Justice Barrett May Have the Crucial Vote in Trump Cases

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the junior member of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, having served just three full terms. But her vote may be decisive as the justices consider whether and how hard to push back against President Trump’s efforts to reshape American government.

On Wednesday, for instance, she was the only one of the three justices appointed by Mr. Trump to vote against his emergency request to freeze foreign aid, joining the court’s three Democratic appointees and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to form a bare majority.

The ruling was provisional and tentative, only the first of what will certainly be a series of more consequential tests of the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to come before the court. But it suggested that the president cannot count on the court backing every element of his efforts to expand the authority of the executive branch, and it has already drawn sharp condemnations of Justice Barrett by some of the president’s allies.

Some scholars welcomed the ruling’s willingness to police the boundaries of the separation of powers by a court whose direction has at times been shaped by the executive branch experiences of most of its conservative members.

Payvan Ahdout, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said the message sent by Wednesday’s preliminary action was that a majority of the court was “open to a role for judicial review of these decisions.”

“They just have not yet reached consensus on what that judicial role is,” she said.

Justice Barrett, she added, appears to have an open mind on the limits of the president’s authority. “It seems like she is not coming into these disputes already subscribing to a philosophy that closes the door to reasonable limits on the presidential power,” Professor Ahdout said.