CNN
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When the Supreme Court justices first shared the inaugural stage with Donald Trump, they heard the new president deliver a 16-minute proclamation against the country and pledge that “this American carnage stops here and stops now.”
Then, when they returned to a room on the first floor of the Capitol where they had removed the black wool hoodies, gloves and rain gear they had been wearing on the windy day of January 20, 2017, they were unusually silent. There was little of the upbeat chatter that usually occurred when they were together indoors. Instead, one of the people in the room that day told CNN, no one knew what to say.
The judges and their legal staff greeted Trump with collective trepidation eight years ago. Liberals or conservatives, they wondered what to expect next. Today, there is no ambiguity about what Trump means – or whether the Supreme Court majority is mostly with him.
The bench has been renovated in his image. Trump appointed three of the nine current justices during his first term (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett). Two other right-wing justices, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have been influenced by Trump’s influence.
Whatever barriers existed from Congress and Trump’s administration in his first term have been lowered; The question for the Supreme Court is whether any of its steps would be a bridge too far.
However, Chief Justice John Roberts, who has had a tense relationship with Trump, sponsored the opinion in the case that was most important to him. Roberts wrote the July 1 decision that granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution and guaranteed that he would not face prosecution on election subversion charges during the 2020 presidential contest.
Overall, the reshaped Supreme Court has lowered the standards and changed the law, starting with the court’s upholding of Trump’s travel ban in 2018, then its overturning of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in 2022, and finally its groundbreaking move to shield the president from prosecution.
Along the way, the justices revealed varying levels of respect for Trump: Thomas and his wife, Jenny, dined with him privately. Jenny Thomas also worked to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. At the home of Samuel and Martha Ann Alito in January 2021, an upside-down American flag flew, similar to the symbol adopted by Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
On the other end of the spectrum, liberal Sonia Sotomayor showed her disdain for Trump. When she dissented from the court in the travel ban case, she highlighted his verbal attacks on Muslims. More recently, during January 10 oral arguments in the TikTok dispute, she sarcastically wondered whether Trump would abide by the congressional ban and enforce the law.
In January 2017, the number of judges was only eight. Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, and Senate Republicans blocked any confirmation consideration of then-Justice Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s pick to succeed Scalia, making the vacancy a major issue in that presidential campaign.
The justices compromised often during that eleven-month period, without the tie-breaking ninth vote, and the atmosphere of negotiation and compromise remained throughout the inauguration.
This was tested for the first time seven days later when Trump issued a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, fulfilling a campaign pledge. He has made assertions such as “I think Islam hates us” and “We have problems with Muslims, and we have problems with Muslims coming to this country.”
Within the court, according to the law book of the time, there remained an acceptance of some compromise across ideological lines. In the justices’ initial consideration of the travel ban, they said: It was allowed to take partial effectagainst “foreign nationals who do not have any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States” but barred the ban on people with the requisite relationships.
Law clerks noted an atmosphere of cautious cooperation. Employees still ate lunch together and enjoyed weekly “happy hours” without any imminent ideological rancor.
The following year, the divisions intensified. When the justices ruled on the merits of Trump’s travel ban (the third version), the split was 5-4, with the conservatives in the majority. Siding with the Trump administration, Roberts, in his opinion, dismissed Trump’s anti-Muslim statements as largely irrelevant and emphasized the president’s discretion to suspend immigration.
Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority but wrote a separate opinion. Today, Kennedy’s language seems strange.
“There are many instances in which the statements and actions of government officials are not subject to scrutiny or judicial intervention. This does not mean that these officials are free to ignore the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protects.” books.
“A concerned world should know that our government always remains committed to the freedoms that the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward and endures.”
The Supreme Court created a more powerful president.
Trump will return to the White House with new strength, especially through the court’s decision that protects him from prosecution for any conduct that is challenged during his official business. On the social policy front, the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that would advance his agenda, for example, against reproductive rights and racist treatments.
All three Trump appointees came together to make landmark decisions in those areas of the law, Dobbs v. Women’s Health of Jackson and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were Trump’s most reliable allies of the three. This was demonstrated earlier this month when they disagreed (with Thomas and Alito) as the majority rejected Trump’s request to block his sentencing in the Manhattan secret money case.
Last May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to “hush money” paid during the 2016 election to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair. (Trump denied the issue.)
Trump’s bid before the Supreme Court to avoid the ruling was far-fetched. As the majority wroteTrump’s claims of “evidence violations” at trial were separate on appeal and any burden of the imposed sentence was “relatively immaterial” because it was scheduled to be a virtual hearing and the trial judge was granting Trump “unconditional release.”
Trump appointee Barrett, along with Roberts and liberals Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, made up the majority. Roberts and Barrett’s rejection of the request was no less telling than the desire of four of their conservative colleagues to block a ruling that Trump asserted would disrupt his work during the presidential transition.
After the Supreme Court order, Trump himself reserved his criticism for the trial judge. He had said he viewed the Supreme Court’s interpretation as an endorsement of his broader appeal of the trial ruling, and said: “I think everything will go well.”
During Trump’s first term, Judge Thomas appeared to have the closest relationship with him. Trump invited Thomas and his wife, Jenny, to a private lunch in 2018. Jenny Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, separately attended Trump’s celebration at the White House when he was acquitted in February 2020 by the Senate after his first impeachment in the House.
Trump’s 2020 impeachment arose out of his pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to investigate his political rival Joe Biden. A year later, Trump underwent a second impeachment trial and acquittal after attempting to challenge the 2020 election results and the events of January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol. Among the communications that emerged during this latest investigation was one that Jenny Thomas sent to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, pleading with him to continue the legal battle to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“Help this great boss stand firm, Mark!!!” “You are the leader with him who stands for American constitutional governance on the brink,” she wrote on November 10, 2020. The majority knows that Biden and the left are attempting the greatest theft in our history.”
Earlier in January, Trump’s relationship with Alito was in the spotlight when it became known that he had received a phone call from the president-elect about a former law clerk seeking a position in the new administration.
It is not uncommon for justices, conservative or liberal, to promote their former clerks for positions in a new administration or with any potential employer. However, the Trump-Alito conversation occurred just as the justices were about to grant Trump’s petition to avoid ruling in the hush money case.
“We did not discuss his emergency request today, and in fact, I was not aware until the time of our conversation that such a request would be made,” Alito said in a public statement, given first to ABC News, which was first to report the call.
Multiple surveys have documented this Declining public approval and confidence in the Supreme Court in the years following Trump’s first term.
Chief Justice Roberts has downplayed this trend as well as national attention to ethical concerns. In his annual report issued on December 31, he focused instead on critics of the court who he said had engaged in “intimidation” and “misinformation.”
“It is also unfortunate that government officials have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, by suggesting political bias in a judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such claims,” Roberts wrote.
In fact, from the beginning of his first campaign, Trump claimed that individual federal judges ruled against him on political grounds.
His public attitude toward the Supreme Court has been volatile. When he lost initial immigration cases in lower courts in the opening months of his first term, he posted on social media: “See you in the Supreme Court.” But in 2020, when justices narrowly rejected one of his immigration initiatives against children brought to America without documents, he tweeted: “Are you under the impression the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”
In general, Trump did not have sufficient grounds for complaint, and he was excessive last July in describing the court’s immunity decision as “a victory for the Constitution and democracy.”
Lawyers who represented Trump in such personal lawsuits are now set to represent his administration in politics, including Dr. John Sawyer, whom Trump appointed to be the federal government’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court. In recent filings in the big-money case and the dispute over Congress’ ban on TikTok, Sawyer laid out a more expansive vision of Trump’s presidential power.
After being sworn in on Monday, the justices are expected to join Trump at the usual inaugural luncheon in Statuary Hall. If the ritual of eight years ago is repeated, the justices and spouses will sit at round tables in front of Trump’s place at the head table.
There, they will sit alongside Cabinet appointees and other Trump officials who will soon be pressing his new legal agenda.