The Ezra Klein Show
‘A Sword and a Shield’: How the Supreme Court Supercharged Trump’s Power
17 Dec 2024
Full Episode
And a contributing writer for New York Times Opinion. Enjoy. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In recent years, the Supreme Court has handed down a string of decisions that have fundamentally changed the federal government. Court decisions have hamstrung the capacity of administrative agencies, and they have shored up the power of both the president and the court itself.
These decisions mean that Donald Trump will be entering office at a time when presidential power has arguably never been stronger or more unchecked. At the same time, Trump has promised to radically transform the federal government. Now, I don't want to make the mistake of ascribing too much coherence to Donald Trump's vision of the federal government or of governance more broadly.
But it is worth taking a hard look at the way the court has reshaped the tools at his disposal and what that could mean for how the federal government might work and what it might be able to do going forward.
To talk about all of that, I wanted to bring in Jillian Metzger, a professor of law at Columbia Law School, who's been thinking very deeply for a long time about the presidency, the administrative state, and the Supreme Court's relationship to both. Jillian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Okay, so to begin, I thought we could start with a proposition.
President-elect Donald Trump will enter office in January 2025 with more power and with fewer constraints than any other president in modern U.S. history. Agree or disagree?
I agree. I agree. I think there are some factors that complicate the assessment a little bit in terms of some decisions that have pulled back on administrative power compared to presidential power.
But when you're focusing on presidential power specifically, the president's control of the executive branch or the most recent immunity decision, the president's immunity from prosecution, those are decisions in areas where the president's powers have really been expanded.
So I agree that there are certain complexities and I do want to get into some of those. But it seems at the outset as though we do agree that the president's power has been expanded in recent years and recent decisions and that the immunity decision is really a critical piece of that story. Absolutely.
And so I think that actually one way to think about a number of recent Supreme Court opinions, maybe first and foremost the immunity opinion, is that they give the president both a sword, new powers, and a shield, new protections from any sort of meaningful accountability.
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