During Donald Trump’s four years as president, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts forged a slim majority with the Court’s four liberals in certain cases to craft what colleagues called “administration-specific standard[s].” These cases popped up primarily in the context of administrative law—the field that governs how the administrative state is allowed to go about its business of promulgating, changing, and rescinding policies and rules—and thwarted Trump’s executive agenda on subjects from immigration to the Census. But these decisions don’t exist in a four-year vacuum. They bind all the courts in the country and will likely be applied against President Biden’s efforts to undo some Trump policies.
Consider Department of Homeland Security v. Regents, in which the Court struck down the Trump administration’s efforts to undo the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Though President Obama created DACA by mere executive order, Roberts wrote that Trump could not rescind the program without complying with the strictures of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), as DACA recipients had relied on the program to make such life choices as taking jobs and buying houses,
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