2023-2024 is a key year The term is probably the most It is remembered for its rulings involving a former president and a leading Republican candidate. That includes the unanimous decision to keep him on the ballot in March.
But in other cases Big changes came on many fronts: Courts told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it could no longer try suspects of securities fraud and limited its prosecutorial powers in cases involving suspected rioters who attacked the United States. A vote on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, blocked an ambitious effort by the Environmental Protection Agency to target air pollution between states.
While the Supreme Court has reached agreement on some of its most high-profile decisions, there are new signs of a fragmentation of its conservative coalition, reflecting the fact that the court is not always predictably divided between liberals and conservatives. Even in cases where nearly all the justices agreed, many chose to decide separately. This includes cases in which the court rejected challenges to federal gun restrictions aimed at domestic violence perpetrators.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett, In their fourth terms, the Supreme Court’s often decisive moderates, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, seemed emboldened to disagree sharply with their conservative colleagues. The three voted for the majority in nearly all of the court’s most high-profile cases.
“What this term shows us is that they are willing to move the Supreme Court to the right, but not as far or as fast as other conservatives on the court,” Irv Gornstein, director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law School, said of Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett. “Whether the same pattern will continue in the next term is anyone's guess.”
There were 11 other decisions. Last term, the justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines on contentious cases involving homeless rights, voting rights in South Carolina and the repeal of bans, compared with five this time. A bump stock device that allows a rifle to fire at speeds close to those of an automatic rifle.
At the same time, the court has rejected some of the most aggressive decisions from the conservative Fifth Circuit, at least for now. — Efforts to challenge the approval of abortion pills, attacks on White House efforts to block what the federal government considers to be misinformation on social media platforms, and attempts to undermine the existence of consumer watchdogs.
Two years after the capsize Roe v. WadeFollowing its landmark decision establishing a fundamental right to abortion, the Supreme Court has ruled in two cases that represent temporary victories for abortion rights but leave room for future moves to restrict abortion access: one about emergency room abortions, where a patient's health but not their life is at risk, and the other about the abortion drug mifepristone, one of two drugs used in more than 60 percent of abortions in the United States.
Depending on the decisions of the lower courts, both cases could return to the Supreme Court in the next few years.
“Despite some departures from some justices in some high-profile cases, the Supreme Court has been very conservative,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law professor who follows the court closely.
Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor and co-host of the liberal Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” said the Supreme Court's rejection of some of the 5th Circuit's most extreme decisions has allowed the justices to “maintain a semblance of moderation” even if the court's most conservative justices sometimes agree with lower court decisions.
Even though the justices have rebuked the 5th Circuit, their rulings and dissents “move the court a little to the right,” Murray said. “It just feels like a middle ground.”
In a tense and high-stakes election year, the Supreme Court has at times appeared to seek consensus. In March, it unanimously Roberts rejected an attempt to remove Trump from Colorado's primary ballot because of his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But he was unable to reach a consensus on the final, and perhaps most consequential, case of his term. The ruling, which gives Trump and future presidents broad protection from prosecution for official conduct, drew sharp criticism from the liberal justices, who said the majority created a “lawless zone around the president.”
Public confidence in the Supreme Court remains at an all-time low due to new revelations about potential conflicts of interest by some justices. Seven in 10 Americans believe justices make decisions based on their own ideology rather than serving as an independent check on the government, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll released last week.
Gornstein said many Americans who see Trump as a threat to democracy are likely to interpret the Supreme Court's immunity decision as “a sign that the Court cares more about President Trump and his chances of reelection than it does about democracy and the rule of law.”
“A significant portion of the public has already lost faith in the courts and that should be a concern for the courts,” he said.
Supreme Court Justice Gregory G. Galle, who served as justice under President George W. Bush, said the conservative majority had been its boldest this term in opposing what the six Republican nominees saw as abuses of federal agency power and unjustified expansion of the administrative state.
“Court decisions in this area will reshape the separation of powers and how government operates,” he said in an email.
On Friday, the court Chevron, For decades, the law has required judges to defer to federal agencies in enforcing laws that protect the environment, financial markets, the workplace and drug safety. The day before, the Supreme Court agreed with a Fifth Circuit ruling that found unconstitutional the in-house courts the Securities and Exchange Commission uses to enforce rules against fraud. That same day, the Supreme Court blocked an ambitious Environmental Protection Agency effort to target interstate air pollution, with Justice Barrett leading a dissenting opinion from three liberal justices.
And on Monday, the Supreme Court again split along ideological lines in a decision extending the time for companies to challenge the regulations. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, reading a dissenting opinion for the court, called the decision “deeply precarious” and said it would “create havoc for government agencies, businesses, and society at large.”
Taken together, these decisions will significantly limit the power of federal agencies to regulate key aspects of American life while encouraging litigation challenging agency actions.
Elimination of ChevronIn particular, the decision marked a milestone for conservatives who have long criticized the legal system for unfairly favoring government regulators. Although Roberts generally supports gradualism, he wrote the majority opinion that overturned precedent. The framework was “unworkable” and prevented judges from presiding over cases.
“Chevron“'The government's presumption is false because government agencies do not have special authority to resolve statutory ambiguities; courts do,'” he wrote.
The Trump administration has prioritized judicial nominees who share Trump's skepticism of the power of federal agencies. He has promised to facilitate the firing of thousands of civil servants if elected to a second term.
“Deregulation efforts have never been more successful than they have been this term. This was the culmination of a decades-long project,” said Deepak Gupta, a Supreme Court lawyer who follows the court's activities closely.
Gupta said the key point is that the Supreme Court is “expanding its own power. This is a self-aggrandizing move by the Supreme Court to take power away from an elected institution.”
His comments echoed dissents in two cases, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor calling the court's decision to invalidate the use of in-house courts a “power grab” and Justice Elena Kagan saying: Chevron It shows that “the majority despises restraint and seizes power.”
Although the court continues to hear fewer cases than it did for most of its history, The 62 justices this term allowed important decisions to pile up until the end: For the first time since 1996, outside of pandemic times, the Supreme Court released its final decision on July 1 instead of the customary end-of-June deadline.
The passage of time has been particularly important in President Trump's immunity case, with Americans focused on whether his trial for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election would take place before the next election is held.
To some observers, the backlog of high-profile decisions and the abundance of individual opinions from justices suggests a lack of discipline.
“There are signs of dysfunction,” Galle said, noting that conservative justices tend to write separate concurring opinions. “This makes the chief justice's job even more difficult.”
Decades ago, when the Supreme Court ruled on more than 100 cases per term, justices didn't have time to write so many individual opinions. But now, with only 60 justices, “many of the justices are too famous to speak for the Supreme Court alone. They think the world wants to know what they think,” Lazarus, the Harvard Law professor, said. “I'm even more impressed when they show they can work with others.”
Still, Roberts has written majority votes in the most important cases, underscoring his important role in steering a shaky court. According to EmpiricalSCOTUS statistics compiled by Adam Feldman and Jake S. Truscott, the justices formed the majority 96 percent of the time, followed by Kavanaugh and Barrett.
The sense of dysfunction was compounded when the court inadvertently briefly posted a copy of an Idaho abortion ban ruling on its website the day before the court was due to formally issue its decision.
Early in his term, Roberts responded to criticism from Democrats and ethics experts by announcing for the first time that the Supreme Court had agreed to abide by a unique set of ethics rules for its nine justices. If the rules were intended to keep justices out of political frays in an election year, they didn't succeed.
Far from silencing critics, the Supreme Court has been dogged again by ethical questions related to a provocative flag that flew outside the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and new revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas' travels funded by his friend and benefactor, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
In June, Justices Roberts and Alito were targeted by a liberal activist and filmmaker who posed as religious conservatives and secretly recorded the justices in action during a black-tie dinner celebrating the founding of the Supreme Court Historical Association.
“If the chief justice saw this term as an opportunity to remove the court from the political maelstrom, he failed,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor who follows the court's activities closely. “The court has continued to assert its position as a central player in political debate, not as a superior body, in the decisions of its justices and in their extra-court actions.”
