U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito attends an event organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, in Rome, Italy, September 20, 2025. REUTERS/Vincenzo Livieri
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has leaned conservative for decades, conservative GOP-appointed justices of the past — including Ronald Reagan appointees Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor — had a lot more nuance than the 6-3 Republican supermajority of 2025. Kennedy was a judicial wild card with strong libertarian leanings, sometimes siding with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg over fellow Reagan nominee Antonin Scalia and George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas.
The High Court's new term begins on Monday, October 6, and The Guardian's Steven Greenhouse isn't optimistic that the six GOP-appointed justices will do much to push back against President Donald Trump.
In an op-ed published on October 6, Greenhouse explains, "Two of the world's best-known authoritarian leaders — Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president — have each had at least 15 years at their country's helm to pack the courts with loyalists and to pressure and intimidate judges. And no surprise, judges in those countries have repeatedly done what Orbán and Erdoğan want. Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the U.S. Supreme Court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the Court's nine justices."
Greenhouse continues, "Nevertheless, the Court's conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office. The six conservative justices have fallen into line much like Hungary's and Turkey's judges, even though the Supreme Court's justices have life tenure to insulate them from political pressures."
Trump's executive orders are getting a lot of pushback in the lower federal courts, with some federal judges blocking them. But Greenhouse isn't optimistic about those rulings being upheld by the High Court.
"With the Court's new term beginning on Monday, many Americans are dismayed that the conservative justices have been so submissive to Trump — the most authoritarian-minded president in U.S. history," Greenhouse laments. "Notwithstanding the U.S.' celebrated system of checks and balances, the justices have utterly failed to provide the checks on Trump that many legal scholars had expected. In ruling for Trump, the chief justice, John Roberts, and the other conservatives have let him gut the Department of Education, fire Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board members, and strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants."
Greenhouse continues, "The right-wing supermajority has also let Trump halt $4 [billion] in foreign aid, fire tens of thousands of federal employees despite contractual protections and deport migrants to countries where they have no connection. In these and other cases, the supermajority has ceded huge power to Trump, for instance, by greatly reducing Congress' constitutional power over spending as it let Trump unilaterally gut agencies and halt funding approved by Congress."
Greenhouse notes that J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge who is very much a Never Trump conservative, believe that Chief Justice John Roberts is "presiding over the end of the rule of law in America."
"The conservative justices have repeatedly done Trump's bidding even though they don't begin to face the intense pressures that Hungary's and Turkey's judges face. Erdoğan has sometimes purged and blackballed judges seen as insufficiently loyal, while Orbán’s high-ranking allies have berated less obedient judges as 'traitors,'" Greenhouse warns. "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled for Trump in a startlingly high percentage of cases this year. It has issued 24 decisions from its emergency docket, often without giving any reasons, and ruled in Trump's favor about 90 percent of the time."
Greenhouse continues, "In doing so, the Court has repeatedly vacated injunctions that lower courts had issued after concluding that Trump, with his 209 executive orders, had egregiously broken the law."
Read Steven Greenhouse's full op-ed for The Guardian at this link.