The Lines the Court Won’t Cross
The Atlantic · LC · trust 31/100
The Supreme Court is mostly giving the Trump administration what it wants—with interesting exceptions.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty July 21, 2026, 10:06 AM ET Share Save Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 10:17 At about this time last year, the Roberts Court seemed like an arm of the Trump administration. On its so-called shadow docket—where it considers emergency applications without a full briefing or a hearing—the Supreme Court gave the White House victory after early victory. Over the past year, however, the mood has changed: The Court handed the president major losses on two of his signature policy initiatives, birthright citizenship and global tariffs.
Seeing these decisions, some might hope that the Court is taking a moderate turn or perhaps forging a sense of true independence . But that is not what is happening here. Instead, the Court’s future dealings with the Donald Trump presidency will likely be guided by three general rules: First, keep focus on the constitutional project that Chief Justice John Roberts has been coaxing into being since he joined the Court—one that will transform the First Amendment, eviscerate the equal-protection clause, and recalibrate the Constitution’s balance of powers—and green-light presidential initiatives that chime with this project. Second, because this project aims at deep constitutional change, consider breaking from ideological stereotypes when a case involves a mere statute, which can always be reworked by Congress. Finally, beware of presidential frolics that could leave the justices politically exposed when things go sideways—especially if traditional Republican elites would be among the unhappy constituencies.
Roberts’s project of constitutional change began long before Trump came into office. Take the transformation of the First Amendment: Just five years after his confirmation to the chief justiceship, Roberts wrote the Citizens United v. FEC decision, interpreting the First Amendment to invalidate limits on corporate election spending. This term, the Court pushed further, allowing the national parties to act as vehicles for big-dollar spending. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC , the Court invalidated long-standing laws limiting parties’ spending in coordination with candidates. This undermines insurgent candidates’ ability to work around parties’ national leadership and hands the full-coffered Republican Party another leg up in this year’s midterms. In the longer run, when combined with the Court’s recent blessing of gerrymandering, the NRSC decision will further erode meaningful democratic processes: Legislative districts will be drawn by party elites who are closely aligned with wealthy donors, and voters will have less and less input in the process.
Another strand of the justices’ effort to reinterpret the First Amendment has not yet reached its apogee, having gotten derailed last term by an unexpected recusal. Since 2012, the Roberts Court has expanded churches’ immunity from ordinary laws under the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause. The Court has also stripped away constitutional limitations on state support for churches. Put these together, and the country is dramatically expanding the right of ecclesiastical bodies to ignore state law while demanding state funds.
Last year, religious litigants in Oklahoma challenged the state’s refusal to fund religious charter schools. The Court split 4–4, leaving in place the lower court’s ruling that said the state was in the right; Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself from the case. Should another case present a similar question, and should all nine justices vote on it, the outcome may remake the relationship between Church and state in America.
As with the First Amendment’s free-speech clause, the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause is being repurposed to do the opposite of what it was intended. This shift also began long before Trump’s ascension. In 2007, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 , the Roberts Court stopped municipalities from accounting for residential segregation when assigning children to schools in a district. Roberts justified this embrace of de facto balkanization by equating equal protection with color blindness. Even a sliver of recognition that race matters to people’s life chances, he ruled, flouted the Constitution.
This term, the Court pulled that move again, reading the Constitution’s equality guarantee as a requirement of a “colorblind” approach. As a result, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important enabler of minorities’ ballot access in a long history of racial disenfranchisement, has been essentially neutered . The decision frees state legislators to eliminate majority-Black districts, which Alabama immediately did. The decision also removes one of the last frictions on partisan gerrymandering—and so it abets the power of parties to select their electorates, rather than vice versa.
But the Court has not been consistent in its commitment to a colorblind legal system. In one case, it blessed race-based immigration-enforcement stops, in a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that cited the supposedly “common sense” idea that darker-skinned people are more likely to be undocumented. In another, when Haitian plaintiffs pointed to explicitly racist justifications for the termination of their temporary protected status, the Court downplayed the evidence of color consciousness, instead trimming constitutional equality protections to a fruitless nub. Meanwhile, plaintiffs challenging state efforts to mitigate race discrimination have a glide path to victory.
Finally, there is the unitary-executive theory. In 2010, the same year as Citizens United , the Roberts Court for the first time applied the idea of the unitary executive by limiting Congress from installing layers of bureaucracy between the president and federal officers. This term, it gave the president near-absolute power to…
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