When high-profile policy changes reached the Supreme Court during President-elect Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House, one conservative justice looked to wonky federal requirements to keep the administration in check.
But a lot has changed in the five years since Chief Justice John Roberts penned a 5-4 ruling that used the Administrative Procedure Act to undo Trump’s push to unravel deportation protections for people who came to the United States illegally as children and led a fractured court to find that the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census was just a pretext for other goals. Those decisions gave environmentalists hope in their fight against rollbacks of Obama-era protections for air, water and climate.
For one thing, Trump added Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the high court during his last weeks in office in 2020, meaning that in close cases, Roberts now needs at least one more conservative ally to use the APA and other administrative law principles to rein in the president-elect over the next four years.
“If the court is principled, then what it’s saying is, ‘Agencies, you better look at everything and respond to everything, or we’re going to send it back to you,’” said William Buzbee, a professor at Georgetown Law.
