Trump’s Big Wins, Radical Regulatory Rollback Marks Breakthrough Supreme Court Term

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump and the conservative interests that helped him reshape the Supreme Court got most of what they wanted this term, from significant help for Trump’s political and legal prospects to sharp blows to the administrative state they criticize.

The rulings reflect a deep and at times bitter division on the court, where conservatives, including three Trump-appointed justices, outnumber liberals by a two-to-one margin, and are likely to reinforce the view of most Americans that ideology, not neutral application of the law, determines the outcomes of the court’s most important cases.

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, often viewed with suspicion by Trump and his allies because of concerns about the independence of the judiciary and fears about the court’s reputation, has issued the most significant decisions. They include the court granting broad immunity from criminal prosecution to former presidents and overturning a 40-year-old case that had been used thousands of times to uphold federal regulations.

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

The end of the court’s term marked an unusual change of fortune for Trump, who is seeking a second term as president.

Six months ago, he was preparing for a criminal trial in early March in Washington on charges of interfering in the 2020 election after his loss to President Joe Biden, and he faced being disqualified from voting in several states.

In a final court order issued Monday, the justices granted him an indefinite stay of trial and narrowed the election interference case against him. Last week, they separately limited the use of the obstruction charge he faces, which should give him even more legal leverage months after the court reinstated Trump to the presidential election.

Each of the three cases arose from Trump’s actions following the 2020 election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. But Roberts’ opinions offered only a dry account of the events of Jan. 6, emphasizing that the court “cannot afford to focus … on the exigencies of the present.”

The court also overturned the Chevron decision, depriving the SEC of a key fraud-fighting tool and opening the door to repeated, broad regulatory challenges that, when combined with the end of Chevron, could lead to what Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson described as a “tsunami of lawsuits.”

The decisions also sparked heated, sometimes cutting, debates about judicial humility. “The principle of judicial humility is giving way to the principle of judicial hubris,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent overturning Chevron.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chastised Roberts for his “feigned judicial humility” in his immunity opinion. Roberts ridiculed the dissenters’ “tone of terrified doom.”

In each of Trump’s cases, the majority was 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 dismiss Trump’s case. Those same justices, as well as Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, were the majority in the federal regulation cases. Conservatives also voted together in a major homelessness case that found that outdoor sleeping bans targeting homeless encampments do not violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — even when there is a shortage of shelter space.

But Roberts has repeatedly defended the court against accusations that its justices are nothing more than politicians in robes.

But the court’s public standing has taken a hit in recent years, especially since Roe was overturned. Seven in 10 Americans said the justices are more likely to follow their own ideology than to serve as neutral arbiters of government power, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that was conducted before the latest round of decisions.

Abortion is one issue where the court has sidestepped the liberal-conservative divide by avoiding a major ruling in a presidential election year when abortion is a hot topic, largely because of the justices’ 2022 decision that led to abortion bans or severe restrictions in most Republican-controlled states.

The one-sentence injunction in the Idaho case cleared the way for emergency abortions to resume despite that state’s strict abortion ban. But it did not end the lawsuit or answer key questions about whether doctors can perform emergency abortions elsewhere, even in states with abortion bans that would prohibit them.

In the second abortion case, the justices unanimously dismissed a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors who sought to reverse decisions made by the Food and Drug Administration to make mifepristone, the pill used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States last year, easier to obtain. The decision pointedly omitted any ruling on the FDA’s actions, focusing solely 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 picture of moderation. The justices also overturned 5th Circuit rulings that would have invalidated a federal gun control law intended to protect victims of domestic violence, invalidated the funding structure for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and barred Biden administration officials from trying to persuade social media platforms to remove misinformation.

In a separate gun case, the court struck down a Trump-era Justice Department regulation that banned bump stocks, the rapid-fire gun accessories used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The court was split along ideological lines, with a majority of conservatives.

The last days of a term of office often bring about an avalanche of sharp disputes in the most controversial cases, and this year there were an exceptionally large number of important judgments that remained pending until the very end.

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