This Could Be the Year the Supreme Court Pushes Back on Trump
There will be no shortage of major legal cases and rulings at the Supreme Court in 2026. The ones we already know about will touch upon topics ranging from tariffs to the structure of federal agencies to Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. At the core of many of these cases, however, will be one simple question: How much power should Donald Trump have? Up until now, the Roberts Court’s rulings have suggested that there aren’t many appreciable limits to Trump’s presidential privilege in his second term. Those boundaries might finally be in sight.
By far the most important Supreme Court case of the year will be Trump v. Barbara. At issue will be the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause—and, more specifically, whether the president can unilaterally refuse to recognize birthright citizenship.
The amendment’s drafters wrote the clause in 1869 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, to indisputably confirm the citizenship of formerly enslaved Americans, and to remove future questions of U.S. citizenship from the political sphere. To that end, the constitutional language is sweeping and definitive: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
For roughly a century and a half, all three branches of the federal government have interpreted it to apply to anyone born on U.S. soil, except for children of foreign diplomats, who aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they have diplomatic immunity. Many Native Americans were also previously excluded, but the closing of the frontier and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eliminated that exception.
Trump and his allies want to change that long-settled meaning. The White House issued an executive order last January that instructed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the U.S. citizenship of the future children of certain groups of non-citizens. Lower courts have thus far prevented the order from taking effect.
On an intellectual level, this should be an easy case for the justices. Undocumented immigrants and visa recipients are indisputably “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. They can be taxed, arrested, fined, imprisoned, executed, and much more while on U.S. soil. There is also ample precedent supporting birthright citizenship, including Supreme Court rulings like 1897’s Wong Kim Ark v. United States.
To refute this notion, the Trump administration and some of its right-wing allies in legal academia have concocted a novel reading of the clause that instead grounds citizenship in “political allegiance” to the United States. This “scholarship,” which was almost entirely a bespoke creation to justify Trump executive order, is flimsy at best and in some cases outright embarrassing. (One of the top revisionist proponents, Kurt Lash, recently published an article where he ran a 19th-century congressman’s purported letter through multiple AI chatbots to glean its accuracy and meaning.)
It is hard to trust the Supreme Court to get this case right. The conservative majority’s track record is far from comforting. In 2024 alone, the justices butchered a different clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to allow Trump to run for a second term despite a constitutional bar on office-holding for insurrectionists. A few months later, Roberts and his conservative colleagues invented the concept of “presidential immunity” out of thin air, sparing Trump from a criminal trial before the election and facilitating widespread corruption in his second term.
The past year was not reassuring, either. The high court has bent over backwards to facilitate Trump’s illegal purges of the federal civil service, his unlawful deportations and freezes on congressional spending, his dismantling of congressionally authorized federal agencies, and much more. Time and time again, the conservative justices have used the court’s shadow docket to grant Trump new and untrammeled powers, often overriding lower courts without a scintilla of legal reasoning or explanation.
The court’s sloppiness runs so deep that the justices cannot be trusted to get it right even if Trump loses. Some of its worst decisions have been framed as compromises: Roberts’s immunity ruling took pains to reject Trump’s view of the matter, as if he was staking out some sort of median position, while the court also invented a custom exception for the Federal Reserve when it effectively overturned ninety years of precedent in May. The stakes in Barbara are much higher: Any compromise on birthright citizenship could strip U.S. citizenship from millions of Americans, leaving them vulnerable to deportation and destroying their lives.
Trump wants the unilateral power to decide American citizenship—and much more. He is also seeking the limitless authority to fire the heads of multi-member agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and more in the pending decision in Trump v. Slaughter. Congress created these agencies with the intent of entrusting their immense powers in politically neutral appointees who would act in the public’s best interest. The Supreme Court appears poised to clear the way for Trump to command them at will under the auspices of the unitary executive theory.
There may be limits to the court’s willingness to empower Trump. The justices will hear oral arguments later this month on whether Trump can lawfully dismiss Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, against whom he and his Justice Department lackeys have brought dubious charges of mortgage fraud. Members of the Fed’s board of governors are legally insulated from dismissal except for cause, and the justices signaled last year that they would preserve the Fed’s independence. (Their 401k’s arguably depend on it.)
And then there are signs that the court might not be willing to grant him everything that he wants. In the near future, the court is expected to hand down a ruling that could strike down Trump’s claimed ability to impose trillions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War-era emergency law. Oral arguments were not reassuring for the Trump administration, and the president has occasionally fumed on social media in the recent weeks about the possibility that a cherished cudgel could be stripped from him.
And 2025 closed out with an even more reassuring move from the justices. Two days before Christmas, the court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago to assist in immigration-enforcement operations there. In an unsigned order, the justices concluded that federal law did not allow him to deploy the National Guard under the present circumstances. That drew a strenuous dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, who apparently slept through the last few years of shadow-docket rulings.
“In this case, the Court has unnecessarily and unwisely departed from standard practice,” he wrote. “It raised an argument that respondents waived below, and it now rules in respondents’ favor on that ground. To make matters worse, the Court reaches out and expresses tentative views on other highly important issues on which there is no relevant judicial precedent and on which we have received scant briefing and no oral argument.”
The Illinois ruling is a hopeful sign for those who want the nation’s highest court to aspire to something higher than greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s half-hearted would-be dictatorship. More importantly, the decision shows that the Supreme Court can contain Trump when it wishes to do so: The president promptly withdrew the National Guard from not only its planned deployment to Chicago, but also Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities where he made a performative and un-American show of force. If the court isn’t careful, people might actually expect it to act like a co-equal branch of government once again.