The Supreme Court closed its just-completed term having systematically stripped Congress of authority and concentrated power in two institutions: the White House and the court itself. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck summarized the term's real headline as "Supreme Court rules for itself, 6–3" — a realignment now governing how federal regulators are controlled, how $4 billion in congressionally-appropriated foreign aid gets withheld, and who sets the rules over markets, employment, and voting rights.
FTC Independence Falls; Federal Reserve Gets a Carve-Out
In Trump v. Slaughter, the court's most consequential regulatory ruling, justices preserved the Federal Trade Commission's statutory powers while dismantling the structural independence Congress built around it. Boston University legal historian Jed Shugerman called the move a Roberts Court line-item veto: keep the parts of a law it approves, discard the rest. The same day, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a separate opinion sparing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook from the same fate — a carve-out that Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett publicly rejected as an unprincipled contradiction, warning it would be reversed in a future term.
Unitary Executive Theory Wins the Term
The rulings extend decades of conservative legal argument that the Constitution vests all executive authority in the president alone. This term, the theory prevailed on multiple fronts. Congress can no longer insulate regulators from presidential removal, limit coordinated political-party spending — a restriction the court itself upheld in 2001 — or compel race-conscious voting districts under the Voting Rights Act. The court also allowed the administration to continue withholding the $4 billion in foreign aid, a move critics say breaches Congress's core power of the purse.
Shadow Docket Expands; Three Rulings Go Against Trump
A growing portion of the court's authority now flows through the shadow docket, where cases skip full briefing and argument, and unsigned, unexplained orders arrive quickly. Through that channel, justices have refereed immigration crackdowns, mass firings of federal workers, frozen aid, revised voting maps, and transgender passport restrictions. Roberts authored all three significant rulings against the administration this term: blocking emergency tariffs, sparing Cook, and rejecting the order ending birthright citizenship.
Four-Justice Bloc Signals Future Terrain
Trump's birthright citizenship loss carried its own warning. Four justices indicated willingness to rule that the executive order did not violate the 14th Amendment — a position Vladeck described as outlandish as recently as a decade ago. That four-vote bloc, he said, will embolden the next generation of once-fringe constitutional arguments. By every measure this term established, Congress is the weakest branch; the presidency and nine life-tenured justices now divide the remaining authority between them.