WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump and the conservative interests that helped him reshape the Supreme Court have gotten most of what they wanted this term — from substantial support for Trump’s political and judicial prospects to sharp blows against the administrative state they detest.
The decisions reflect a deep and sometimes bitter divide within a court where conservatives – including three Trump-appointed justices – outnumber liberals by a two-to-one margin. They are likely to reinforce the view among most Americans that the outcomes of the court’s most critical cases are determined by ideology rather than a neutral application of the law.
The justices also grappled with ethics controversies that led to the adoption of the court’s first code of conduct, which failed to be enforced. Months later, Justice Samuel Alito made public statements rejecting calls for him to recuse himself from several cases because of doubts about his impartiality, including after the revelation that two flags linked to the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol were flying over Alito’s homes in New Jersey and Virginia.
Chief Justice John Roberts, often viewed with suspicion by Trump and his allies because of his concerns about judicial independence and the court’s reputation, made the most consequential decisions, including granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution and overturning a 40-year-old case that had been cited thousands of times to uphold federal regulations.
“He has contradictory tendencies. One is to be a statesman and an institutionalist,” says Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The other, says Hasen, is to get involved “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 turning point for Trump, who is seeking a second term as president.
Six months ago, he was preparing for a criminal trial in Washington in early March. He was accused of election interference following his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020 and was in danger of being disqualified from the presidential election in several states.
In the court’s final decision, announced Monday, the justices granted Trump an indefinite recess and confined the election interference case. Last week, they also confined the possibility of an election interference charge against him, which should give him even more legal arguments months after the court reinstated Trump for the presidency.
Each of the three cases arose from Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which culminated in his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But Roberts’ opinions offered only sober accounts of the events of January 6, insisting that the court “cannot afford to fixate on present exigencies.”
The court also overturned the Chevron decision, stripping the SEC of a key anti-fraud tool and opening the door to repeated, sweeping challenges to regulations. Combined with the demise of Chevron, this could lead to what Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson described as a “tsunami of litigation.”
The end of Chevron was the third year in a row that conservatives explicitly or effectively overturned critical, decades-old precedents. Two years ago, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Last year, it was affirmative action in higher education.
The Trump case and the regulators’ case appear to point in different directions with regard to the power of the executive branch, says Michael Dorf, a professor of constitutional law at Cornell University.
“On the one hand, the court makes it harder for the government to do its job through administrative agencies, and on the other hand, it gives the president permission to act illegally,” Dorf said. “Taken together, I think these two actions concentrate power in the White House in the president’s political operations and outside of what might be called the bureaucracy.”
The decisions also sparked heated, sometimes pointed, discussions about judicial modesty. “The rule of judicial modesty gives way to the rule of judicial hubris,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion overturning the Chevron decision. Roberts responded that modesty in this case meant “acknowledging” and “correcting our own errors” in the original Chevron decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chided Roberts for the “feigned judicial modesty” of his opinion on immunity. Roberts derided the “tone of ghastly condemnation” of the dissenters.
In each of the Trump cases, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, two of Trump’s three appointees, were part of the majority, along with two others, Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, who also rejected calls to stay the Trump cases. The same justices, plus Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, formed the majority in the cases involving federal regulations. Conservatives also voted together in a key case on homelessness that found that bans on sleeping outside targeting homeless encampments do not violate the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment – even when there is a lack of space in shelters.
But Roberts has repeatedly defended the court against criticism that its justices are little more than robed politicians. In a memorable clash with Trump in 2018, Roberts chided the then-president for complaining about the decision of an “Obama judge.”
“We don’t have judges like Obama, Trump, Bush or Clinton. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges who do their best to give equal justice to the defendants who appear before them,” Roberts said at the time.
But the court’s public image has taken a hit in recent years, especially since the Roe decision was overturned. Seven in 10 Americans said the justices were more likely to be guided by their own ideology than to act as neutral arbiters of the government, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted before the final round of rulings was released.
Abortion was one issue on which the court skirted the divide between liberals and conservatives by avoiding major rulings in a presidential election year when abortion is a volatile issue. The main reason for this was the justice’s 2022 decision, which led to abortion bans or severe restrictions in most Republican-controlled states.
A ruling in an Idaho case cleared the way for emergency abortions to resume, despite the state’s strict abortion ban. But it did not end the case or answer key questions about whether doctors can perform emergency abortions elsewhere, even in states where abortion bans prohibit them. The Idaho decision was accidentally posted on 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 brought by anti-abortion groups seeking to overturn Food and Drug Administration decisions to augment access to mifepristone, a drug used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States last year. The decision explicitly avoided any assessment of the FDA’s actions and focused solely on the lack of standing for doctors to sue.
The mifepristone case was one of several before the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that made the court seem the epitome of moderation. The justices also overturned 5th Circuit rulings that would have struck down a federal gun control law designed to protect victims of domestic violence, overturned the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and barred Biden administration officials from persuading social media platforms to remove misinformation.
The domestic violence gun law was the court’s first Second Amendment case since its landmark 2022 ruling that overturned the nation’s gun laws by requiring that any restrictions have a mighty historical basis.
Roberts also authored the decision upholding the law that disarms people who pose a threat of physical violence. The ruling could also provide guidance to lower court judges in applying the Supreme Court’s novel history and tradition test.
In another case involving guns, the court struck down a Trump-era Justice Department regulation banning “bump stocks,” rapid-fire gun accessories used in the deadliest mass shooting in current U.S. history. The court was ideologically divided, with conservatives in the majority in another case involving limiting regulators’ discretion.
The final days of a term often see a flurry of heated exchanges in the most controversial cases, and this year, despite a smaller caseload than usual, there were more than enough critical judgments that were left until the end.
In May, Justice Sonia Sotomayor hinted at what the final days might look like for her and the other liberal justices. “There are days when I’ve come into my office after a case has been announced, closed the door behind me and cried,” Sotomayor said after receiving an award from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “And there will probably be more.”
