Dace Potas: Supreme Court rulings prove partisan panic is misguided

The Supreme Court’s tariff ruling is getting a lot of attention for its impact, and rightly so. It is one of the most important recent cases for the court as an institution for reasons beyond the impact on the economy.

It means the court has now applied the same rationale for striking down executive overreach under President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. This might have been surprising to some who view the court as partisan, but to those of us who take the more ideological view, it was not.

The court’s decision against Trump’s tariffs is yet another nail in the coffin of the view that the court’s conservative majority is a monolith that bends to Trump’s will. The conservative majority on the bench is often divided, and the direction of the current Supreme Court is ideological, not partisan.

The central doctrine at the core of the tariffs ruling is the “major questions doctrine,” which holds that when the executive branch claims extraordinary power, there must be clear statutory authority for it. Put simply, when Congress delegates its own authority to the president, it must do so clearly.

In this case, when Trump claimed unilateral tariff authority but relied on the word “regulate” to mean tariff, it wasn’t good enough to sway the majority of the court.

The same doctrine has been used to curtail executive overreach before Trump. The Supreme Court ruled similarly in Biden v. Nebraska, the case that struck down Biden’s student debt forgiveness scheme, finding that Congress did not authorize it expressly under the statutory language.

The three conservatives in the majority on each of those cases Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch have consistently applied this approach to interpreting ambiguous statutes in cases, regardless of who the president is and what power they are claiming.

In the tariff ruling, Gorsuch and Barrett ruled against Trump despite being his own appointees. Such independence will surely be forgotten the next time they rule in the president’s favor by those who wish to undermine the court’s legitimacy. To those acting in good faith, however, this should mark yet another example of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority being neither a monolith nor sycophantic toward Trump.

Being aware of any partisan dynamics is important, but the justices are not dedicated to an ideological goal of increasing or decreasing the executive branch’s power. Rather, their mission is to push each of the three branches of government back into their appropriate constitutional boundaries. Cases like this one make that mission clear.

The goal isn’t to make the executive branch stronger or weaker for value’s sake, but rather to restore the constitutionally appropriate role of the president, and in turn the other branches.

Justice Roberts’ court should be viewed through an ideological lens, not a partisan one. Viewing the Supreme Court justices as partisan rather than ideological actors continues to lead to a poor understanding of what the court does.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA Today and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.