So much for the notion that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents, was going to be a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. That is a frequently voiced charge by partisan Democrats, and a fear of many ambivalent voters who find many of Trump’s policies agreeable but worry about his overreach on policy and personnel. 

That’s one political meme refuted by the court’s Learning Resources v. Trump decision last Friday, announced, after more than the expected delay for the drafting of concurring opinions. The court struck down Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, with only one Republican-appointed justice taking the president’s side while the majority made up of three Republican-appointed and three Democratic-appointed justices. 

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Such a result should not have surprised those with some appreciation of Supreme Court history. President Franklin Roosevelt, after seeing several of his New Deal programs ruled unconstitutional, and after unsuccessfully urging Congress to pack the court with new justices, finally ended up filling eight of the court’s nine seats. 

That didn’t stop a bench of Democratic appointees from disapproving of Democratic President Harry Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel plants during the Korean War, in a case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, cited 15 times by the Learning Resources justices.

Justices newly appointed in times when Supreme Court decisions are subjects of partisan disputes tend to agree on contemporary issues. But in time, new problems arise, to which they turn out to have differences. And even animosity: some of the Roosevelt appointees even stopped speaking to each other.

One such issue brought forward by Donald Trump’s election and reelection........

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