When people argue about the Supreme Court right now, it can feel like two different crowds are shouting past each other.
Liberals see seismic rulings and “stolen seats” and get even more convinced the Court is part of the problem.
MAGA conservatives, meanwhile, are furious about judges they think are disloyal and about executive orders getting struck down.
In her new book, Last Branch Standing, podcast host and reformed GOP political operative Sarah Isgur wants to flip that framing.
The Court “isn’t doing its job,” she argues, unless it’s pushing back on powerful presidents and questionable legal principles.
But what she really stresses is something less glamorous: the failures of the other two branches—especially the White House of the last two decades, which treated executive orders like a governing strategy, and Congress, which she says has largely walked away from its responsibilities.
Congress as the missing hinge
Isgur’s case is basically this: when presidents try to do the work of Congress, the judiciary gets pulled in.
And the judiciary, in turn, has to decide whether the president can act alone—or whether Congress has to do the hard part.
It’s a pretty direct challenge to the common headline version of events.
When courts strike down Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness or stop Trump’s tariffs, she’s hoping the public learns to read those decisions as a Congress-centered instruction, not just a partisan win.
There’s a practical anxiety underneath all of it.
If Congress won’t do its job and the executive branch keeps getting more power, then what’s supposed to happen next—besides more lawsuits and more judicial interventions that feel like constant interruptions?
Isgur says the Court is trying “some self-help,” but she keeps returning to the same punchline: presidents can’t make these changes by themselves, they must have Congress.
On the campaign-trail instinct—throw the bums out—she’s less convinced that’s enough.
She points to how incentives changed in Congress itself.
When members were punished in primaries for compromising with the other side, she argues, legislation effectively ground to a halt.
And once compromise becomes a political liability instead of a legislative tool, you can get stuck in a loop where everyone claims government is broken, while the legislature avoids being the legislature.
Why the Court keeps getting the blame
Isgur also pushes back on the idea that the justices are just politicians in robes, saying the Court’s job is to decide “who gets to decide.” She argues that a lot of the public misunderstanding comes from treating Supreme Court decisions like policy-making.
In her view, the Court isn’t passing judgment on what’s good policy or bad policy.
It’s deciding whether the process and the authority behind a policy actually exist—whether it’s Congress, a constitutional amendment route, or the legal bounds set by statutes and the Constitution.
She uses her tariff and student-loan examples to make it harder to dismiss.
The Biden student-loan debt forgiveness case and Trump’s tariff decision are treated as the same kind of constitutional argument, she says—but the tariff case matters more, in part because it’s a repeat scenario.
If you’re worried about how the Court will behave when the president is from a party that usually gets criticized for judicial caution, a second time signals something real about principle and precedent.
And there’s the other layer, the one she insists gets overlooked: the incentives aren’t only in Washington.
When reporters or the public create a climate where justices fear they might be secretly recorded, she argues it drives them further into isolation.
She criticizes secretly recording someone as unethical and says the practice can have “detrimental effects” that make it harder for officials to live normal public lives—restaurant outings, casual conversations, the whole uneasy reality of being in the spotlight.
For all the Supreme Court talk, the book is really about institutional risk—how we got into a setup where the Court becomes the last place to fix what should have been handled through Congress in the first place.
Isgur describes Chief Justice John Roberts as trying to navigate “treacherous waters” and restore separation of powers between the presidency and Congress.
In her telling, Roberts wants unanimity and to speak with one voice; instead, the Court issues roughly the same number of unanimous opinions but with more concurrences, which makes everyone feel the need to add “two cents” and fight on paper.
It’s not exactly the legacy she’d hoped for, she implies.
As she talks, the moment feels small and oddly human—at least in one memory she shares from her own routine.
When asked about her days, she says she works from home and, most days, “I don’t put on pants.” It’s a tiny detail, but it cuts through the legal grandeur.
The institutions might be massive, but the underlying frustration—the sense that Congress isn’t doing its part—doesn’t feel abstract.
It feels like something stuck in the gears, and everyone’s listening for the sound of the next ruling.
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