The first case cited as precedent in the first Supreme Court brief filed by lawyers for President Trump since he took office this year was Trump v. United States, the July decision that gave him substantial immunity from prosecution. That citation was the first of nine. A second brief, filed days later, cited the decision eight more times.
It was at first blush a poor fit. The issue in the new case, the first arising from a challenge to the administration’s blitz of executive actions, was whether Mr. Trump could fire the leader of an independent agency without cause. It had nothing to do with prosecutions or immunity, presidential or otherwise.
But Mr. Trump’s lawyers had good reason to rely on the decision. Its legacy, scholars say, will not be its three-part test for determining whether prosecutions of former presidents can proceed. It will be how the decision amplified presidential power just in time for a new administration determined to test its limits.
The decision, ostensibly about the important but limited question of immunity, contained “some of the most far-reaching pronouncements about presidential power in the court’s history,” Jack L. Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard and a former Justice Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush, wrote in “The Presidency After Trump v. United States,” a draft article posted last week that is to be published in The Supreme Court Review.
The opinion, he added, “amounted to perhaps the most consequential disquisition ever on the law of the presidency.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, made the case for a vigorous and energetic president whose core responsibilities cannot be constrained by Congress and the courts. “Unlike anyone else,” he wrote, “the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties.”
