Week 76: A Court That Giveth and Taketh, a Presidency That Cashes In

“`markdown This was the week the Supreme Court closed out its term, and it did so with a docket that refused to move in one direction. Within the span of a few days, the justices preserved constitutional guarantees in one case and dismantled a decades-old check on presidential power in the next. Running alongside the rulings was a second story, pieced together through financial disclosures and investigative reporting, showing a president whose family’s wealth had grown by billions of dollars through ventures his own administration regulates. By week’s end, the two threads — judicial power and presidential profit — had become impossible to separate from the broader question of what checks remain on the executive.

**The Weekend**

The week opened on a somber note. On Saturday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to let the administration strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians, clearing the way for deportations even to Haiti, a country under an active State Department travel warning. The ruling set the tone for an enforcement push that would intensify through the week. That same weekend, civic groups including 50501, the Women’s March, and the Next250 coalition staged counter-programming to the administration’s official 250th-anniversary events, asserting a fuller account of the nation’s history. The administration’s own "Freedom 250" fair on the National Mall, by contrast, drew sparse crowds despite heavy promotion, with Fox News hosts falsely describing it as packed and performers withdrawing once they recognized its partisan character. The White House also unveiled a commemorative passport bearing Trump’s own portrait and signature, and Speaker Mike Johnson warned a conservative audience that a Democratic House majority would use its committees to investigate Trump’s family and donors — an admission, of sorts, of what might be found. In Mississippi, police used teargas against demonstrators seeking accountability for the shooting death of a one-year-old child, while officials withheld the body-camera footage.

**Monday**

By Monday, the Court’s term-ending docket began in earnest, and a separate story broke that would recur throughout the week: a Guardian investigation revealed that the White House’s National Design Studio, staffed by veterans of the Department of Government Efficiency, had quietly rebuilt sensitive federal websites — a government login gateway, passport applications, children’s savings accounts — operating outside the agencies legally responsible for them, without the privacy filings or spending disclosures normally required. The systems handled identity, financial, and passport data for millions of Americans, built and run by a parallel structure largely invisible to statutory oversight. It was, in its quiet way, one of the week’s most significant stories: a structural expansion of executive reach that would outlast any single ruling.

The Court itself handed down two major and divergent decisions that day. In Slaughter v. Trump, a 6-3 majority overturned Humphrey’s Executor, the 91-year-old precedent that had shielded heads of independent agencies from removal without cause. Adopting a "unitary executive" theory, the ruling gave the president sweeping new control over roughly two dozen agencies Congress had designed to operate independently of direct political control — a decision dissenting justices warned would reshape the structure of the federal government itself. Yet the same day, in a 5-4 ruling, the Court blocked Trump’s attempted removal of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, finding he had failed to provide the legally required notice and allowing her to remain on the board while her challenge proceeded. The Court, in other words, expanded removal power broadly while drawing a narrow, almost surgical line to protect the Fed’s independence specifically. The justices also declined to hear Trump’s final appeal of the $5 million E. Jean Carroll defamation verdict, closing out that chapter with the judgment intact.

Monday’s immigration developments compounded the weekend’s TPS ruling. North Carolina’s legislature overrode gubernatorial vetoes to mandate sheriff cooperation with ICE and to pass anti-DEI education measures, while DHS Secretary Mullin defended deportations to Haiti despite the standing travel warning — a defense Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, publicly broke with. Elsewhere, reporting showed the administration had redirected funding from more than 900 National Park Service safety and maintenance projects while proposing to cut park staff by nearly a third, even as it sought $10 billion from Congress for Washington beautification, a request the Senate rejected. North Carolina’s Senate advanced a bill criminalizing homeless encampments, even as Seattle and New York swore in new Democratic socialist mayors, Katie Wilson and Zohran Mamdani, the latter soon securing a rent freeze covering nearly a million apartments. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continued an unexplained purge of senior military leadership, removing more than two dozen officers including the former Joint Chiefs chair and top Navy, Coast Guard, and Army leadership.

**Tuesday**

Tuesday brought the Court back to more protective ground. The justices rejected a Republican National Committee challenge to state laws counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, ruled that geofence warrants require Fourth Amendment protection, and agreed to hear a future case on proof-of-citizenship voting requirements. Away from the Court, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy publicly accused Trump of treating Congress "as an appendage" after being berated over his support for an Iran war-powers resolution — a rare public break from a sitting Republican senator over military transparency, though Cassidy later withdrew his support once belatedly briefed. Trump, meanwhile, dismissed a bipartisan housing bill that had passed 358-32 as "a big yawn," conditioning his signature on passage of the SAVE Act and blaming Republican holdouts including Lisa Murkowski. Legal resistance widened on multiple fronts: the Justice Department sued Massachusetts and Rhode Island over in-state tuition for undocumented students, federal employee unions sued over disability accommodations, 23 states challenged a Medicaid work-requirement rule, and courts granted injunctions protecting Seattle and Shoreline from DEI-related funding conditions. Trump also declared a fertilizer emergency to permit duty-free phosphate imports from Morocco and threatened to prosecute gas station owners who failed to lower prices — a threat Treasury Secretary Bessent would later echo.

**Wednesday**

Wednesday delivered the week’s most consequential cluster of rulings. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court upheld birthright citizenship, striking down Trump’s executive order and affirming the 14th Amendment’s guarantee for children born on U.S. soil — a genuine preservation of a foundational constitutional right, though the margin was narrower than expected, with four justices expressing openness to revisiting the precedent in the future. In a separate 6-3 ruling, the Court upheld state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports, overturning lower-court decisions in Idaho and West Virginia and clearing the way for similar bans across roughly 25 other states. A third ruling eliminated limits on coordinated party campaign spending, extending a two-decade trend of dismantling campaign finance restrictions.

Away from the Court, HHS restructured its civil rights office to elevate religious exemptions, a move legal experts warned could enable healthcare providers to refuse care related to LGBTQ+ health, reproductive services, and vaccines. An HHS report found at least 5 million Americans had lost health insurance in the first half of the year due to the end of ACA subsidies — a loss Dr. Oz publicly minimized by suggesting exercise could offset healthcare costs. The Atlantic reported internal White House discussion of a "250 pardons for 250 years" initiative, alongside accounts of pardons being offered through international lobbying for roughly $2 million. And early reporting previewed Trump’s forthcoming financial disclosure, pointing to $2.2 billion in earnings, much of it from cryptocurrency.

**Thursday**

By Thursday, the week’s threads began to converge. One day after the Court upheld birthright citizenship, Acting Attorney General Blanche directed federal prosecutors to pursue fraud charges in "birth tourism" cases — despite acknowledging the practice accounts for less than one percent of U.S. births — an apparent attempt to narrow through enforcement what the Court had just affirmed. A federal judge separately blocked a USPS plan to deny mail-ballot delivery to states that refused to share voter rolls with DHS, the second judicial setback for the administration’s mail-voting restrictions in recent weeks. Florida’s state education board voted to bar undocumented and non-citizen students from all 28 public universities, a move critics said exceeded its authority. In New York, nearly half a million residents lost coverage as the state’s Essential Plan ended, a direct consequence of federal Medicaid cuts and the expiration of ACA subsidies.

ICE arrested more than 10,000 people in five days, nearly doubling its prior daily pace, while new student loan borrowing caps and the elimination of income-driven repayment plans took effect. New reporting detailed Trump’s substantial NVIDIA and Amazon holdings while he set policy affecting those firms, stock purchases made ahead of his own tariff-pause announcement, and an undisclosed $50 million loan. And in a case testing the boundaries of military dissent, an active-duty Air Force officer, Major Jason Watson, was arrested in uniform while holding a sign calling for Trump and Vance’s impeachment; the Air Force opened an investigation that could end his career.

**Friday**

The week closed with its heaviest convergence yet. The Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, giving southern legislatures greater latitude to redraw districts previously protected to ensure minority representation — a decision experts said would meaningfully reduce the number of Black representatives in Congress. A House Democratic investigation titled "From Vanity to Insanity" alleged the 250th-anniversary celebration had been turned into a vehicle for self-dealing, with donor funds routed through a shadow entity, sponsorships sold for access, and civic programming replaced by partisan content.

Trump’s 927-page ethics disclosure confirmed the $2.2 billion in earnings previewed earlier in the week, more than $1.4 billion of it from family crypto ventures, even as the SEC eased enforcement on exchanges listing his coin and the Senate Banking Committee voted down a measure barring presidential crypto ownership. Separate reporting showed Trump’s sons had taken a 20 percent stake in a company tied to a Kazakhstan mining deal secured by the administration, and that at least 14 companies connected to the Trump and Lutnick families had received or were being considered for $8.9 billion in federal funding.

In New Orleans, a judge sealed his courtroom in violation of state law during the indictment of the state’s attorney general, and journalists who objected were handcuffed — a decision the state supreme court later stayed over the procedural violations. The Fifth Circuit, meanwhile, ruled that the government cannot detain immigrants longer than 90 days without a bond hearing, restoring a measure of judicial review amid the enforcement surge. The administration allocated $68 million to a politically connected contractor for its July 4th celebration, while federally funded "Freedom Trucks" exhibits presented a sanitized version of American history omitting slavery and Native removal. And legal experts, echoing Speaker Johnson’s warning from the weekend, predicted that a Democratic House majority would move quickly to investigate alleged corruption, a proposed slush fund, and possible emoluments violations.

Taken as a whole, the week offers a rare, condensed view of a government institution pulling in two directions at once. The Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship and mail-ballot access even as it stripped humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of people, gutted a long-standing check on presidential removal power, and narrowed voting-rights protections that had shaped congressional representation for half a century — often by margins thin enough to invite reversal. Set against that judicial record, the week’s financial disclosures turned what had been reported allegation into documented fact: a sitting president earning billions from an industry his administration regulates, with family members profiting from government-brokered deals abroad and a shadow web infrastructure handling citizens’ data beyond the reach of ordinary oversight. Courts, state officials, journalists, and even members of the president’s own party pushed back at nearly every turn — through injunctions, public dissent, and investigative reporting — but the week’s cumulative record suggests an executive branch testing, and in several cases finding, the limits of what existing checks can still restrain. “`