The Supreme Court is wrapping up a term that has focused on President Donald Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power and this week issued major rulings that restrict the use of geofence warrants, expand the president’s authority to remove some independent agency officials, reject an attempt to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and allow states to count some mail-in ballots that arrive late if they were postmarked by Election Day.
The court rejected the president’s effort to remove Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook; Cook denies allegations of mortgage fraud, and no president has ever fired a Fed governor in the agency’s 112-year history.
In a separate decision that expands presidential authority over independent agencies, the justices in a 6-3 ruling allowed the president to remove a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter, for policy reasons. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and said protections that allow removal only "for cause" at more than two dozen independent agencies violate the separation of powers and effectively overruled the 1935 decision Humphrey's Executor v. U.S. President Trump called the ruling "one of the most important ever" in a post on his social media platform. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, saying the court had endorsed a theory of "total executive control."
The geofence case arose from a May 2019 robbery at the Midlothian branch of the Call Federal Credit Union in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., in which $195,000 was taken. Detectives served a warrant on Google seeking location information for cellphone users in and around the bank for the hour before and after the crime. Google initially identified 19 users and later provided the names of three whose location data showed they were at the bank; police found at one home a pistol matching security camera footage and nearly $100,000 in cash. The man, Okello Chatrie, confessed and was convicted.
Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan said broad geofence surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and "the Fourth Amendment must, as ever, protect against unjustified government intrusion on the privacy of the individual." The court rejected the Trump administration's argument that no warrant is required, said that at a minimum law enforcement must obtain a judicially approved warrant to use geofence data, but did not decide whether the warrant used in Chatrie’s case was valid and sent the matter back to a lower court. Chatrie pleaded guilty to federal charges of armed robbery and brandishing a firearm, was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison and has reserved the right to appeal on the geofence issue.
In a separate 5-4 ruling the court held that states may count postal ballots that arrive after Election Day if they were postmarked by Election Day, upholding a Mississippi law that allowed ballots postmarked before Election Day to be received up to five days afterward. The majority opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's three liberal justices. In dissent Justice Samuel Alito wrote that accepting late-arriving ballots "effectively postpones the date on which the electorate's choice is made." President Trump called the decision a "tremendous loss," RNC chairman Joe Gruters said Republicans would keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day, and California governor Gavin Newsom said the ruling "helps ensure mailed-in ballots get counted and people's voices are heard."
Other high-profile cases remain pending, including the president’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship; legal challenges from West Virginia and Idaho that ask whether to uphold laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on public school and college teams; and a case over limits on political party spending in support of candidates for Congress and president.
The court's conservative majority has been mostly receptive to the administration's immigration crackdown, including a decision last week allowing the administration to end temporary legal protections for people who came to the U.S. because of war or natural disaster in their homeland. In February the court rejected the president’s assertion of the power to unilaterally impose wide-ranging tariffs under an emergency powers law, a decision that drew the president's ire and an unusually harsh denunciation of two of his appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who voted against him. By custom the court finishes its work before July 4, and after this week its next public meeting is the first Monday in October.