SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
elena kagan
Supreme Court Lets Trump Withhold $4 Billion in Foreign Aid Approved by Congress
"This result further erodes separation of powers principles that are fundamental to our constitutional order," said one critic.
Sep 26, 2025
The US Supreme Court on Friday gave President Donald Trump the green light to withhold billions of dollars of congressionally approved foreign aid, a major win for the White House and executive authority and, according to critics, a body blow to the bedrock constitutional principle of congressional power of the purse.
At issue in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition is $4 billion in foreign aid allocated by Congress that the Trump administration determined was wasteful, including funding for international public health such as HIV prevention programs, which have been credited with saving millions of lives.
The high court's right-wing majority found that "the asserted harms to the executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm" to aid recipients, while cautioning that "this order should not be read as a final determination on the merits."
BREAKING: Supreme Court lets Trump unilaterally freeze billions in congressionally appropriated foreign aid money apparent 6-3 vote with liberals in dissent @courthousenews.bsky.social
[image or embed]
— Kelsey Reichmann (@kelseyreichmann.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 1:43 PM
The Trump administration sought not only validation of its claimed ability to claw back spending previously approved by Congress—which under the Constitution generally holds power of the purse—but also of "pocket recission," a highly contentious budgetary maneuver to cancel previously approved federal expenditures by exploiting legal ambiguity in the Impoundment Control Act (ICA).
Democrats and many legal experts contend that pocket recissions are illegal, and Democratic lawmakers warned even before Trump's White House return that he would try to use the tactic in order to refuse to disburse funds allocated by Congress for social programs.
Justice Elena Kagan—who dissented along with fellow liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—asserted that the majority approved "essentially a presidential usurpation of Congress' power of the purse."
"The stakes are high: At issue is the allocation of power between the executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies," Kagan said.
“That is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions through the enactment of appropriations laws,” she wrote. “If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the executive of that duty, then the executive must comply.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court dealt a temporary blow to Trump's evisceration of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a ruling that left intact a lower court's decision ordering the resumption of approximately $2 billion in foreign aid frozen by the administration.
Friday's ruling could complicate bipartisan negotiations to avert a Republican government shutdown as the September 30 deadline looms. Democratic negotiators now worry that Trump, buoyed by the high court decision, could again refuse to spend funds designated by Congress.
“Today’s ruling allows the administration to unilaterally refuse to spend $4 billion in foreign assistance funds that it is required by law to spend," said Nicolas Sansone, an attorney at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and counsel for the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. "This result further erodes separation of powers principles that are fundamental to our constitutional order. It will also have a grave humanitarian impact.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Supreme Court to Weigh 90-Year-Old Precedent and Let Trump Fire FTC Commissioner
"Rest in peace to the presidency, and long live the king," quipped one attorney.
Sep 22, 2025
As US President Donald Trump faces mounting accusations of authoritarian conduct, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority on Monday empowered him to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to review a 90-year-old precedent that restricts executive power over independent agencies such as the FTC.
Trump in March fired the FTC's two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without cause. Slaughter fought back, and US District Judge Loren AliKhan allowed her to return to work while the case continued. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld that decision, but it was halted Monday by the nation's top court.
Monday's decision was unsigned, though the three liberals collectively dissented, led by Justice Elena Kagan. In addition to letting Trump move forward with ousting Slaughter, the majority agreed to reconsider the precedent established with Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that centered on whether the Federal Trade Commission Act unconstitutionally interfered with the executive power of the president.
In Humphrey's Executor, the high court found that Congress' removal protections for FTC members did not violate the separation of powers. Along with revisiting the precedent established by that landmark decision in December, the justices plan to weigh whether a federal court may prevent a person's removal from public office.
The court's stay allowing Trump to fire Slaughter was granted as part of the court's emergency process, or shadow docket. In a short but scathing dissent, Kagan noted that it is part of a recent trend: "Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the president to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission."
"I dissented from the majority's prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this court unanimously decided nearly a century ago," she wrote. In Humphrey's Executor, Kagan continued, "Congress, we held, may restrict the president's power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing 'quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial' functions, without violating the Constitution."
"So the president cannot, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey's: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress' judgment about agency design," she argued. "The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the majority from giving the president the unlimited removal power Congress denied him."
More broadly, Kagan declared that "our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation's separation of powers."
Kagan, of course, is correct that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Humphrey's Executor and allow the president to fire leaders of any independent agency (other than the Fed—maybe?!). She's also right to bemoan the fact that SCOTUS effectively overruled Humphrey's on the shadow docket already.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, slammed the court in a Monday statement.
"Today, in a one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court authorized President Trump's illegal firing of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and his ongoing destruction of the independent, bipartisan Federal Trade Commission," Vaheesan said.
"As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, Commissioner Slaughter was fired without cause and is clearly entitled to her position under the FTC Act and controlling Supreme Court precedent," he added. "The court could override Congress' decision to create an independent FTC on specious constitutional grounds but until it takes that step Commissioner Slaughter has a right to her job.”
While the justices agreed to take Slaughter's case, they turned away petitions from two ousted Democratic appointees referenced by Kagan: Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. According to SCOTUSblog: "The court did not provide any explanation for its decision not to take up Harris' and Wilcox's cases at this time. They will continue to move forward in the lower courts."
The New York Times noted that "the justices are separately considering the Trump administration’s request to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor. The Supreme Court has yet to act, but has suggested that the central bank may be insulated from presidential meddling under the law."
However, as Law Dork's Chris Geidner highlighted on social media, the second question the justices will consider in the Slaughter case, regarding courts preventing removals from public office, "would have implications even for the 'Fed carveout' exception that the court suggested exists."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Supreme Court Porn ID Ruling 'A Blow to Freedom of Speech and Privacy,' Says ACLU
"The legislature claims to be protecting children from sexually explicit materials, but the law will do little to block their access, and instead deters adults from viewing vast amounts of First Amendment-protected content," said Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the ACLU.
Jun 27, 2025
Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm after the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a Texas law requiring users to share personal identification to view adult material online.
The law, which mandates websites that host sexual content to require users to provide photo IDs or biometric scans to verify that they are over 18, was challenged by several adult websites and free speech organizations. They argued that it violated adult users' First Amendment rights.In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines siding with Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion that the law "only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults," and therefore did not require "strict scrutiny" from the Court.
But advocates for free speech and online security have warned that such laws—which have passed in 24 states—have the potential to be much more invasive, both to personal expression and privacy.
Following the ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decried the Court's decision as "a blow to freedom of speech and privacy."
"The Supreme Court has departed from decades of settled precedents that ensured that sweeping laws purportedly for the benefit of minors do not limit adults' access to First Amendment-protected materials," said Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the ACLU. "The legislature claims to be protecting children from sexually explicit materials, but the law will do little to block their access, and instead deters adults from viewing vast amounts of First Amendment-protected content."
The ACLU's concerns echoed those expressed in Justice Elena Kagan's dissenting opinion, in which she said the court should have applied "strict scrutiny," which would have required the bill to use the least restrictive means possible to meet its goal. Applying strict scrutiny is standard in cases involving content related restrictions on expression, and has been used in past cases related to obscenity.
"No one doubts that the distribution of sexually explicit speech to children, of the sort involved here, can cause great harm," she added. "But the First Amendment protects those sexually explicit materials, for every adult. So a state cannot target that expression, as Texas has here, any more than is necessary to prevent it from reaching children."
During oral arguments in January, Kagan warned of the potential "spillover danger" if the court were to weaken strict scrutiny for free expression cases.
"You relax strict scrutiny in one place," she said, "and all of a sudden, strict scrutiny gets relaxed in other places."
Friday's ruling comes as red states have introduced laws increasingly cracking down on public discussion of sex and gender.
These have included laws banning sexual education or the discussion of LGBTQ+ identities in schools, bans on books containing "divisive" topics including sex and gender, and bans on drag shows in public spaces. Many states have also introduced laws allowing parents to challenge books containing "divisive" concepts, including discussions of sexuality and LGBTQ+ identity.
On Friday, the Supreme Court also ruled on religious liberty grounds in favor of parents' rights to opt their children out from classes with storybooks involving LGBTQ+ characters.
"As it has been throughout history, pornography is once again the canary in the coal mine of free expression," said Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, which was one of the plaintiffs in the Texas case.
Beyond burdening adults' free expression, critics warned that requiring photo identification poses a privacy risk to porn viewers.
The conservative justices defended the law as tantamount to others that require identification to access alcohol or to enter adults-only spaces. In his majority opinion, Thomas wrote that the law is "appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data."
However, Kagan argued in her dissent that requiring photo ID for online activity is fundamentally different because the user has no idea if their identifying information is being tracked or logged.
"It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits—respecting speech many find repulsive—to a website operator, and then to… who knows?" she said.
Evan Greer, founder of the online privacy advocacy group Fight for the Future, wrote on BlueSky that the ruling bodes ill for internet privacy more generally.
"This is bad in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with porn and everything to do with expanding invasive surveillance of every single internet user, including all adults," Greer said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular