Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court wrapped up its December hearing session this week. It kicked off with a case that could “destroy the structure of government” if the Trump administration has its way. And that was just Monday.
The destruction concern came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “You’re asking us to destroy the structure of government and to take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent,” she told U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer during the hearing in Trump v. Slaughter.
Sauer pressed the high court to overturn its 1935 precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which has protected independent federal agencies from presidential control. The hearing suggested that the only question is how the administration will win the case, not whether it will.
On Tuesday, one of Sauer’s top deputies pressed the court to lift yet another limit on campaign financing. Sarah Harris represented the administration in backing JD Vance and other Republicans’ bid to let political parties coordinate campaign spending with candidates. A 2001 precedent upheld those restrictions, but Harris argued that “intervening developments have demolished” its reasoning.
What changed since 2001? The court’s membership. Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Harris clerked, is the only justice still on the high court bench. He authored the dissent in that 5-4 decision, writing that he remained “baffled that this Court has extended the most generous First Amendment safeguards to filing lawsuits, wearing profane jackets, and exhibiting drive-in movies with nudity, but has offered only tepid protection to the core speech and associational rights that our Founders sought to defend.” He’s now part of a GOP-appointed supermajority that is enthusiastically projecting its vision of the founding fathers’ vision.
But a “bait and switch” on campaign finance is what the Republicans are after, a lawyer defending the law told the justices: “What they’re really aiming at is all the other laws that they want to take down,” Roman Martinez argued. But would it really be a bait and switch if the high court majority is in on the trick? Thomas, for one, might have thought in response to Martinez’s warning: Don’t threaten me with a good time.
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