There Was One Clear Loser in the Supreme Court Term Ending in June 2026: the American People

Presidential Power

Putting independent agencies under Trump’s control

In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6-3 majority overturned precedent and gave Donald Trump the power to fire agency heads even when Congress has specifically protected them from being fired without cause.

What happened in this case? 

Since the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 19th century, Congress and the president have recognized the need for some agencies to be insulated from political pressure. They have created numerous independent agencies whose leaders are nominated by the president subject to Senate confirmation, but then not removable by the president without cause. Examples include the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Supreme Court long ago upheld this type of structure as constitutional in a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor. 

Last year, Trump purged several multi-member agencies of their Democratic members without cause, including FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. She sued, and a lower court held that Trump had clearly acted illegally, under Humphrey’s Executor. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.

How did the far-right majority rule? 

In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts and made possible by the three Trump justices, the Court’s MAGA majority overturned Humphrey’s Executor and gave Trump the power he claimed. Their decision dramatically destabilizes the balance of powers among the branches in furtherance of the once-fringe constitutional theory of the “unitary executive,” which grants immense and unchecked powers to the president. They held that all executive power belongs to one person – the president – and by definition that must include the ability to fire agency heads that are not carrying out his policies as he wishes. 

What did the dissenting justices say?

Justice Sotomayor strongly dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. She observed that by “transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws,” the majority was giving the president “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.”

She noted the significant threats to our freedom as a result of the majority’s decision. In particular, Congress has relied on the principles laid out in Humphrey’s Executor, to serve as a check on the power of independent agencies created to serve the people. Because the powers of these agencies are so immense, Congress specifically included provisions protecting the leaders from being removed by the president without cause. This provided a buffer against abuses of power. But now, the Supreme Court majority has handed those powers directly to the president. Sotomayor wrote:

Seldom, if ever, has this Court worked such a profound bait and switch on a coequal branch: For more than 90 years, Congress believed, with this Court’s express approval, that it was allowed to create a workable Government, including by granting certain agencies tasked with certain responsibilities some independence from Presidential control. In rejecting that project, after decades of promising the political branches that structures like the FTC’s were permissible, the Court creates an Executive Branch that Congress never dreamed of establishing and that it now has little hope of ever reining in. 

Sotomayor also pointed out that under the majority’s logic, civil service protections protecting federal employees from being fired for partisan reasons are now at risk. 

Why was the result harmful?

The Court majority engaged in a massive structural shift of power in our society. Donald Trump now has immense power over vast areas regulated by formerly independent agencies – power that Congress took pains to prevent a president from having. Trump now has the power to fire agency leaders who do not eagerly abuse their agency’s power to target Trump’s enemies or enrich him and his allies.

Making an Exception for the Federal Reserve

On the same day it decided the Slaughter case, the Court issued a decision in Trump v. Cook that showed how without principle the majority’s decision in Slaughter was. In effect, the majority carved out an exception and preserved the independence of one independent agency: the Federal Reserve.

What happened in this case?

This case involves Trump’s moves to illegally grab power over the Federal Reserve in direct violation of a law passed by Congress. It was precipitated by his firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who was appointed by President Biden.

Congress structured the Federal Reserve to protect it from undue political influence over decisions affecting the nation’s monetary policies: the president can only fire a Federal Reserve governor “for cause.” In this case, unlike with Slaughter, Trump claimed that he had a cause. He accused her of engaging in misconduct before she joined the Fed. The allegations have been widely debunked. But they provided a fig leaf for Trump to claim he was acting consistent with the “for cause” provision.

Cook sued to protect her job – and the integrity of the Federal Reserve. Trump argued that as long as he gave a reason for firing her – any reason, no matter what – he satisfied the statute, and no court has a right to take any action to stop him. The lower courts ruled that Cook could keep her job while the litigation proceeded, and Trump appealed that decision.

How did the Court rule?

The MAGA justices split, and the Court narrowly ruled against Trump in a 5-4 decision written by Roberts. He was joined by Kavanaugh, as well as Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.

The majority ruled that Trump had to give Cook an opportunity to contest the charge against her before firing her. Otherwise, he could fire Fed governors on a whim, which would violate the statute.

As noted above, this came out on the same day as Slaughter, which held that Congress has no authority to limit the president’s power to fire agency heads. But in this case, the majority held that the Federal Reserve was unique among independent agencies because of what Roberts called the nation’s “tradition of central banking protected from political interference” that predates the Constitution. Because of the Fed’s “unique historical status and role,” Roberts claimed, the congressional protection from being fired is constitutional. Therefore, he concluded, Cook cannot be removed until she has a chance to address the allegations Trump is making against her.

What did the dissenters say?

Justices Thomas, Alito, and Barrett each wrote their own dissent, with Gorsuch joining Alito’s. While they addressed different aspects of the case, all four would have allowed Trump’s firing of Cook to go into effect immediately, while her lawsuit was pending. This would have effectively ended the Fed’s independence.

Immigrants’ Rights

Nearly Stripping Citizenship from Millions -- “Birthright Citizenship”

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court came only one vote away from eliminating the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of citizenship for people born in the United States.

What happened in this case?

On his first day back in office in 2025, Trump issued an executive order declaring that people born after February 19 in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants are not American citizens. If allowed to go into effect, this would strip about 200,000 babies every year of U.S. citizenship.

What does the Constitution say about citizenship?

After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment became part of our Constitution. The amendment begins:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This did more than correct the infamous Dred Scott decision, which had held that Black people were not American citizens under the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment reflected an expansive concept of citizenship: Essentially, anyone born here is an American citizen. This is sometimes referred to as “birthright” citizenship. And in case there were any doubt as to whether the amendment means what it says, the Supreme Court cleared it up in an 1896 case.

Trump’s order was challenged in multiple courts and lost each time. So he appealed to the Supreme Court.

How did the Court rule?

The Court ruled 5-4 that Trump’s order violated the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. The Court explained how the history and text of the Fourteenth Amendment make clear that children born here to undocumented parents are unquestionably U.S. citizens. Roberts criticized the dissenters as having a “dramatically revisionist view” of the amendment’s meaning.

Justice Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh dissented. Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision has a much narrower scope:

[It] was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.

Justice Alito’s dissent said that the majority had made a “serious mistake” and “degrade[d] the concept of United States citizenship.” Justice Kavanaugh also wrote a separate dissent. He also believed the executive order was constitutional, but that it violated a law passed by Congress in 1940. In other words, he made clear his position that Congress can end birthright citizenship should it so choose.

What does this result tell us?

While the result was positive, all Americans should still be deeply concerned. This is a case that should have been decided 9-0. The fact that the Court held oral arguments and took Trump’s arguments seriously – and came only one vote away from toppling a long-recognized bedrock principle of the Fourteenth Amendment – makes clear that none of us is safe.

Targeting Haitian and Syrian Immigrants

The Trump administration illegally withdrew legal status and work authorizations from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States. In Mullin v. Doe, the 6-3 majority let it happen.

What happened in this case?

Because of particularly unsafe conditions in Haiti and Syria, forcing people from those countries to return would be extremely dangerous. So for over a decade, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has given them something called temporary protected status (TPS). It protects them from being deported and gives them permission to live and work in the United States. DHS first granted this to Haitians after the devastating 2010 earthquake there, and to Syrians in 2012 in light of the government’s brutal repression of the civilian population.

DHS secretaries have repeatedly reviewed conditions in those countries and determined that they are still too dangerous to permit people to return safely. So TPS status has continued until 2025, when the Trump administration withdrew it.

Congress created the TPS status. The statute recognizes that at some point, countries will no longer be so dangerous. So Congress allows the DHS secretary to terminate TPS status, but only after following certain precautions. Among other things, the secretary must (1) consult with appropriate federal agencies about conditions in the country; (2) review those conditions; and (3) determine if conditions remain so bad as to warrant retaining TPS.

But then-Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t consult with the appropriate agencies before announcing the end of TPS status for these two countries. And Trump’s racist comments about Haitians raised the additional factor of unconstitutional racial discrimination. Both decisions were challenged in court. The legal violations were so blatant that two district courts ordered that TPS status should remain in effect while litigation was pending. The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court.

How did the MAGA majority rule?

The case was decided 6-3, with an opinion written by Justice Alito and joined by the other MAGA justices. They reversed the lower courts and ruled that both TPS withdrawals should go into effect. Alito cited a provision of the law preventing courts from reviewing the secretary’s “determination” regarding TPS. According to the majority, “determination” includes not just the decision itself, but also the entire process leading up to it. So even though Noem failed to engage in the consultation required by Congress, he concluded, that can’t be reviewed by the courts.

He also wrote that Trump’s “heated language” about Haitians was not “overtly racial,” and that there could be non-racist reasons for wanting to restrict immigration to America.

What did the dissenting justices say?

Justice Kagan wrote a dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. She pointed out that the plaintiffs in these cases weren’t asking the courts to review whether Noem had made the right decision. Their challenge was based on the fact that she didn’t follow the procedures required by Congress, such as consulting with federal agencies about conditions in the countries. She sharply criticized Alito’s expansive definition of the word “determination” to include everything the decisionmaker does before the determination. She noted that is not how the word is used in ordinary English.

She also found that the Haitian plaintiffs had clearly shown that racism was a motivating factor. Unlike the majority, she did not protect Trump from the impact of his own words, but included numerous of his statements in the opinion. They included his outrageous comment about eating pets. They included his claim that Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of our country. They include his lament that we accept people from what he called “shithole countries” like Haiti and Somalia and not people from Norway and Sweden. Kagan observed that Trump’s comments are “shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes” and “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”

Why was the result harmful?

The Court’s decision will have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of people who the Trump administration can now force to return to dangerous conditions in their home countries. It gives Trump permission to bypass the TPS requirements set by Congress with impunity in its campaign of terror against immigrant populations of color.

Preventing Immigrants From Even Applying For Asylum

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court’s MAGA majority upheld the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent immigrants from applying for asylum by blocking their entry.

What happened in this case?

During Trump’s first term, the government adopted a nationwide “metering” policy under which it strictly limited the number of immigrants it would process and allow to apply for asylum by physically blocking their entry into the U.S. at the border. This significantly expanded a similar, more limited policy instituted towards the end of the Obama Administration to deal with an unexpected influx of Haitian immigrants at the US-Mexico border. 

A federal lawsuit was filed in 2017, which resulted in an order invalidating the policy that was affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. The Biden Administration rescinded the policy, but the Trump Administration indicated that it wants to be able to reinstate it and pursued the case in the Supreme Court.

How did the Court majority rule?

The MAGA justices united for a 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Alito. He based his majority decision on a narrow reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA provides that someone who “arrives in the United States” can be processed and considered for asylum. According to Alito, that does not apply to someone who arrives at the U.S. border but does not set foot “in” the country because government agents block the entry. This is in accord with “ordinary speech,” Alito wrote, in which “no one would say” that a person “arrives in” a place until and unless the person actually “enters that place.”

How would the dissenters have ruled?

Justice Sotomayor strongly dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. She wrote that the majority’s position “ignores the statutory context and history,” as well as the “longstanding position of the Executive Branch,” all of which show that any noncitizen “arriving at our doorstep” must be allowed to apply for asylum “regardless of whether her foot has crossed the threshold.” She went on to explain the likely consequences if the administration reinstates the metering policy, as it now can do: “More people will attempt to cross the border illegally,” more will be “subjected to violence” in their home countries, and more “people will die.” Sotomayor read part of her dissent from the bench, to which Alito responded “with anger dripping from his voice.”

The majority’s decision threatens to harm many victims of persecution.

Gun Violence

In Wolford v. Lopez, a state’s reasonable effort to address gun violence once again fell to the far-right’s continuing and dangerous transformation of the Second Amendment.

What happened in this case?

The Hawaii law being challenged in this case involves property rights. It sets a default assumption that you cannot carry weapons onto someone else’s property without permission. That includes places like shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, and parking garages, which are generally held open for access by the general public.

That part of the law was challenged under the 2022 Bruen case, which severely weakened the ability of states and cities to set reasonable restrictions on firearms. In Second Amendment challenges to gun safety laws, judges can no longer balance the individual’s right to own and carry firearms with the urgent need to prevent gun violence. Instead, under Bruen, judges can only uphold a firearms regulation if a comparable law existed at the time the Second or Fourteenth Amendments were adopted.

The Ninth Circuit upheld the law under that test, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

How did the MAGA justices rule?

In a 6-3 decision made possible by all three Trump justices, the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and struck the Hawaii law down. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by the other MAGA justices: Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Alito wrote that the Hawaii law imposes a new and significant burden on people who want to carry weapons with them in areas open to the general public. And he found ways to distinguish the founding-era laws from today’s. For instance, he wrote that colonial and early American laws banning poaching were irrelevant, because they didn’t involve retail establishments and didn’t implicate the right to self-defense.

What did the dissenting justices say?

Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissented. Kagan explained how the Hawaii law is a modern-day analogue to founding-era laws that prohibited the carrying of weapons onto someone else’s property without their consent. She wrote that it didn’t matter that those old laws were passed to address poaching, because both sets of laws share the same principle: addressing the harms that occur when someone carries guns onto another person’s land without permission.

Justice Jackson (joined by Justice Sotomayor) wrote a dissent that made the same point. But she also went further. She wrote that Bruen shouldn’t even be relevant to this case. She pointed out that there has never been a constitutional right to bring firearms onto someone else’s property without their permission. Since the Hawaii law doesn’t implicate the constitutional right to bear arms (as defined by Bruen), there isn’t even a need to take the next step and find historical analogues. She accused the majority of changing the right to bear arms into a right to do whatever one wants with one’s firearm.

Jackson didn’t mince words:

Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law.

Why was the result harmful?

The current Supreme Court majority again demonstrated its hostility to laws that seek to effectively address gun violence.

Trump’s Illegal Tariffs

The Court struck down Trump’s illegal tariff scheme in a 6-3 vote in Learning Resources v. Trump, with three of the MAGA justices dissenting.

What was this case about?

The question in this case was whether President Trump’s price-raising tariffs were lawless abuses of power, or whether Congress had given him the authority to establish them.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to set tariffs on imported goods. Congress, in turn, has passed laws to give the president the ability to set limited tariffs under certain circumstances, and only for a limited time. But Trump went beyond those limits. He claimed that a 1977 law giving the president a vast array of specifically enumerated powers in response to significant foreign threats includes vast powers to set tariffs. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not mention tariffs. But Trump claimed it gave him that power anyway by giving the president the power to “regulate … importation.”

This was an unprecedented claim. In the nearly 50 years since its passage, no president had ever cited this law as authority to impose any kind of tariff. Trump was claiming enormous unilateral power over the economy. Although businesses pay the tariffs, they pass much of the costs along to consumers through higher prices.

How did the Supreme Court rule?

The Court struck the tariffs down in a 6-3 ruling, with Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissenting.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion. In a section joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, Gorsuch, and Barrett, he noted that the IEEPA gives a “lengthy list” of specific economic powers to the president to address foreign threats. The omission of tariffs and duties from that list indicates that Congress didn’t include that power. If “regulate” had such a broad meaning as to include the ability to set tariffs, then much of the list of specific powers would have been “wasted ink.”

Roberts also wrote a section that only Gorsuch and Barrett joined. They wrote that the tariffs should be struck down under the “major questions doctrine.” That is something the Court first used in a 2022 environmental case to strike down an EPA action they disagreed with. Under that rule, when they deem that an agency regulation addresses a major policy question and has a significant economic impact, they will strike the regulation down unless they can find “clear congressional authorization” for it. The “major questions” doctrine gives powerful business interests a legal weapon to use to sabotage important health and safety protections they oppose. So Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson did not join this section of Roberts’ opinion.

What would the MAGA dissenters have done?

Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh would have given Trump the tariff power he was claiming. They agreed with Trump that the power to “regulate … importation” includes the power to set tariffs. They also wrote that since this involves foreign affairs, the court should defer to Trump.

How was Trump’s reaction relevant to filling Supreme Court vacancies?

After the decision, Trump made clear in a Truth Social post that he believes that the Supreme Court justices he nominated owe loyalty to him above all. 

The Court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country, and instead decided to, potentially, give away Trillions of Dollars to Countries and Companies who have been taking advantage of the United States for decades.

In the same Truth Social post, he condemned the independence of justices who rule against him in any cases:

They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how “honest,” “independent,” and “legitimate” they are.

Several weeks later, he was even more explicit:

[I]t’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to “almost” the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

It is obvious that in his second term, Donald Trump will not nominate anyone to the Supreme Court unless they have assured him in advance of their unfettered loyalty.