The Supreme Court is a Mess. An assessment of the Court this week

by Andrew Weissmann - Jul 1

In this short edition of the Main Justice podcast, an assessment is given of the Supreme Court’s decisions over the last two days.

As I put it, Chief Justice John Roberts is “cherry-picking.” I give my first takes on several of the Supreme Court’s most consequential end-of-term rulings, starting with a quick accounting of the decision not to hear the Trump appeal of the first of the E. Jean Carroll cases and the Court’s decision to uphold a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots that are sent by election day to be counted.

But I save my longer analysis for two similar cases with opposing results: the Trump administration’s firings of Lisa Cook and Rebecca Slaughter. While the Court ruled that the Trump administration must have “cause” to dismiss Cook from the Federal Reserve, it allowed the government to fire Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission for no reason at all. I explain three reasons why I believe the latter decision is deeply flawed, and exemplifies the dangerous trajectory of the conservative majority’s support for a “unitary executive.”

And finally, I break down the Court’s skin-of-its-teeth decision to uphold birthright citizenship, and why the tight 5-4 split on the constitutional issue is the story.

Thanks for taking a listen (as you will hear, I am flying solo in this short edition of Main Justice (more to come with Mary in the next episode).

Stay engaged, now more than ever.

Andrew