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For nine months, in a flood of emergency orders, the Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to expand his power.
The justices have permitted Trump to slash the federal bureaucracy, fire the heads of nominally independent agencies and exercise powers traditionally ascribed to Congress.
How much further will the court go?
That will be the overriding question Wednesday when the court hears arguments on the legality of most of the president's tariffs - the first case to reach the justices in a series of high-stakes tests of Trump's sweeping claims of authority.
His asserted tariff powers are uniquely dear to Trump, who has repeatedly warned of economic devastation if the court were to rule against one of his signature policies. But the other tests of presidential power could also have major impact.
In November, the court will consider whether to strike down a 90-year-old precedent that insulates independent agencies from White House interference. In January, it will explore whether Trump can remake the Federal Reserve, with its vast powers over the economy.
Taken together, the cases will determine the extent to which the Supreme Court will embrace Trump's view of a presidency constrained by few checks and wielding the type of authority typically only seen in times of war or national crisis. Decisions are expected in the cases by the summer.
"I think the court so far has been more deferential to President Trump than most Supreme Courts in modern times," said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. "It's very hard to point to a significant way in which the court has said 'stop' to the White House. It raises the pressure on the court, and it raises the stakes for the term ahead."
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement the high court's rulings have corrected erroneous decisions by "far-left liberal activist judges" and that the president is doing what he was elected to do.
"The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges attempt to intervene," Jackson said.
Trump's claim that he can unilaterally impose massive tariffs, a cornerstone of his economic agenda, is among his most aggressive moves to date. His assertion rests on a 1977 law that grants the president emergency powers to regulate international commerce. Trump's argument that the law can be used for tariffs is one no other president has made in the statute's 50-year history.
The administration has asked the justices to overturn federal court rulings that found the law did not convey authority to impose tariffs. Trump said the levies, some of which he announced at an event he dubbed "Liberation Day," will help stem the flow of fentanyl across the border and restore America's manufacturing base.
Small businesses and states have sued to block the levies, arguing they will cause widespread economic harm.
Arguably, no institution has set the stage for Trump's efforts to expand his power as much as the Supreme Court and in particular its chief justice. John G. Roberts Jr. has written decisions in recent years declaring the president a uniquely powerful figure.
In a 2020 ruling, Roberts wrote the "entire ‘executive Power' belongs to the President alone." He has also intimated the president should have a free hand to fire low-level government employees and made it easier for the president to remove the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Last year, Roberts, writing for the majority, granted Trump and other presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts. Roberts said such protection was necessary for the president to carry out his responsibilities forcefully and fearlessly.
"Unlike anyone else, the president is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties," Roberts wrote.
The decision drew a vigorous dissent from the court's liberal justices: "The President is now a king above the law," Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamented for the trio.
Roberts's rulings are in keeping with the unitary executive theory; the legal idea, embraced mostly by conservatives, that the president has sole and total control over the executive branch, including the right to fire its employees with little interference from Congress or the courts.
The theory was advanced by the Reagan White House, where a young Roberts served as an attorney. It has now reached its zenith in Trump's second term.
Legal experts said it's not just the substance of the high court's decisions that have empowered Trump - it's how the justices have made them.
The administration has brought far more cases to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket than any of its predecessors, allowing for quick decisions that temporarily clear the way for Trump's priorities to take effect while litigation continues.
The court's liberals have frequently criticized the conservative majority for making decisions on weighty issues without full briefings, arguments or the extended deliberation that accompanies cases heard on the regular docket.
Decision by decision, the emergency-docket cases have increased Trump's power, albeit on a provisional basis so far. In all, the court has ruled for Trump 17 out of 23 times in emergency appeals - an extraordinary record. Four cases remain pending and one was declared moot.
Graham G. Dodds, a professor of political science at Concordia University, said the Trump administration was testing the boundaries of the law with its actions, understanding the Roberts court's expansive views of the president's role.
"Some of [Trump's] recent actions in his second term have almost invited court cases, intentionally pushing the envelope hoping to provoke a court case," Dodds said.
Dodds pointed to the string of temporary rulings in which the court has allowed Trump to fire without cause members of the Federal Trade Commission, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Those rulings cut against the Supreme Court's main precedent on the issue of independent agencies, a 1935 case called Humphrey's Executor, which allowed Congress to shield such agencies by limiting the ability of presidents to fire their board members.
Congress created the protections so the agencies could make decisions based on nonpartisan expertise, not politics. The agencies include those that make critical decisions about elections, media and product safety.
The court's conservatives have argued Humphrey's Executor subverts the constitutional order, but liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissents that its potential demise will greatly expand the president's power and could politicize core functions of the government.
"The majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President," Kagan wrote in her dissent over the firing of an FTC commissioner. "He may now remove - so says the majority, though Congress said differently - any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies' bipartisanship and independence."
Kagan wrote in another dissent that it was backward for the conservative majority to accede to Trump's request to fire FTC member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter on its emergency docket, even though it had not decided a challenge to Humphrey's Executor, the precedent that protected her. She said it showed a majority "raring to take … action."
"Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars," Kagan wrote. "Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation's separation of powers."
In another case, the justices green-lit Trump's efforts to gut the Education Department by firing more than a third of its staff and outsourcing its duties, one of several rulings allowing Trump to radically downsize the government. The majority did not detail the rationale for its decision, which is common in cases decided on the emergency docket, but the court's liberals issued a blistering dissent, noting Congress created the agency by statute.
The ruling "hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave," Sotomayor wrote.
Unlike Trump, nine presidents over the last 100 years in both parties have gotten permission from Congress to reorganize the executive branch before moving forward with such plans, Sotomayor wrote.
The high court has bolstered Trump's power in another area traditionally seen as under the purview of Congress: spending.
Trump has unilaterally held up billions of dollars in appropriations for research, teacher training and conservation, among other cuts. Congressional Democrats estimated as of June that Trump had refused to allocate more than $425 billion mandated by Congress.
In one key decision, the justices permitted Trump to freeze more than $4 billion in foreign aid for food, medicine and development, which officials said was not in keeping with the administration's priorities or values. The justices ruled aid groups, which sued over the freeze, probably were not allowed to bring such suits.
Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, which sued the Trump administration over the freeze, said the high court's ruling "potentially implies that the Administration can disregard Congressional power of the purse."
Cecillia Wang, national litigation director at the ACLU, which has challenged the Trump administration in numerous cases, argued the Supreme Court has made it easier for the Trump administration to win cases on the emergency docket.
Traditionally, the high court has leaned toward preserving the status quo in emergency decisions, but Wang said the court's conservatives have shown a greater willingness to upend current policy to allow Trump's agenda to move forward. The justices have also shifted how they weigh harms and benefits of blocking a policy, one of the criteria for issuing an injunction, she said.
"They have ignored profound harms to plaintiffs - sometimes at the risk of their lives - while giving overwhelming preference to the president's assertion that he doesn't wish to be delayed in implementing his policies," Wang said.
Andrew Rudalevige, professor of government at Bowdoin College, said Trump's steady accretion of power is striking because it bucks historical precedent.
"In the past when you've had the expansion of presidential power, it's almost always been because of a pretty-well-agreed-upon national emergency," Rudalevige said. "The Civil War is a big boost for presidential power. The depression and World War II are boosts for presidential power … There's no equivalent of that now."
Jeffrey Rosen, who recently released a book dealing with presidential power called "The Pursuit of Liberty," said the current era is also distinct in that Congress has typically pushed back against presidents who try to expand their power. But the Republican-controlled legislature has been particularly quiescent during Trump's second term.
"If this pattern continues of a deferential Congress and court allowing the consolidation of executive power in the White House, it may change the balance of power in ways that are hard to restore," Rosen said.