CNN's Supreme Court analyst and Georgetown University professor Steve Vladeck said that when it comes to the U.S. Supreme Court's new term starting Monday, the "chickens are coming home to roost" as the justices have to to start "weighing in substantively on what the [Trump] administration is doing."
When anchor Manu Raju asked "just how far could this term change the powers of the presidency?" Vladeck replied, "You know, pretty dramatically," pointing to cases before the Court on tariffs, Trump's ability to fire senior agency heads, the deployment of troops in Portland and Chicago and removal of migrants from the country.
He also says that justices aren't only going to weigh in on the scope of Trump's powers, but "about how much the president's factual determinations that particular things are true can be reviewed by the Courts. I think that's going to be a dominant theme of the court's business over the coming weeks and months," he said.
Trump, who has won 84 percent of "a staggering number" of emergency appeals in contrast to President Joe Biden, leading the justices to overturn "past Supreme Court precedent without explaining why," Raju noted.
Vladeck said that Trump's actions — firing federal officers despite statutes saying they could only be removed for cause, the cutting of the Department of Education by a third, hundreds of thousands of migrants losing temporary immigration status and trans individuals being dismissed from the military — have been met with silence from SCOTUS.
"As solicitous as the court has been toward President Trump, for as much as those rulings have enabled these actions, the court has said shockingly little in those rulings about whether what President Trump is doing is actually legal," Vladeck said.
"And so a big part of the story for this Supreme Court term that starts today is that chicken coming home to roost, meaning now the Court really is going to have to start weighing in substantively on what the administration is doing," he added.
Vladeck said all eyes will be on the justices and how they react to Trump's blatant lawlessness.
"Now we're going to learn a lot more, not just about whether the justices are willing to silently enable this behavior, but whether they're willing to publicly rationalize it to the law in the Constitution," he said,
In response to Raju's mention of "deep tension on the bench" and a great polarization between the justices, Vladeck said, "by the end of the summer, the tenor of some of the dissenting opinions by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, by Justice Elena Kagan, by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had become quite sharp and provocative."
But, Vladeck said, it's not just about justices get along with each other. "It's also about how they're getting along with the lower courts," heexplained.
" I think we're going to see emerge this term is more and more conflict between lower court judges who are trying their best with high profile, fast moving cases and who are getting, from their perspective, insufficient guidance from the Supreme Court.