The US Supreme Court on Monday announced decisions affecting President Donald Trump and his agenda, with justices refusing to hear his bid to overturn a $5 million civil verdict for sexually abusing and defaming a writer.
The top court also said he could not fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, but found in his favour in a different case that will further expand his powers.
In the sexual abuse case, the Supreme Court's nine justices, six of whom are conservatives, declined to review Mr Trump's appeal of a 2023 jury verdict in favour of writer E Jean Carroll.
A New York jury found him liable for sexually abusing her in a dressing room in the mid-1990s and for defaming her. Mr Trump on Monday called it a "fake case".
In the case concerning Ms Cook, the Supreme Court stood firm to preserve the central bank's independence against Mr Trump's unprecedented challenge.
The court, in a 5-4 ruling, blocked his bid to become the first president to remove a Fed official since Congress created the central bank in 1913. In his second term as President, he has tested the limits of presidential power in several other ways.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the ruling, said Mr Trump "failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the President laid against her".
Ms Cook, whom Mr Trump had accused of mortgage fraud, said the case "was an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people."
Federal Trade Commission
In another case, the Supreme Court backed Mr Trump's firing of a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding his powers over the government and overturning its 1935 precedent that had recognised the authority of Congress to protect leaders of certain regulatory agencies from presidential removal at will.
The three liberal justices in a written dissent said that the ruling had given the President "a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted".
"Put simply, today the majority reshapes our government," they wrote. "Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands."
In a different case, the Supreme Court ruled that federal law permits postal ballots to arrive after election day, in a decision that preserves grace periods in 30 states.
Rejecting Republican Party and Libertarian Party arguments on a 5-4 vote, the justices upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive within five business days.
The decision gave Democrats a rare victory in the conservative-controlled Supreme Court.
