Isgur Situates Loper Bright in Roberts Court Broader Project

Advisory Opinions host Sarah Isgur has an essay at The Atlantic where she discusses the Supreme Court’s project “to shrink the presidency back to size and force 535 people to figure out a lasting solution to our problems, one that everyone can live with.” Although the Court’s recent decision striking down President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs was the impetus for the article, Isgur includes Loper Bright‘s impact. She wrote:  

The 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch. So did the vaccine-mandate case (Biden) in 2022 and the tax-records case (Trump) in 2020. This is a through line across administrations.

At the same time, the Court is putting the president more fully in charge of his branch of government. In that sense, Trump is winning. In Trump v. Slaughter, which involves the question of whether presidents can fire members of so-called independent agencies, the Court appears poised to let him have more direct control over those agencies and their personnel to execute his preferred policies. But that’s only after the justices, in Loper Bright, took power away from those agencies and handed it back to Congress, where it belonged. Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.

Read the full piece here.