What we are seeing over and over again from the Trump administration is that they just go forward, right?

They wait to be stopped.

They do things that are clearly illegal, and maybe there are lawyers saying at some point, like, "Hey, we're not sure about this."

But effectively, the Trump administration waits for the courts to stop it.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today I am looking at some of the most consequential rulings to come out of the Supreme Court this year.

I'll also dig into the tense relationship between SCOTUS and POTUS, which boiled over after the court struck down President Trump's signature tariff agenda.

The Democrats on the court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote no.

They're an automatic no, just like in Congress, they're an automatic no.

They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.

In the past year alone, the Supreme Court has weighed in on everything from voting rights to the power of federal agencies issuing decisions that could reshape how Americans vote, how government functions, and how power is distributed in Washington.

The court is still far from finished.

Still to come are major rulings on birthright citizenship, the independence of key federal agencies, protections for immigrants, campaign finance, and many other issues that will help define the balance between presidential authority and constitutional limits.

At the same time, the court itself faces growing scrutiny.

Public confidence in the institution has declined sharply in recent years.

A September 2025 Pew survey found that only 48% of Americans viewed the Supreme Court favorably.

That's down from 70% just five years earlier.

Gallup's approval rating last year, even lower at 39%, was an all-time low.

And even some justices, like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, have expressed their concern that the court is becoming political and that it might, in fact, be putting democracy at risk.

Yet in case after case, judges from the Supreme Court on down have remained among the few institutional checks willing to confront a president determined to push the boundaries of executive power.

So what is the state of those judicial guardrails today?

How much power does a president really have?

And how much power should the courts have to stop him?

Joining me to make sense of it all, Emily Bazelon, senior research scholar at Yale Law School and staff writer for the New York Times Magazine.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

Did you hear the news?

It's an outrage.

Yeah, people are taking sick leave when they are sick.

Not that.

I mean Russia.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and... Emily Bazelon, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Ian.

There's always stuff to talk about with you.

Last time, it was a concern that you had, mounting concern, that the judiciary was under siege.

Not sure how well it would stand up.

We are nearing the halfway mark of the Trump administration.

And you would say what?

I would say that the lower courts have been a real bulwark, probably the strongest, maybe institution nationally, and certainly the strongest part of our democracy in presenting a counterforce to the Trump administration and standing up for the rule of law.

And it's been across the board.

There are lots of Trump-appointed judges who have ruled against the administration when it has taken unreasonable, illegal actions.

I think that the record is much more mixed about the United States Supreme Court, mostly because of what we call the shadow docket, the series of emergency orders it has issued, most of which have gone in Trump's direction without a lot of explanation at all.

There have obviously been some important moments where the court has pushed back on Trump's tariffs, on his effort to bring the National Guard into Chicago for immigration purposes, but those are really the exceptions, not the rule.

We're not finished with this term.

- Trade's a really big one, to be fair.

- Totally a really big one.

It's a big deal for the Supreme Court to say no to Trump's signature initiative, which Trump made all too clear that he expected them to go along with.

Almost like too clear, right?

They had in some ways less of a choice about standing up to him.

- I'm hardly a scholar of jurisprudence, but anyone looking at IEEPA, the idea that you could just use and declare a national emergency to ensure tariffs on any country for any reason, that just never passed the smell test.

- Right.

- So I would have been quite surprised if the Supreme Court had not ruled in that direction.

Totally agree, and so you don't wanna give them too much credit for something that's relatively obvious, that they kind of had no choice about, but I think you're right.

It was not really a persuasive explanation, and it's very important that the court made that ruling.

The thing that most surprised me, and maybe it shouldn't have, and I'd love to hear from you how important it was and whether it was surprising, was the recent decision on the Voter Rights Act.

The U.S.

Supreme Court today struck down one of Louisiana's majority Black congressional districts, a decision that weakens key protections under the Voting Rights Act.

The decision could open the door to broader legal challenges over majority Black and Latino districts across the country and give states new latitude to redraw maps in ways that could shift the balance of political power.

Is that the most consequential sort of surprise from the Supreme Court or not really?

Well, it's the most consequential decision this year so far.

I was not surprised by it because Chief Justice John Roberts has really made a long-term project out of weakening and indeed dismantling the Voting Rights Act.

And so this was the latest step in that process.

Enormously consequential, we're seeing a redistricting as a result, because now there is no limit at all, really, at least from federal courts on gerrymandering.

And we're seeing the results of that, especially in the South, where longtime seats held by members of the Congressional Black Caucus are now going to turn into Republican seats, mostly held by white people.

It's a big shift.

But I wasn't surprised by it, because I think that there is a strong conservative majority that has been very intent on eliminating protections against race discrimination and saw the Voting Rights Act in that context.

And so even just setting aside making it easier for Republicans to win Congress, which is where we kind of are in the tallying of the gerrymandering, set that aside.

It is bad for the democracy to have Congress less competitive, to have Congress more polarized, and to have the kind of regional factionalization we're now gonna have, right?

We are gonna have a congressional delegation from the South that is almost entirely Republican.

We already have delegations from the Northeast, from the Pacific Northwest, that are almost entirely Democrats.

And that's not good.

That's just not good for knitting the country together, right?

- Yeah, I mean, we don't obviously have, it's not the way the Senate works, it's not the way governors work, it's not the way state houses work, but it is the House of Representatives.

So essentially you're saying this decision, the most impact has been weakening the House.

- Yes, which is called, as you were just saying, the House of Representatives.

It's supposed to be our closest representation to true democracy, and it is now gonna be further and further removed from that because of the Supreme Court.

What's the argument that the majority is using, and how credible is it in your view, legally, to advance this decision?

- Part of the argument is the idea that things have changed.

That the Voting Rights Act passed a long time ago, and that because the problems it was initially designed to solve in 1965 have been ameliorated, like Black people can now register to vote, you don't have that gap that you had that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement, that those problems have been solved and we can just sort of move on from that.

And then a second argument the court used is this idea that it is not the province of the federal courts to be interfering with how legislatures do their redistricting, that they really should be deciding these things from themselves and the court can't figure out how to play a role in that in any kind of fair way.

And I think the problem with those arguments are, first of all, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act only 20 years ago.

So this notion that it's antiquated and that the court should step in to essentially undo the work of Congress, I think is just a really thin argument that seemed politically and ideologically motivated by the conservative majority.

- Interesting, okay.

Well, now you talked about the shadow docket for the Supreme Court.

What are the other couple of decisions that have come down that make you more concerned about the Supreme Court as a check on executive power in ways that will get to the lower courts of nothing?

- So one really important set of decisions has been about the power of Congress to appropriate funds and decide how to spend money and Trump's effort to undo all of that.

So USAID, for example, the court first seemed to check Trump's effort to dismantle that agency and then let it go ahead.

Same thing with the Department of Education.

And basically, I think the court is using kind of excuses to allow the president to do what he wants.

But it's really hard to know because it's the shadow docket and we don't get any reasoning and explanation.

And that, I think, is just a problem in itself.

Because the thing that differentiates the court as a branch of government is that it gives reasons.

And you can decide whether or not you think those reasons hold up.

And there's a dissent explaining a different point of view.

And on the shadow docket, we almost always lose all of that aspect of the court's work.

I've noticed as this is going on that the level of public support, popular support, belief in the Supreme Court has been going down.

Is that a direct response to this?

Is it everything's getting politicized?

The public believed in the Supreme Court even after Bush versus Gore, right?

So, I mean, that was pretty fundamental, right?

I mean, that was like a partisan decision on the back of an election up for grabs.

Doesn't get any bigger than that.

Why is it taking such a toll now?

- So after Citizens United, which made it much harder for Congress to have campaign finance reform, there was a dip.

And then the court largely recovered.

Then you get to Dobbs, right?

The end of Roe versus Wade.

And I think the message that the court was a political institution, that it had changed its mind about the constitutional right to abortion because there were just more conservative justices and they were going to end Roe, I think that really broke through to people.

And I also think you're right, that in the last couple of years, decisions that seem like they are against the Voting Rights Act, on the side of presidential immunity, in the context of a challenge from President Trump, those decisions make the court look nakedly political in a way that people can see and kind of smell.

And the justices, on the one hand, they've been trying to defend the court as an institution.

Chief Justice Roberts, other members of the court saying, "Hey, we don't do politics.

We get along."

But then there are these other signs.

They're very sharp and directly confronting each other in opinions, and sometimes that's been true in their public remarks.

So I think there's also a way in which, if you're paying attention to the court, it looks like the institution is fraying on the inside.

What are the indications that we should be looking for that the next time there is a potential constitutional crisis, specifically around transfer of power, that the Supreme Court will or will not be able to stand up as a break?

I mean, the best argument that the court will do that job is the way it responded to challenges to the 2020 election, right?

Trump really tried to get the courts to come in on his side.

Basically, virtually unanimously, lower courts in this country said no to those election challenges, and the court-- - They threw a lot of them out.

- They threw them out.

It was a really powerful and very important kind of consensus statement of the judiciary, and the Supreme Court stayed out of it.

That's important, and tariffs are important, right, for the reasons we were just talking about, an indication that when you present the court with a ludicrous argument or a fairly weak argument, they're not going to go for it just because Trump is asking.

Entirely possible that birthright citizenship, I think, likely is going to have the same kind of outcome because the administration's arguments that Trump, with a stroke of his pen, can end a constitutional right that's been in place since the middle of the 19th century.

It's clear from the Constitution.

Wrong, exactly.

And so I think that that will be also an indication that there are limits.

On the other hand, we have these decisions in the political realm, like the one about the Voting Rights Act, that suggests that sometimes the justices are not really moved by these considerations.

And so I think it's going to depend a lot on the context, the facts of the case that come before it.

If Trump does something that's blatantly, transparently illegal, the justices are going to feel, I think, institutionally, that it's important for them to stop it.

But if it's something on the margins, if it's something that maybe they could get away with justifying, I feel less confident.

Now we have seen over the course of the past months a lot of fairly obviously illegal things that courts are striking down.

- Yes.

I mean, stupid issue, but taking Trump's name and putting it on the Kennedy Center, which I mean, it's just very clear that there's no ability to do that unless it comes from Congress.

Like, it couldn't be clearer.

- In the statute.

- In the statute, right?

And just shot down.

And Trump, you know, basically says, "I'm taking my toys and I'm running off," right?

What, you know, shouldn't this have been obvious?

Yes, and I think what we are seeing over and over again from the Trump administration is that they just go forward, right?

They wait to be stopped.

They do things that are clearly illegal, and maybe there are lawyers saying at some point, like, hey, we're not sure about this.

But effectively, the Trump administration waits for the courts to stop it.

And I think this is what Trump decided about the Justice Department when he was president the first time.

There were lots more people high up in the Justice Department, including at various points both of his attorneys general, who said no.

There was a limit.

They reached it.

They were like, we're not going ahead with this.

But that we don't have anymore.

We don't have that anymore.

Completely gone.

It's just not there.

And so I think that's why you see the administration doing things that are clearly illegal.

It is just filled with, at this point, I'll just say yes men, because we have a male attorney general.

- Yeah, who used to be the personal attorney of the president.

Now, I mean, we've had attorneys general who have been very personally linked to presidents before, Bobby Kennedy, for example, right?

- Yes.

- But it does feel in this environment that the purpose of the attorney general is to conduct the political bidding and the legal bidding of the president.

Am I correct in that assessment?

A hundred percent.

I mean, I think it is very clear Pam Bondi did her best to keep her job by going along with everything she could.

She didn't get fired because she said no to Trump.

He just got tired of her and got mad about the Epstein files.

So the AG, the attorney general, is not acting in any way to constrain or mitigate the fact that Trump wants to try all this stuff.

But then when it actually hits the lower courts, whether it's Democrat or Republican appointed, we're then seeing this stuff is struck down.

Yes, exactly.

That's the dynamic.

It's why the lower courts have been such an important bulwark.

You know, there is a way in which politically Trump still uses it, right?

Then he rails against particular lower court judges and tries to kind of make political hay out of that.

But with no particular impact.

No, I don't think it's really working for him.

I think that's true.

But that is the move that he makes.

It's still kind of a threat to the judiciary as a separate branch of power, right?

It's not respectful.

It's not respectful, but I mean, if the mechanism does... I mean, again, he's two years in now.

It's his second term.

He talks about the judges being horrible and the courts being rigged, but his ability to do anything about it so far... Limited.

- More than zero?

Well, I mean, he is over time going to appoint more and more of those judges, right?

And so this is the most important defense that we've had, and it's a real blessing from the Constitution that we have in this case people -- they have life tenure, they have long careers and long periods of service, and so each president doesn't just get to come in and appoint lots of judges.

I sort of can't believe I'm saying that because normally I'm a critic of life tenure in the context of the Supreme Court.

But in this case, it's very important, the slow moving nature of changing the judiciary.

Especially because so many of the judges that were initially appointed by Trump feel quite independent once they get into their positions.

Right.

And those judges, a lot of them came up through the Federalist Society, the main organ of the conservative legal movement, they're real lawyers.

They're super conservative, but they're not hacks.

And so, you know, several months ago, Trump started complaining about that breed of judge and saying, "No, no, like I want Trump judges.

"I want people who are gonna do what I want all the time."

And we just don't know enough to know yet how successful he will be, but it is really important that there aren't yet that many vacancies.

You mentioned birthright citizenship, which a lot of people have been talking about, and which I would also be surprised if it went through, but what are some of the other big cases people should be watching for that the Supreme Court is likely to rule on soon?

So, you know, just to talk a little bit more about the birthright citizenship case, I mean, this is a case in which Trump issued an executive order to end birthright citizenship, despite its enshrinement in the 14th Amendment and also of federal statute.

So I think that's why we both agree that it would be implausible for the president to win, though he will shake his fist if and when he loses.

A couple of other really significant cases are about the power of the executive branch.

So on the one hand, you have Lisa Cook, the governor of the Board of Federal Reserves, who Trump has tried to fire for cause.

A really thin kind of pretextual basis, but he's saying, "I have reason to fire her "because according to the administration, she committed mortgage fraud in some way."

- Yes, driven by the now acting Director of National Intelligence, which is an interesting dynamic.

- Completely.

- Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So that question of whether Trump can fire Lisa Cook, the court is going to rule on.

The court seemed skeptical of the administration's arguments.

Also seems willing, for reasons it's not yet articulated, to think of the Fed as different from all the other administrative agencies, even though legally, historically speaking, it's really not clear why that would be.

There's another related case about Trump's power to fire commissioners of multi-member headed agencies.

So in this case, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission.

He fired Rebecca Slaughter, one of the commissioners, without cause.

He's claiming that the president-- -Has the right to do that, yes.

-Exactly.

And I think it's very likely the court will rule in the president's favor.

In part because it's not the Fed.

In part because it's not the Fed, even though I don't think that really makes any sense, that distinction.

And that is going to be a real shift in how we think about these administrative agencies.

Yeah, I mean, Congress set them up starting early in the 20th century with this independence, this separation from direct presidential control, because you had to have cause to fire people.

And I think we're about to lose that.

And this was a big piece of Project 2025, what they wanted to accomplish.

- 100%.

- Specifically with the so-called deep state, the administrative state, that has been a big part of the civil service in the US.

So maybe close this up as we think about the judicial system and rule of law in the United States.

There are many out there, including people watching this show right now, that think that the US is heading to a constitutional crisis, that the democracy is really in danger, and that if it's not handled well, we could see no more free and fair elections, all the rest.

I certainly, that has not been my view.

I feel, and tell me if I'm wrong, that you're saying, actually, no, these checks and balances are a little stronger and more durable than a lot of people believe.

- I think that's been true about the judiciary.

I mean, another way to think about this is Congress has been so failing on the job that relatively speaking, the courts look good, even the Supreme Court, because Congress, Republican-controlled Congress has stood up to Trump basically not at all.

And that is obviously a low bar.

But I do think, you know, these instances in which you see the Supreme Court say no, which we've talked about, have been significant.

And what's really, really mattered have been the lower courts, which have been really just trying to do their job.

Emily Bazelon, trying to do her job.

Much appreciated.

Thank you.

And now to Puppet Regime, where European leaders have had it up to here with Vladimir Putin.

Did you hear the news?

It's an outrage.

Yeah, people are taking sick leave when they are sick.

Not that.

I mean Russia has launched a drone into Romania.

Maybe it's time we do something about it.

Time to break out their big guns.

Let's call him now.

I'm gonna live forever.

Hello?

- Monsieur Putin, you have made a serious violation.

Yes.

- It's an outrage.

You provoke.

Can't stop, won't stop.

Well, you leave us no choice.

We are going to deploy Europe's most fearsome weapon.

A ruthlessly destructive power.

We are issuing you, Vladimir, a statement... ...of strongest condemnation.

We said statement of strongest... No, I heard you, I heard you.

I'm just really relieved that you didn't hit me with... ...working group.

We did.

Should we have discussed this?

Should we have done... We could have a working group and... Ragazzi!

- Puppet Regime!

Oh, I'm gonna live forever.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you're ready to put the whole system on trial, take a breath.

And check us out at GZEROmedia.com.

(upbeat music) - Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... ♪♪♪♪♪