Big wins for Trump and sharp blows to regulations mark momentous Supreme Court term

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and the conservative interests that helped him reshape politics High Council got most of what they wanted this term, from substantial help for Trump’s political and legal prospects to hard blows to the administrative state they so despise.

The decisions reflect deep and sometimes bitter divisions on a court where conservatives, including three justices appointed by Trump, have a two-to-one advantage over liberals, and they appear likely to strengthen the liberals’ position. the views of most Americans that ideology, not a neutral application of the law, determines the outcome of the biggest cases in court.

The justices also faced ethical controversies that led to the adoption of the court’s first code of conduct, though there was no means to enforce it. Months later, Justice Samuel Alito made public statements rejecting calls to recuse himself from several cases over questions about his impartiality, including after revelations that two flags flown over Alito’s homes in New Jersey and Virginia were flown by rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Chief Justice John Roberts, often viewed with suspicion by Trump and his allies over his concerns about the independence of the judiciary and concerns about the court’s reputation, have made the most consequential decisions. These include the granting of broad immunity from criminal prosecution to former presidents and his reversal of a 40 year old case which had been used thousands of times to enforce federal regulations.

“He has competing tendencies. One is to be a statesman and an institutionalist,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The other, Hasen said, is to delve into it “when it’s something that’s important enough to him.”

For Roberts, who served in the White House counsel’s office during the Reagan administration, presidential power is one of those issues.

The end of the court’s term marked a remarkable turnaround for Trump, who is now seeking a second term as president.

Six months ago, he was preparing to face a criminal trial in Washington in early March on election interference charges after he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. He was at risk of being removed from the ballot box in several states.

In the court’s final decision issued Monday, the justices granted him an indefinite stay of trial and narrowed the election interference case against him. Last week, they separately limits the use of an obstruction charge he is facing cases that should provide him with even more legal arguments, months after the court Trump put back on presidential list.

Each of the three cases arose from Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters. But Roberts’ opinions offered only dry accounts of the events of Jan. 6, emphasizing that the court “cannot afford to fixate … on the current emergency.”

The court also overturned the Chevron decision, the SEC stripped of an important anti-fraud instrument and opened the door to repeated, broad regulatory challenges that, combined with the demise of Chevron, could lead to what Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson described as a “tsunami of litigation.”

Chevron’s demise marked the third year in a row that conservatives explicitly or effectively overturned key, decades-old case law. Two years ago, Roe v. Wade fell. Last year, it was affirmative action in higher education.

The Trump and regulatory cases appear to point in different directions when it comes to executive power, said Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University.

“On the one hand, the court makes it much more difficult for the government to act through administrative agencies, but on the other hand, the court gives the president license to act lawlessly,” Dorf said. “When I take those two steps together, I think they concentrate power in the White House, in the political operations of the president and outside the context of what you might think of as the bureaucracy.”

The decisions also prompted heated, sometimes acrimonious, debates about judicial modesty. “A rule of judicial humility is giving way to a rule of judicial arrogance,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent overturning Chevron. Roberts responded by saying that humility in this case meant “admitting our own mistakes” and “correcting our own errors” in the original Chevron decision.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson chided Roberts for the “feigned judicial humility” of his opinion on immunity. Roberts mocked the dissenters’ “tone of chilling doom.”

In each of the Trump cases, the majority was made up of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two of Trump’s three appointees, and two others, Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, who also rejected calls to sit out the Trump cases. Those same justices, plus Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, formed the majority in the cases involving federal regulations. Conservatives also voted together on a landmark homelessness case that found that outdoor sleeping bans targeting homeless encampments do not violate the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — even when there is a shortage of shelter space.

Roberts, however, has repeatedly defended the court against criticism that the justices were little more than politicians in robes. In a memorable 2018 clash with Trump, Roberts chided the then-president for complaining about the ruling of an “Obama judge.”

“We don’t have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges who do their utmost to provide equal justice to those who appear before them,” Roberts said at the time.

But the court’s public reputation has taken a hit in recent years, particularly since the overturning of Roe. Seven out of ten Americans said judges are more likely to be guided by their own ideology than to act as neutral arbiters of government authority, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that was carried out before the final round of decisions were made.

Abortion was one of several issues where the court sidestepped the liberal-conservative divide by avoiding major rulings in a presidential election year when abortion is a hotly debated issue. That was largely due to the court’s 2022 decision that led to abortion bans or severe restrictions in most Republican-controlled states.

A one-sentence order in an Idaho case paved the way for emergency abortions to resume, despite the state’s strict abortion ban. But it did not end the litigation or answer key questions about whether doctors elsewhere can perform emergency abortions, even in states where abortion bans would prohibit them. Idaho’s decision was accidentally posted to the court’s website a day early, reminiscent of the leak of the draft opinion two years ago that ended the constitutional right to abortion.

In a second abortion case, the justices unanimously dismissed a lawsuit from anti-abortion doctors seeking to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions to expand access to abortion. mifepristonea pill used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States last year. The decision avoided explicitly ruling on the FDA’s actions, focusing entirely on the doctors’ lack of legal standing to sue.

The mifepristone case was one of several from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that made the court seem like a model of moderation. The justices also reversed 5th Circuit rulings that federal gun control law intended to protect victims of domestic violence, the financing structure for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and barred Biden administration officials from attempting convincing social media platforms to remove misinformation.

The domestic violence firearms law was the first case the court has heard based on the Second Amendment since its landmark 2022 ruling, which revolutionized U.S. firearms law by requiring restrictions to have a strong historical foundation.

Roberts also wrote the decision that upheld the law that disarms people who pose a threat of physical violence. The finding also could give lower courts some guidance on how to apply the Supreme Court’s new history and tradition test.

In a separate gun case, the court struck down a Trump-era Justice Department rule that banned bump stocks, rapid-fire firearm attachments used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The court split along ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority in another case that limited the discretion of regulators.

The final days of a term often produce a flurry of heated debates in the most contentious cases. This year, there were more than enough important rulings that had to wait until the end, despite the fact that the number of cases was lower than usual.

In May, Justice Sonia Sotomayor telegraphed what the recent days might look like for her and the other liberal justices. “There are days when I’ve heard a case announced, I’ve come to my office and closed my door and cried,” Sotomayor said after receiving an award from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “And there will probably be more.”