Do Supreme Court decisions matter to Trump?

Both Kate Shaw and Mark Joseph Stern have published end-of-term previews that hit on the same theme: John Roberts is primarily responsible for giving Trump the power he now wields; will he and his court try to take some of it away? The smart money says Roberts will make one or two decisions that try to restrain the administration, while making many, many more that give it free rein.

Plotted against all of this is the question of whether Supreme Court decisions will actually matter to Trump. The administration has felt free to largely ignore lower-court rulings; will it change its tune if the Supreme Court stands against them?

It is a weird time to be covering “law.” The study of law presumes that rules exist and will be enforced. Those two presumptions seem wildly inconsistent with our lived experience of the Trump administration. The end of this term might fully expose those premises as bald-faced lies.

• Elon Musk is (allegedly) done with ruling the government. But OMB director Russell Vought nd Musk’s deputies still remain at DOGE and still remain committed to destroying the ability of the federal government to function.
• Trump is asking the Supreme Court to give him the authority to deport people to “third countries”—a euphemism meant to mask the true horror of what he wants to do: capture people who come here and send them to some other country they’re not even from. This unhinged administration doesn’t even want to provide any assurance that the people it sends to “third countries” will be treated humanely or have any rights to seek repatriation to where they’re actually from. Trump wants constitutional authority to send people into black holes from which they may never emerge.
• NPR is suing the Trump administration for cutting its funding, saying that the government’s move is a clear violation of the First Amendment. NPR is right, of course: Trump would not be cutting its funding if NPR spent all of its time kissing his ass like The Washington Post does. Interestingly, while NPR (and three Colorado public radio stations) sued, PBS, which is under the same funding freeze, did not. I’m not sure why. Maybe Elmo loves everyone except lawyers?
• Trump wants to vet the social media accounts of foreign students before they can get a visa to attend school in the United States. Students applying for US visas are already vetted by the government, so all this will do is give the administration another opportunity to exclude foreign students who have said mean things about Trump.
• The Trump administration canceled funding meant to develop a vaccine for bird flu. This comes at the same time as Anti-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. changes the Covid vaccine requirements—without consulting the CDC. This government is run by some sick people.

• The Nation’s Jeet Heer has an important report about the increased threats of violence faced by members of the federal judiciary, and the way the Trump administration is contributing to those threats.
• I’m going to double up on Jeet’s writing this week, because I cannot stop thinking about his piece about the way that the Democrats’ insistence on running geriatrics desperately clinging to power yet barely clinging to their mortal coil is literally killing the party.
• Count me as a person who has bought into the rhetoric that America’s public schools are “failing.” But Perry Bacon Jr. tells me that I’m wrong, deeply and statistically wrong. It’s an eye-opening piece that literally changed my mind about something.

Tucked into the Supreme Court’s unsigned, 6–3 opinion—which once again treats Trump like a king—was a curious piece of legal mumbo jumbo that would earn you a failing grade in any high school logic course. The court wrote: “Finally, respondents Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee.… We disagree. The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

What the court is trying to do here is protect the Fed, and thereby protect US monetary policy, from being messed with by Trump and his disastrous economic “policy” team. The Republicans on the court are basically saying that Trump can crush labor rights, environmental protections, and make sure his cronies are never audited by the IRS again… but he can’t touch their precious interest rates.

The problem is that the distinction the court is trying to draw between the Fed and every other regulatory agency makes no sense. The structure of the Fed is not unique, nor is it private, “quasi” or otherwise. It is an executive agency like any other, with members appointed by the president who, up until five seconds ago, could not be fired by the next president just because he doesn’t like their race, gender, or policies. It is a ludicrous legal position to take that the members of the NLRB can be fired, but the members of the Fed cannot.

Yet that is the position this court is taking. As Jay Willis put it: “The Supreme Court really expects you to take this craven horseshit seriously.”

There is no clearer example than this ruling that the Republicans on the Supreme Court do not consider themselves bound by law, logic, or basic common sense. They are making things up as they go along, trying to preserve their pet projects while letting Trump destroy the people they do not care about.

• By the time you read this newsletter, my piece on the Trump tariff decision should be published. Please excuse the delay, as it’s taken me some time to learn about “tariffs” and to Google “What is the US Court of International Trade again?” In the meantime, if you missed my post from late last week about Trump trying to hold international students at Harvard hostage, you can catch up on that here.

I’m not talking about concussions or financial rights for college athletes or any of the traditional things liberals complain about when talking about college athletics or football generally. Yes, yes, I know it is hard for some people to find enjoyment from gladiatorial bloodsports. But for the purposes of this argument, assume that young men slamming into each other at medically dangerous speeds while having fewer rights than the women who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are why so many people like the sport. Trying to address the violence inherent to football would ruin the point I’m about to make.

What’s ruining the sport—from the perspective of people who actually like it—is the business of it: specifically the way the heads of the major college football conferences have sacrificed all respect for regional cohesion, competitive parity, and a commonsense playoff structure in their insatiable greed for even more money. The problems became acute during the process of “conference realignment.” That’s when the football conferences abandoned geographic cohesion and started adding big-time colleges to their conferences based on the colleges’ abilities to generate large numbers of viewers on television.

The most powerful conference, the Southeastern Conference (SEC), now has teams from Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. The second most powerful conference, the “Big Ten”—traditionally a Midwest-focused conference with teams like JD Vance’s Ohio State and Michigan—now has teams from California and Oregon. And the number “Ten” has long ceased to have any meaning: The Big Ten now consists of 18 football teams.

The SEC and Big Ten make so much more money than all the other conferences that they can generally bully the rest of college football into doing what they want, and what they want is to stack the new college football playoff with teams from their conferences so their teams make even more money. Currently, the SEC and Big Ten are fighting to get “automatic” bids to the NCAA college football playoffs for four of their schools, each. That’s eight spots, out of a total of 12, that would be reserved for teams from just two conferences. Even if the NCAA tried to mitigate that competitive harm by expanding the playoff field to 16 teams, that would still result in half of the playoff spots going to just two conferences.

And if the NCAA doesn’t cave in, the SEC and Big Ten are threatening to split off from the alleged “governing body” of college athletics, form their own association, and potentially crown their own champion.

College football fans, for the most part, don’t want this. College football is deeply steeped in tradition, and fans like their traditional rivalries. Fans also like to travel to away games, which is a thing that is easy to do when you are going from Alabama to Georgia, but a lot harder to do when you have to go from UCLA to Rutgers. And fans (except for the fans of the 10 to 15 teams that can financially compete in this new world) generally like for there to be some form of competitive balance such that their school might have a shot to pull off a Cinderella upset and win a national championship.

The federal government can put a stop to this, and we know it can because of… Donald Trump. We have seen that the federal government can force most universities into doing what it wants them to do simply by threatening their funding.

The Democratic candidate for president should promise to use all of Trump’s tactics aimed at bullying schools—not to prevent them from admitting Black people and foreign students but to make them do what is necessary to fix the sport. I am entirely serious. If the party wants a way to “connect” with working-class voters in this country, “Make College Football Great Again” is a winning issue.

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