Supreme Court hasn't always been friendly in Trump cases
“I'm not happy with the Supreme Court,” President Donald Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021. “They love to rule against me.”
His assessment of the court, in a speech delivered outside the White House urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, had a substantial element of truth in it.
Other parts of the speech were laced with fury and lies, and the Colorado Supreme Court cited some of those passages Tuesday as evidence that Trump has engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office again.
But Trump's reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court in the speech, freighted with grievance and accusations of disloyalty, captured not only his perspective but also an inescapable reality. A fundamentally conservative court, with a six-justice majority of Republican appointees that includes three named by Trump himself, has not been particularly receptive to his arguments.
Indeed, the Trump administration had the worst Supreme Court record of any since at least the Roosevelt administration, according to data developed by Lee Epstein and Rebecca L. Brown, law professors at the University of Southern California, for an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly.
Now another series of Trump cases are at the court or on its threshold: one on whether he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution; another on the viability of a central charge in the federal election-interference case; and the third, from Colorado, on whether he was banned from another term under the 14th Amendment.
The cases pose distinct legal questions, but earlier decisions suggest they could divide the court's conservative wing along a surprising fault line: Trump's appointees have been less likely to vote for him in some politically charged cases than Justice Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
In his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.
“I picked three people,” he said. “I fought like hell for them.”
Trump said his nominees had abandoned him, blaming his losses on the justices' eagerness to participate in Washington social life and to assert their independence from the charge that “they're my puppets.”
He added, “And now the only way they can get out of that because they hate that it's not good in the social circuit. And the only way they get out is to rule against Trump. So let's rule against Trump. And they do that.”