SCOTUS just signaled how its next term will go — and Trump is “ecstatic”

President Donald Trump has had a tumultuous week so far. There was his strange, inappropriate remarks about hating his opponents at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, a bizarre press conference in which he denounced Tylenol and vaccines, and a downright unhinged speech he gave before world leaders at the United Nations. But the president did get some good news from his allies on the Supreme Court. Using the so-called “shadow docket,” the justices allowed him to fire someone the law says he should not be allowed to fire. No doubt that felt very soothing. He is, after all, the man who first ran for office by shouting his famous reality show catchphrase: “You’re fired!”

In March, Trump terminated two Democratic-appointed members of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without cause. They in turn sued the government, demanding to be reinstated and pointing to Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a landmark 1935 Supreme Court case involving the firing of an FTC commissioner. The ruling made clear that a president cannot fire independent agency commissioners at will; there must be a grave reason.

After Bedoya resigned from the case in June to seek other employment, Slaughter was left to carry on with the suit alone. The lower courts all sided with her, citing the clear precedent in Humphrey’s Executor. But earlier this week, ahead of its upcoming term that begins Oct. 4, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority accepted Trump’s emergency appeal in the case and, using an accelerated timetable, added it to its December docket. Worse, they ruled that Trump’s firing of Slaughter could stand until the case is resolved.

You don’t need to be a Supreme Court insider or a psychic to figure out how this will go. The conservative justices couldn’t even bring themselves to allow the precedent to stand for a few more months until they could hear the case. They had to step in to give Trump the relief he craved to be able to fire this woman.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the minority, pointed out that this is only the latest in a series of cases in which the majority has “has handed full control of all those agencies to the president…He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”

The ruling shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It continues the court’s trend of supporting Trump’s view of the unitary executive, a theory that has been pushed by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation for years, which holds that the president has absolute power over the executive branch.

The Trump administration may be ramshackle and chaotic in most ways, but they have offered a master class in legal strategy. Their timing and choices of cases to push on an emergency basis has been meticulously planned. They have petitioned the Supreme Court on cases the conservative majority seems to most want to hear, and according to NBC News, the White House is feeling “ecstatic” at their success.

And why wouldn’t they be? Of the 28 cases the administration has petitioned the court to hear on an emergency basis, they’ve only lost two. Three have resulted in no decision, and a few are still pending. But all in all, their track record has been nearly a clean sweep.

NBC reported noted that more than 300 cases have been filed against the administration so far, which they believe indicates that the administration has been careful not to push the conservative majority to take up cases they could conceivably see as a bridge too far. I really doubt that’s going to be a problem. A couple of the justices might nod weakly toward American ideals and uphold birthright citizenship since it’s the text of the 14th Amendment seems clear, but I suspect they will generally side with Trump on even the most draconian authoritarian policies.

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The court’s conservative wing hasn’t seemed even remotely interested in findings of lower courts, and they seem even less interested in providing judges any guidance as to how they are supposed to carry on. A prime example is Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s asinine opinion that immigrants who are detained by masked men demanding proof of citizenship is only a “brief” inconvenience. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”

Um, no. Either Kavanaugh is so cloistered in his cushy Supreme Court office that he has no idea what is actually happening on American streets, or he does know and is just choosing to ignore the truth in favor of advancing deportations without normal constitutional constraints.

Trump’s Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, is yet another of his personal lawyers elevated to a top job in the government. But more importantly, he once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and clearly has the conservative majority’s number. (For all we know, he has their cell phone numbers too.) Sauer has proven very competent, having successfully argued the immunity case that has essentially given Trump free rein to openly conspire with his Justice Department to persecute his political enemies.

Some of the court’s biggest cases are yet to come, and they may prove a bit harder for the conservative majority to justify. In October the court will hear the big tariffs case, and a favorable ruling for Trump would mean bad news for the American — and world — economy. On the other hand, the court has shown that they consider the Federal Reserve to have special status apart from other quasi-independent agencies, which may indicate they are less likely to rubber stamp the president’s assertion of an obscure emergency power to justify his extreme tariff policies. The conservative justices may not prove as enthusiastic about letting Trump mess with rich people’s money as they are about usurping people’s civil liberties and the constitutional balance of power. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett has emerged as something of a wild card, aligning with the liberal wing in a handful of cases.

But for the most part, there can no longer be any doubt that the conservative majority is working hand-in-glove with the administration to expand presidential powers to resemble those once given to absolute monarchs. Whether the justices are prepared to accept that those powers might one day be in the hands of someone with whom they are not so ideologically aligned is another story. If we’re lucky, we will find that out in the not-too-distant future.

If Democrats manage to win back power in the next couple of elections, they must understand that “guardrails” are insufficient. Right now we’re watching what happens when we rely on norms and the good faith of extremists with lifetime appointments to guard our rights and freedoms. Democrats must build a big, beautiful, legal wall to prevent this from happening in the future — and make sure MAGA pays for it.