More from Donald Trump’s privy council

It got buried by the Court’s unreasoned order permitting people to be detained because of their race and one other transparent proxy for race, but yesterday John Roberts also used an administrative stay to effectively overrule a unanimous 90-year-old precedent by allowing the firing of an FTC commissioner contrary to federal statute to go forward.

Today, he was back for Congress’s appropriation powers:

NEW: Chief Justice Roberts freezes a lower court order that had obligated the government to pay out $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress. His freeze will last until the full court acts. Trump is trying to undertake a "pocket rescission" of these funds.

[image or embed]— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) Sep 9, 2025 at 1:10 PM

I think we can take this as a sign that the Court is going to transfer yet more unambiguous Article I powers to the executive (and the judiciary, because obviously Democratic presidents will not have the same leeway.) Among other things, this is going to make gridlock even more dysfunctional — how can you agree to budget compromises if they can be unilaterally abrogated by the executive branch? But when you’re trying to wreck the federal government this is the whole point.

I guess we could use some comic relief now, so:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of Barrett’s three liberal colleagues, recently wrote that the court seems to have a rule: “this Administration always wins.”

Barrett disagrees.

“I don’t think it’s true,” she said, adding the court doesn’t make decisions the way she might handle her children’s disputes – “OK, well, I’m going to try to even things out and you’ll win some and you’ll lose some.”

The numbers, however, might suggest Jackson has a point about Trump’s success. Among the two dozen emergency appeals the administration has made to the justices when lower courts blocked the president’s policies, nearly all have gone his way.

But Barrett said that while the focus is understandably on Trump because he’s the current president, the decisions she’s making are not about one man.

“It’s about the presidency,” she said. “And so the decisions that we make about executive power today are the same ones that will still be precedent three or four presidents from now.”

Definitely don’t google “Biden v. Nebraska!”