; they are evidence of working judicial craft. The Marquette Law School poll gives the board its data. The field work — 1,076 adults, with cross-tabs by party identification, ideology, and prior knowledge of the Court — is the kind of dataset reporters rely on. On the three rulings, the cross-partisan numbers hold: 66% approve the tariff decision; 63% approve the birthright citizenship ruling; 70% approve the Federal Reserve ruling. The Justices, on the board’s account, are doing the work the Constitution assigns them.
Don’t fall for it.
The three rulings are real, and on their terms, the majority reached the correct result. In Learning Resources v. Trump, the majority confronted a President invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs — a statute authorizing emergency economic regulation that does not, by its text, grant tariff authority. The majority read IEEPA as Congress wrote it. Emergency economic powers are not tariff powers. In Trump v. Barbara, the majority confronted an executive order attempting to redefine birthright citizenship by administrative fiat, overriding the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause: “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The Court struck the order down. In Trump v. Cook, the majority confronted a President who fired a Federal Reserve governor without alleging cause. The Federal Reserve Act requires removal only “for cause” — inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. The opinion held that this language was not optional. Seventy percent approved.
But the same poll asked respondents how often the Justices side with Trump in his second term. Twelve percent said “almost always.” Forty-three percent said “most of the time.” That is fifty-five percent of the country reading this Court as a reliable arm of the MAGA project. The board’s editorial does not address this finding. It ignores it.
The defenders then cite other rulings as evidence of majority independence. The girls’ sports case polled at 65%. The marijuana-and-guns case, at 61%. The racial gerrymandering case, at 53%. Notice the pattern. Every “popular” decision on this list advances a deeply conservative cultural agenda. The public likes these outcomes because they reinforce a worldview the conservative majority already embraces. That is not independence. That is alignment, dressed up as coincidence.
Where the Court rules against Trump, it rules on institutional grounds. The Federal Reserve is sacred to capital. Tariffs were a chaotic policy even Republican donors questioned. Birthright citizenship had been settled for more than a century. The conservative Justices will protect the institutional architecture of American governance when a President’s whims threaten it. They will not protect the people from a President whose broader program they have already endorsed.
The full record is damning. The defenders say Justice Jeffries “slept through” the term. He did not. He watched a Court hand Trump most of his agenda, then hand him procedural losses only when his excesses threatened the system itself. That is not a coequal branch checking a President. That is a Court protecting itself while letting the rest of the country burn.
The defenders also note that 33% of those surveyed had “never heard of” Chief Justice John Roberts. They treat this as proof of public ignorance. Read it the other way. It is proof of how thoroughly the conservative legal movement has insulated the Court from democratic accountability. People do not know Roberts because they are not supposed to. They are supposed to learn the names of Justices only when a case becomes a culture war. The rest of the work — the slow, technical, deregulatory, and authoritarian turn of the federal judiciary — happens in obscurity, beyond the polling the defenders now treat as verdict.
Justice Kagan’s public correction of Jeffries is offered as the decisive rebuttal. Kagan is correct about those three rulings and wrong about the larger pattern. A Court that hands a President most of what he wants and refuses to constrain his worst instincts is, functionally, a subsidiary — even when it occasionally says no.
That the public cannot yet see this is not a flaw in Jeffries’s argument. It is the design.