Bummed by the news reports about the Supreme Court as it flooded the end of June with key decisions? Don’t be because the headlines are as misleading as a date with a tranny without being told she is a he.
Reporters cover the courts about as well as they cover the White House, election polls and war.
Consider Niña Totenberg of NPR, the doyenne of Supreme Court coverage, and winner of multiple duPont-Columbia, Peabody and other major journalism honors. She is in the Radio Hall of Fame.
At 82 with 51 years of experience at NPR, she sets the standard for covering the Supreme Court. Moments after the final decisions became public, she reported, “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, is retiring, the court announced Tuesday.”
It didn’t happen—just like Clarence Thomas harassing Anita Hill didn’t happen, another Totenberg Tall Tale.
NPR pulled the story after 10 minutes and issued a rare apology.
What should be done to her? Don’t fire—retire.
Now that we have established the quality of the media covering the Supreme Court, let’s look at the coverage of the final decisions of the 2025-2026 season.
Let’s start with NBC’s “Supreme Court rules Trump can’t fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.”
Except he can.
Two paragraphs underneath the headline, the story said, “In a 5-4 vote, the high court said Trump does not have the constitutional authority to fire a Fed governor without cause. While the landmark ruling limits a president’s authority over the central bank, a majority of the justices separately ruled Trump has free rein to fire agency heads at will.”
The president can still fire her because the ruling held that Trump can fire Cook for cause, after providing her with due process and with the approval of a district court judge. Obviously, the case would be appealed no matter what the district judge decides. It is a lengthy process that applies only to the Federal Reserve. Money talks, after all.
But everyone else in the political appointee sphere can be fired for any reason now because in Trump v. Slaughter, justices said he indeed could fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission because she is a will-and-pleasure appointee.
Or was.
The justices struck down an earlier Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor, which prevented a president from removing FTC board members. The Roberts Court tossed it into the waste basket of history.
His is a monumental decision that allows the president to be the chief of the executive branch of government, just as the Constitution says he is. Presidents can fire FTC board members and the rest of the bigshots of the bureaucracy with or without cause.
William Ewart Humphrey is the Humphrey in Humphrey’s Executor.
He was a Republican congressman from Washington state who ran for the Senate and lost. He stayed in DC as any good grifter will do. Coolidge later appointed him to the FTC and Hoover re-appointed him. FDR fired him. Humphrey fought it in court but died before the case was concluded.
Samuel Rathbun handled his estate and sued the U.S. government for back pay. The justices were mad at FDR over his socialist policies so they voted 9-0 in 1935 to pay the estate. This tied presidential hands for 91 years.
Not anymore, Fenimore.
In 1935, justices acted as if the FTC board was a group of experts. Far from it. Woodrow Wilson appointed Samuel Huston “Shy” Thompson, whose main claim to fame was being the first University of Texas coach to coach the Longhorns team for two consecutive seasons. He became chairman of the FTC, which shows how expert the rest of the FTC team was.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision overturning Humphrey’s Executor because Roberts has wanted to dump the decision for decades As a young lawyer in Reagan’s White House, he wrote, “the time is ripe to reconsider the constitutional anomaly of independent agencies.”
Despite having stayed in DC too long, Roberts is still the biggest threat to the bureaucracy in America.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, don’t fall for the headlines.
The National News Desk reported, “Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed challenge to late-arriving mail ballots.”
Did it?
Mail-in ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received within 5 days of the election. In 2020, Democrats sent in ballots without a postmark and counted them until they had enough votes to make slow, dumb, crooked Joe Biden president. Stopping that sounds like a win to me, but what do I know?
President Trump took the news poorly—flopping on Truth Social like LeBron James after someone brushed him on the basketball court—but the decision is an improvement over the status quo.
Then there is the birthright citizenship ruling, in which the justices decided the 14th Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says.
Yes, the birthright citizenship ruling disappointed but what does the decision change? Nothing. The song remains the same. It was not a victory, of course, but there was no loss. Trump gave it a shot.
The fact that this case was a 5-4 decision effectively means that the concept of birthright citizenship, which is an absurdity to the 14th amendment, that concept is hanging by a thread.
And so what I take from that is, yes, we’ve got to fix the immigration system even more. We have to be even more aware of who’s coming into our country to make sure that they’re not benefiting from this atrocious Supreme Court ruling, but it also means that we have to keep fighting!
Because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision just as we reverse so many bad decisions throughout the generations.
The case is a reminder that Trump is an entrepreneur—a risk taker—a man unafraid of failure. Early in Elon Musk’s career, his first three SpaceX launches ended with the rocket blowing up. He put everything he had on a fourth launch. Tell me again how no man is worth a trillion dollars.
Rockets blowing up reveal how to make better rockets. Eventually, birthright citizenship will be gone.
The big win was dumping Humphrey’s Executor.
Newsweek gets what is going on, reporting:
Despite the divergent outcomes, Trump remarked that the “most consequential Decision issued by the Court, by far,” had been in his favor—the Trump v. Slaughter case.
“This whole concept of “Power” has been fought over for nearly 100 years, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where a large slice of his Power was taken away,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “He fought to regain it, even wanting to “pack the Court,” but was unsuccessful in doing so. This Decision gives tremendous additional Power back to the Presidency, where it belongs.
“It is an Honor to be the sitting President who, after all these years, WON this very important, and hard fought, Case. We had other good Victories, too, and we also had the Birthright Citizenship loss, which we will work to correct in Congress, but the big SLAUGHTER, was SLAUGHTER.”
The president is correct. Slaughter means the deep state can no longer slow-walk a president and otherwise undermine him because the deep staters can be fired. The age-old cliché about “I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go” is gone. Just as Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon, presidents will run the federal government.
If that is too much power, then dial down the power of the federal government. Maybe we can sign a document that says the government cannot spy on you, FBI, or lie to you, CIA, or force you to take medications, Center for Disease Control.
Oh wait. We already said that—or thought we did—in the Constitution. How about a new amendment: Congress should respect the right of the people to be left the hell alone.
Don’t let the Nina Totenberg crowd get you down because they are just propagandists posing as reporters.
Frankly, they are not very good at it.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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