Supreme Court Birthright Citizenship Case
The chief justice faced down the president, forged unlikely coalitions and achieved long-sought goals.
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The Supreme Court term that ended Tuesday left almost everybody at least a little unhappy. President Trump suffered some stinging losses. Liberals rued decisions boosting presidential power and gutting the Voting Rights Act. Conservatives felt betrayed when Trump’s appointees occasionally voted with the court’s three liberals.
But one man had reason to be satisfied. The term was a triumph for Chief Justice John Roberts, who was in all but complete control of a court that had not long ago threatened to slip from his grasp.
“Despite the obvious tensions within the court and the difficulty of managing such a fiercely independent group of jurists, Roberts is on his way to becoming one of the most influential chief justices of all time,” said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.
Chief Justice Roberts has joked about how little authority comes with his title, attributing it to “the odd historical quirk that the chief justice only gets one vote.”
But he does have one key power: the chief justice gets to assign who will write the majority opinion when he is in the majority. And he was in the majority last term in 96 percent of argued cases, the highest rate of any member of the court.
That allowed him to keep and mold the three biggest opinions of the term.
One rejected the centerpiece of Trump’s beloved tariffs program and could lead to refunds of $166 billion in illegal levies. The second shifted the separation of powers , ruling that the president can fire leaders of independent agencies whom Congress had tried to insulate from politics. The third, in soaring rhetoric, reaffirmed the longstanding constitutional understanding that children born in the United States, with vanishingly few exceptions, automatically become citizens.
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