Has the Supreme Court Stood Up to Trump?

Every Friday, PBS NewsHour turns to David Brooks of The Atlantic and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW for a recurring segment of political analysis, and the wrap-up of the Supreme Court's 2026 term gave the pair plenty to argue about. Heading into the country's 250th anniversary, the court had just closed out a docket full of cases that tested, case by case, how far presidential power can stretch before a co-equal branch pushes back.

The stakes were not abstract. Over the course of the term, the justices ruled against President Trump on his tariff program, on his attempt to end birthright citizenship, and on mail-in ballot rules, and they blocked him from removing a sitting member of the Federal Reserve's board. At the same time, they sided with him on immigration restrictions, upheld a state-level ban on trans women in sports, and — in a case referred to in the segment as the Slaughter case — ruled that the president could fire commissioners at the FTC and other semi-independent agencies, reversing a precedent that had stood for roughly a century.

That mixed record is exactly what set up the disagreement between Brooks and Capehart: is a court that blocks the big authoritarian moves but loosens the leash on agency independence actually functioning as a check on presidential power, or is it picking its battles selectively while democracy erodes around the edges?

David Brooks laid out his read of the term bluntly: on what he called "the big authoritarian power grabs," the court "stood up to Trump and slapped him back down." He pointed specifically to the Federal Reserve firing attempt, birthright citizenship, the tariffs, and the fight over sending National Guard troops into Chicago over the objections of local officials. In each of those cases, Brooks argued, the justices drew a real line.

He also offered an institutional explanation for why the court behaves the way it does: it "hates to take on a sitting president because they don't want to take on an elected official." Brooks drew a parallel to the Roberts court's earlier decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, arguing the justices are generally reluctant to overturn what democratic politics has produced. Given that instinct, he said, "it's the most effective branch of government we have right now" — though he was explicit that this is "grading on a very low curve."

On the Slaughter case specifically, Brooks was more conflicted. He said stripping independence from agencies like the FTC was "not my preference," noting he supports the post-1930s tradition of insulating institutions such as the Federal Reserve from raw politics. But he acknowledged that "a significant branch of legal thinkers" believe an administration elected by the president shouldn't be "cushioned off from democracy." His conclusion: the ruling was "not my preference, but reasonable" — and, on the term's biggest questions about preserving democracy, he judged the court did "OK."

Jonathan Capehart didn't accept the premise that the court has been good for democracy this term. He directly challenged Brooks's Obamacare comparison, noting that "democracy brought us the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Supreme Court just gutted it, decimated it" — with Southern states, in his telling, moving to capitalize on the ruling with the same speed, "if not faster," than after the court's earlier gutting of the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. For Capehart, that history predates Trump and complicates any tidy story about the court simply protecting democratic outcomes.

Where Brooks and Capehart converged, though, was on the role of Congress. Capehart argued that many of the term's rulings would have been unnecessary "if Congress were functioning" and had exercised its own Article I powers. His complaint wasn't just about the judiciary: "it's great that the judiciary is functioning, but it'd be really nice if the legislative branch started acting like a co-equal branch of government instead of the staffing arm of the executive." That framing reframes the entire term: the Supreme Court isn't necessarily overreaching by ruling on tariffs, immigration, or agency firings — it's filling a vacuum left by a Congress that has largely stepped back from its own constitutional responsibilities.

The Brooks-Capehart split isn't just a disagreement about legal doctrine — it's a proxy for a much bigger question American voters are wrestling with heading toward the midterms: which institution, if any, is actually constraining the presidency right now? Brooks's answer is "the courts, imperfectly." Capehart's answer is closer to "not enough, and Congress is the real failure." Both point toward the same anxiety about how much power has concentrated in the executive branch since the start of the second Trump term.

The same broadcast connected this institutional debate to a broader mood check, timed to the run-up to the 250th anniversary of American independence. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll cited in the segment found 65% of Americans say they are proud to be American, while 83% say the country has moved away from its founding principles and ideals — and yet 53% still say the nation's best days are ahead of it. That combination of pride, disillusionment, and residual optimism mirrors exactly the tension in the Brooks-Capehart exchange: real anger at how institutions are functioning, alongside a reluctance to write off the system entirely.

Brooks framed his own outlook through the lens of history, arguing the country periodically goes through eras where "people just want to burn everything down," citing the 1770s, 1830s, 1890s, and 1960s as precedents, and expressing confidence the country has "the vitality to change and to fix things" again. Capehart, reflecting on his own family history, said he counts himself among the 65% who are proud, framing his patriotism as inseparable from the fact that his ancestors "were brought here in chains" and helped build the country anyway, through generations of pushing it to live up to its own ideals.

That same tension between institutional distrust and long-run optimism is likely to keep shaping how the Supreme Court's rulings get read heading into 2026's midterm cycle. If Congress continues to defer rather than legislate, the court will keep being asked to settle fights that were never supposed to be its job alone — and Brooks and Capehart's disagreement about whether that's a sign of health or dysfunction isn't going away anytime soon.