Justice Kagan Rejects Charge that Supreme Court Is “Rubber Stamp” for Trump Administration

Some legal and political commentators claim that the Supreme Court has bent over backwards to appease or affirm the Trump Administration. In recent remarks before the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, as reported by Politico, Justice Elena Kagan rejected this common narrative.

From Politico:

“I don’t see this as a court that is just like, ‘We’re just going to rubber stamp what the current administration does.’ You know, quite the opposite,” Kagan said to a judicial conference here Thursday. “I think that that is a bad rap.” . . .

Kagan, a liberal justice and Obama appointee, said the 6-3 decision scuttling Trump’s tariffs was extraordinary.

“Tariffs is probably the key policy issue for this president. I mean, something he campaigned on, he ran on, he cared an enormous amount about,” she said. “I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a a sitting president.”

That the Court is conservative–and reaches conservative decisions–is not evidence that it is under President Trump’s sway.

“You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration,” she said.

Kagan also said that the justices were unaffected by President Trump’s decision to attend oral argument in the birthright citizenship case, another case of extreme importance to Trump in which the Court rejected his position, and even dissenting justices raised questions about the breadth of the Trump Administration’s position.

“It was sort of like….from the court’s point of view, a non-event,” Kagan said in her first public remarks on the unusual spectacle. “Honestly, the vibes in the courtroom were the vibes in the courtroom on any other day.” . . .

Kagan also noted that Trump left about halfway through the two-hour session. “It was a long argument. You really did kind of think he probably had other things to do,” she said.

“So, I don’t know. I think he probably won’t come back,” she added, prompting laughter from the audience.