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The Supreme Court Keeps Inviting Trump to Get More Ambitious - Jay Willis @ Balls and Strikes
https://ballsandstrikes.substack.com/p/the-supreme-court-keeps-invitingOn Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court closed out its 2025-26 term by handing down three opinions that, in order, (further) enhanced Republican lawmakers’ power to discriminate against trans kids, made it (even) easier for wealthy people to buy politicians, and preserved (barely) the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The justices clocked out for the summer—on the merits docket, at least—shortly thereafter, because the most reliable predictor of the pace of the Court’s work remains the justices’ desire to enjoy a long Fourth of July weekend.
As I wrote in Balls & Strikes this week, birthright citizenship was probably the term’s highest-profile case, in part because President Donald Trump cared so much about the result, and also because the relevance of an elderly social media addict’s gutter racism to the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was, to say the least, a novel legal question. The facts that the Court (1) left the case until the very last day and (2) did not give Trump everything he wanted lent themselves well to a time-honored, recency bias-inflected format for end-of-the-term recaps: Once again, the justices delivered some wins for Trump and some losses for Trump, thus wrapping another dramatic season of Supreme Court, that long-running reality show in which nine elite lawyers go behind closed doors to decide who gets rights and who does not.
I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.
I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.
Do not get me wrong: It is good that the Court managed to affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as judges and politicians and scholars and everyone capable of reading at a fourth-grade level has understood it for more than a century. But two cases the Court decided last week—cases that earned less attention and yielded fewer breaking-news push alerts than birthright citizenship—paint a clearer picture of the Court’s disposition toward Trump halfway through his second term, and as the 2026 midterms approach.
As I wrote in Balls & Strikes this week, birthright citizenship was probably the term’s highest-profile case, in part because President Donald Trump cared so much about the result, and also because the relevance of an elderly social media addict’s gutter racism to the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was, to say the least, a novel legal question. The facts that the Court (1) left the case until the very last day and (2) did not give Trump everything he wanted lent themselves well to a time-honored, recency bias-inflected format for end-of-the-term recaps: Once again, the justices delivered some wins for Trump and some losses for Trump, thus wrapping another dramatic season of Supreme Court, that long-running reality show in which nine elite lawyers go behind closed doors to decide who gets rights and who does not.
I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.
I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.
Do not get me wrong: It is good that the Court managed to affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as judges and politicians and scholars and everyone capable of reading at a fourth-grade level has understood it for more than a century. But two cases the Court decided last week—cases that earned less attention and yielded fewer breaking-news push alerts than birthright citizenship—paint a clearer picture of the Court’s disposition toward Trump halfway through his second term, and as the 2026 midterms approach.
Pundits who frame the Supreme Court as “standing up to†Trump because a big case on the last day of the term didn’t go totally his way are either (1) stupid or (2) lying to you
— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2026-07-04T14:11:31.293Z