with CHARLIE HARPER

As the drama with US president Donald Trump and the American military continues to evolve and is likely to present a huge constitutional crisis at some point during the next year, the potential adjudicators of such a crisis have moved to center stage.

That adjudicator is the American Supreme Court, whose political and ideological impartiality has seemingly been eroded to an all-time low. The high court, as usual, began its new term on the first Monday in October, which was of course this week.

This court term, which runs until the end of June, should prove to be momentous.

“This will be the term in which the court will resolve major clashes between the Trump administration and its critics on core questions of executive authority and perceived executive overreach,” one legal expert told The Washington Post. “The justices are going to be doing a lot of thinking and writing about the separation of powers (between the American executive, legislative and judicial branches of government).”

One of the most closely-watched cases will come before the Supreme Court in January. That case involves Lisa Cook, an American economist who was nominated by former president Joe Biden to serve on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve Bank. The first black woman to serve on the Fed’s board, Cook was sworn in three years ago. An economics professor at Michigan State University, Cook previously served on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Cook’s academic qualifications are beyond reproach. She graduated magna cum laude from Spelman College in Atlanta, and after post-graduate study at Oxford University and In Senegal, she received a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

But Trump has tried to fire Cook. In an action similar to others he has taken against African-American and female appointees from the Biden and earlier Democratic administrations, Trump instigated a Department of Justice criminal investigation of Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud. The basis for this action was apparently errors on a home equity loan form submitted by Cook many years ago. In the administration’s view, Cook’s apparent mortgage fraud would constitute “sufficient cause” to allow the president to fire her.

It’s not clear whether this investigation has any merit. The Post said that Reuters news service published last month an analysis of “loan [and] job-vetting forms” submitted by Cook, as well as property records, which directly contradict the Trump administration’s allegations against her.

The Cook case is frankly more interesting than the rest of the cases involving other Biden-era appointees, because of her current service on the Federal Reserve board. Although he appointed incumbent Fed board chief Jerome Powell during his first term in 2018, Trump has recently railed publicly against the Fed generally and Powell in particular. His most frequent grievance is that Trump believes economic stagnation perhaps induced by his tariff regime could be ameliorated by lower interest rates – the singular responsibility of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The president is doing what he does: He is blaming another individual for the consequences of his policies, and counting on the indifference and ignorance of most Americans to minimise the substantive consequences of such actions. Trump is hoping most voters will assign blame to Powell and other bureaucrats for Trump’s own ill-conceived ideas. Most of the time so far, he has gotten away with this strategy and avoided most of the blame.

The American high court has essentially temporised in the Cook case, allowing her to remain in her position at the Federal Reserve Bank until the Supreme Court can carefully consider the case at the beginning of the new year.

Three members of the current Supreme Court were appointed by Trump during his first term -- Brett Cavanagh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Comey Barrett. Chief justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito were both appointed by George W Bush, and Clarence Thomas was named by Bush’s father in 1991. The three liberal justices, who are consistently outvoted these days, were appointed by Barack Obama and Biden.

Trump, with the active complicity of then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, managed to manipulate the rules of the Senate to ensure confirmation of Barrett and overlooked significant-looking issues to ram through Cavanagh’s candidacy. Now the president wants to use the Supreme Court to ratify his partisan attempts to erode oversight of his administration by the Congress.

To this end, the current administration, as well as its political and legislative opponents, have forced onto the Supreme Court’s “emergency docket” more than 20 cases, mostly involving orders issued by Trump that have appeared to be illegal and certainly contravene respected traditions.

Trump has done really well with these tactics. The high court has handed him temporary victories in 18 out of 22 cases, and only two clear defeats. That’s an astonishingly high batting average, and it’s no wonder Trump is anxious to expedite hearings in so many of his judicially-challenged cases before such an apparently sympathetic court.

Now during the court’s regular term, most or all of these cases should be heard and hopefully decided. A legal expert told The Post that “it looks to be shaping up as a blockbuster political-law term, with cases impacting voting rights, elections, redistricting of Congressional districts, various regulatory issues and campaign finance”.

The Supreme Court often waits until late June to issue a whole bunch of decisions, no matter when the relevant cases were heard. In many instances, the suspense will now build for nine months until we see if the rulings follow recent provisional decisions.

Meantime, another presidential initiative certain to inspire additional legal challenges was unfolding at the beginning of this week. Trump has dispatched National Guard troops in increasing numbers to Chicago and Portland, Oregon. Like an early deployment of the Guard to Los Angeles, this action directly contravenes the wishes of the respective mayors and governors, who – hardly coincidentally – are all Democrats.

Trump, as he often has done, is impatient with the inconvenient limitations placed upon his management of the country by legal and normative precedents. The president said on Monday he might invoke centuries-old legislation called the Insurrection Act that gives the president emergency powers to deploy American troops on US soil. Trump then admitted that this would be “a way to get around” some annoying recent federal court rulings that have impeded his efforts to more widely deploy the National Guard in large, Democratically-controlled American cities.

At the beginning of this week, a coalition of such cities filed a legal brief in support of Oregon’s attempt to block Trump’s deployments of National Guard troops. They said they were “gravely concerned that any protest — real or perceived — within their borders will result in another unnecessary deployment of the military”.

A federal judge in Oregon has issued a temporary injunction blocking the president’s plan to send troops to Portland. But federal lawyers have appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has not yet issued a ruling.

Here we go again. The Ninth Circuit, covering much of the American West, features a majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, though Trump has made some inroads with his own appointments.

Another Trump initiative faces what increasingly looks like the only challenge that Democrats can manage to muster against him. And the prospects of ultimate success at the Supreme Court hardly look encouraging in the light of recent decisions.

For background, when Trump deployed the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles over the summer in response to protests against his immigration crackdown, it was the first time since the civil rights movement in 1965 that a president had summoned a state’s National Guard troops against the will of that state’s governor.

A federal judge later ruled that the Mr Trump’s use of the troops in Los Angeles was illegal, saying that the president had effectively turned the troops into a “national police force” in violation of a 19th-century law that generally prohibits the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement.

As we have discussed in earlier columns, Trump doubtless would be happy if his aggressive troop deployments elicited armed and/or violent protests in the local populations. The resulting chaos and vigorous federal response would both reinforce his own image as tough on crime and distract voters from the economic pain his policies will inflict.