Supreme Court June Decisions
The Roberts Court Reaps and Sows
As the Supreme Court becomes ground zero for an escalating constitutional clash with the Trump regime, the Court’s 2024-25 term is shaping up to tell several important stories. In response to a raft of lower court losses on the unlawful executive actions of his first 100 days, Trump and his cabinet have publicly questioned the limits of judicial authority, defied court orders, and leveled incendiary attacks on judges. After paving the way in last term’s Trump v. United States for Trump’s assertions of autocratic power, however, Chief Justice Roberts now finds himself hard-pressed to manage the fallout. Roberts has attempted to walk this tightrope by publicly gesturing to the importance of judicial independence, meanwhile taking pains to avoid outright confrontation with Trump in a series of cases on the Court’s “shadow docket.”
Against this charged backdrop, in a series of consequential cases not implicating Trump’s second-term agenda, the Roberts Court has continued to assert its control over constitutional meaning. As they have done for nearly two decades now, Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees were intent this term on using that power to advance the anti-democratic, pro-billionaire, and theocratic aims of the Federalist Society’s project to undo the socioeconomic progress of the 20th century.
These dynamics have left the American “Rule of Law” in a liminal state, riven by uncertainty over who, ultimately, gets to decide what the law means. And as Trump and Roberts jockey for that power, a supine Congress has reduced itself to spectatorship, shirking its constitutional role. The upshot is that, “upon vital questions, affecting the whole people”—as Lincoln put it in his first inaugural address—the power to set the course for our constitutional future is far removed from where it belongs: in the hands of everyday Americans.
This memorandum provides a brief overview of key cases, grouped by issue area, and examines the political dynamics behind the public posturing. For each case, this memorandum sets out the case background and our reading of the Roberts’ majority’s calculus and strategy. We detail the key outside interests driving the relevant litigation, contextualizing the cases within a broader legal-political framework.
CONTENT
Voting Rights
After a federal court said Louisiana violated the Voting Rights Act by including only one majority-Black Congressional district, the state created a second such district. But then another federal court said those new maps were themselves illegal racial gerrymanders—and the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority suggested at oral arguments that it agrees with that decision, but appeared divided on whether to go beyond the questions presented and gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act. The supermajority, however, seems to have closed that divide by ordering the case reargued next term with supplemental briefing likely over the continued vitality of the landmark law.
What the majority wants us to think:
That they have not yet resolved to declare Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, leaving Justice Clarence Thomas to dissent alone from the reargument order to say he would have done the deed this term.
John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh will tell us that this case is different from 2023’s Allen v. Milligan, in which they joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to block Alabama’s maps that diluted Black voters’ fair representation as a likely violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Now, however, Roberts and Kavanaugh appear ready to join their fellow Republican appointees in further weakening the landmark Voting Rights Act. Roberts and Kavanaugh will likely refuse to join their right-wing colleagues’ renewed call from their Milligan dissent to go further and strike down Section 2 as unconstitutional.
What the majority is really doing:
Giving Justice Brett Kavanaugh cover to provide Justice Thomas with the fifth vote to kill Section 2. In 2023’s Allen v. Milligan, Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a 5-4 decision to block Alabama’s maps that diluted Black voters’ fair representation as a likely violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence suggesting that he would eventually give his fifth vote to the dissenters’ call to kill what remains of the Voting Rights Act, which has been on life support ever since the Roberts Court gutted Section 5’s powerful preclearance provision in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder. But while Kavanaugh flirted with the thought of doing so in this case at oral argument, he then made clear Louisiana failed to fully brief the issue, so he would leave it for another day. The reargument order appears to tee up that day.
Religion
The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied the Catholic Charities Bureau’s request for a religious exemption from a state law requiring employers to pay into the state’s unemployment insurance program. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the state high court, finding its application of Wisconsin’s law to Catholic Charities violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of neutrality among religions.
What the majority wants us to think:
That the unanimous decision penned by Justice Sotomayor proves the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s Democratic majority are the partisan hacks, not the Roberts Court’s right-wing supermajority.
What the majority is really doing:
Chief Justice Roberts assigned the decision in this conservative victory to the liberal Justice Sotomayor as a prebuttal to court watchers and the public criticizing the Court’s rank partisanship as the rest of its big politically-charged decisions come down.
A group of parents, backed by theocratic litigation juggernaut Alliance Defending Freedom, say their kids’ public elementary schools violated the parents’ religious rights by not giving them a chance to opt their children out of instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents' religious convictions. In a 6-3 decision, the Roberts majority agreed with the parents.
What the majority wants us to think:
That it is protecting children from woke indoctrination.
What the majority is really doing:
Putting religion above the law in America, while also harming public schools by chilling the work of every teacher, principal, or superintendent who now must assess every single classroom item or action for who it offends and what lawsuit it could bring.
Oklahoma’s charter school board approved a taxpayer-funded Catholic school designed to obliterate the separation of church and state. The effort was too much even for the state’s Republican attorney general, who won his challenge before Oklahoma’s conservative supreme court. The Roberts Court then agreed to hear the case, but the justices ended up affirming the state supreme court by an evenly divided vote after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal left SCOTUS deadlocked.
What the majority wants us to think:
That it is standing down from making its most aggressive move yet against the separation of church and state by actually blessing a religious public school.
What the majority is really doing:
Biding its time until another case comes up to a fully staffed bench so that the Roberts Court can continue incrementally rewriting the First Amendment to effectively eliminate the separation of church and state enshrined in the Establishment Clause.
Civil Rights
The Medicaid Act allows any of its recipients to seek medical care with “any qualified provider.” After South Carolina defunded Planned Parenthood, a woman brought suit under the Medicaid Act to vindicate her right to have her care at Planned Parenthood be covered under the federal law. The Roberts Court’s 6-3 right-wing supermajority said private plaintiffs cannot bring suit to enforce the Medicaid Act, thereby allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood.
What the majority wants us to think:
That it’s not abandoning a two-year-old precedent out of political animus towards Planned Parenthood, but rather just resolving a circuit split to say the Medicaid Act is fundamentally different than the federal law the Court two years ago said did allow private plaintiffs to sue.
What the majority is really doing:
Abandoning a two-year-old precedent out of political animus towards Planned Parenthood, thus rewarding Alliance Defending Freedom for generating this legal strategy to deprive women of any care offered by facilities that also—or, before Dobbs, used to—provide abortion care.
Guns
The court upheld the Biden administration’s ghost gun ban. By a 7-2 vote, the justices held that the ATF’s regulation was authorized by the Gun Control Act of 1968.
What the majority wants us to think:
The Roberts Court isn’t so pro-NRA after all.
What the majority is really doing:
Roberts assigned this opinion to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who departed from his usual hard-right partners Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—to lend greater force to the narrative of moderation Roberts wants to send the public. This comes as the court prepares to split the difference on gun-related cases this term, meanwhile gearing up to strike down state assault weapons bans and limit federal felon-in-possession laws in the next several terms.
Mexico sued Smith & Wesson for the gun manufacturer’s role in facilitating cartel violence. Smith & Wesson argued that federal law immunizes it from such lawsuits. The 1st Circuit sided with Mexico, but the Supreme Court unanimously sided with Smith & Wesson.
What the majority wants us to think:
That the unanimous decision proves the 1st Circuit’s all-Democratic panel are the partisan hacks, not the Roberts Court’s right-wing supermajority. The justices are just following the law as Congress commanded and correcting the lower court’s attempt to carve out a creative end-around in pursuit of an anti-gun bias.
What the majority is really doing:
Chief Justice Roberts assigned the decision in this conservative victory to the liberal Justice Kagan as a prebuttal to court watchers and the public criticizing the Court’s rank partisanship as the rest of its big politically-charged decisions come down.
Environment
San Francisco and other blue cities challenged an EPA rule requiring them to limit sewage from flowing into their waters. The court’s right wing, by a 5-4 vote, struck down the EPA’s requirement and said the agency can do the dirty work itself.
What the majority wants us to think:
They sided with big, blue cities, so they aren’t just pursuing Republican policy priorities, and the EPA still has the power to fight wastewater pollution.
What the majority is really doing:
Justice Amy Coney Barrett split from the supermajority to join the liberal minority in dissent from Justice Alito’s majority opinion, which uses the blue city plaintiffs as cover to distort the Clean Water Act in pursuit of the deregulatory agenda, while fully understanding that Trump’s EPA will not step into the public health breach the court created.
Public Agencies
The Court upheld the FDA’s rejection of marketing plans from flavored e-cigarettes manufacturers. The unanimous ruling rebuked the 5th Circuit, which held otherwise.
What the majority wants us to think:
That SCOTUS is not a bunch of lunatics like the 5th Circuit.
What the majority is really doing:
Normalizing its deregulatory agenda by using the 5th Circuit’s MAGA extremism as a foil.
Consumers’ Research is a right-wing group that brought three identical cases in three different circuits—a concerted effort to spur the Roberts Court to revive the “nondelegation doctrine,” a weapon against the administrative state that has lain dormant since the Lochner Court used it to strike down parts of FDR’s New Deal in the early 1930s. The Roberts Court refused to review two appeals courts decisions that rejected Consumers’ Research’s constitutional claims. But several weeks later, the 5th Circuit went the other way to create a circuit split the justices had to resolve. In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett joined with the pro-democracy bloc of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson to side against the 5th Circuit and uphold the constitutionality of the FCC’s Universal Service Fund.
What the majority wants us to think:
That SCOTUS is not a bunch of lunatics like the 5th Circuit.
What the majority is really doing:
Sending a signal to the right-wing legal movement and the Trump judges populating the lower courts that they do not need the nondelegation doctrine to nuke the administrative state. The Roberts Court’s recent invention of the so-called Major Questions Doctrine and its overruling of Chevron deference already does all the deregulatory work they need.
In a 6-3 decision, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which recommends that insurers provide patients with treatments like the HIV-prevention drug PrEP free of charge. The decision rejected the 5th Circuit’s ruling that found the Task Force’s members were unconstitutionally appointed.
What the majority wants us to think:
That SCOTUS is not a bunch of lunatics like the 5th Circuit.
What the majority is really doing:
Sending yet another signal to the right-wing legal movement to give up trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, especially when the lower court already granted the plaintiffs’ core request to block free PrEP on religious liberty grounds, which the government did not appeal.
LGBTQ+ Rights
After Tennessee enacted a law banning medical treatment for transgender minors, families of transgender minors challenged the law as a violation of parental rights to direct the health care of their children under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause and a violation of the children’s rights under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Biden Administration joined the Equal Protection challenge, which the 6th Circuit rejected. The Supreme Court then accepted the DOJ’s petition, but not the parents’. The Roberts Court, by a 6-3 vote, ruled that Tennessee’s law, and those like it in 24 other states across the country, does not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender identity—and therefore does not violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the majority “obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute” and, by doing so, “authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them.”
What the majority wants us to think:
Chief Justice John Roberts presents his majority opinion as a model of restraint. The supermajority is respecting the will of Tennessee’s people while Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, limited their reasoning to the specific kind of law at issue, rather than following Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett’s push to leave transgender people with virtually no protection at all from the Equal Protection Clause.
What the majority is really doing:
Threatening or removing access to evidence-based and medically necessary care for at least 110,000 transgender kids living in states that currently have bans on gender-affirming healthcare, while also taking the first step towards depriving trans people of equal justice under law entirely. The majority did, however, leave open the possibility of endorsing parents’ rights arguments in a future case against Tennessee’s law or others like it—and doing so would also benefit right-wing religious organizations that use parental rights claims to attack school policies that protect trans kids from bullying and curricula designed to expose kids to diverse identities.
First Amendment
Congress passed, and then-President Biden signed, a bill banning American app stores from distributing “foreign adversary controlled applications,” effective on January 19, 2025. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, refused to divest or sell TikTok, and instead sued, claiming the law was unconstitutional infringement on the company’s First Amendment rights. Then-candidate Trump, who himself tried to ban TikTok during his first term, filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to side with TikTok after one of his supporters, who was a major investor in ByteDance, came out in opposition to Congress’s TikTok ban. The justices sided against TikTok and then-candidate Trump to unanimously uphold the Act of Congress effectively banning TikTok in the U.S.
What the majority wants us to think:
That it takes Congress’s national security concerns seriously.
What the majority is really doing:
After helping put Trump in office last term, the justices sought to appear independent by siding against Trump before he retook office. But the court also made clear during oral arguments that Trump could defer enforcement of the law as he sought a deal to address Congress’s concerns and permit TikTok’s continued presence in this country.
By a 6-3 vote, the Roberts majority upheld Texas’s law requiring pornographic websites to verify the ages of their users so kids cannot access the material. Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, said the state law’s burden on adults’ access did not rise to the level of a First Amendment violation.
What the majority wants us to think:
That they are still sensitive to adults’ First Amendment rights by applying heightened scrutiny to the Texas law, even if the Court’s bottom line to uphold the law was the same as the 5th Circuit’s, which served as the state’s rubber stamp by applying the highly deferential rational basis test.
What the majority is really doing:
Abandoning the strict scrutiny required under key internet speech precedents because the justices do not like pornography.
Executive Power & Due Process
The Court took this case to decide whether to lift or narrow multiple lower courts’ nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order unconstitutionally stripping citizenship from people born in this country to virtually all non-citizen parents. In a 6-3 decision, the Roberts majority declared universal injunctions likely unlawful, and limited district courts’ injunctive power to providing “complete relief” to the plaintiffs alone. In doing so, the Roberts Court aided the administration’s agenda to make each baby subject to the EO individually sue the government to recognize their constitutionally-mandated citizenship.
What the majority wants us to think:
That they are simply addressing the problem of universal injunctions that everyone recognized needed solving.
What the majority is really doing:
The Roberts Court is seeking to avoid a confrontation with Trump, maintain the Court’s grip on national policymaking, and get ahead of Congress’s push to ban nationwide injunctions. What’s more, Justice Barrett’s majority opinion says class actions are the proper avenues towards nationwide relief in these cases, setting up the possibility that the majority would later reject class certification, in keeping with its historic hostility to class actions.
Trump illegally fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protections Board, designed to trigger a challenge to the landmark 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor. Humphrey’s recognized Congress’s power to create independent agencies by limiting presidents’ power to remove their leaders. By a 6-3 shadow docket vote, the Roberts Court supermajority allowed Trump to proceed with the firings and suggested it would overrule Humphrey’s when formally asked to do so, yet said the Federal Reserve’s independence would be safe from such a ruling.
What the majority wants us to think:
They are vindicating the common-sense position that Presidents can hire and fire anyone who works for them in the executive branch, while still protecting the global economy.
What the majority is really doing:
Working in concert with Trump to constitutionalize the so-called Unitary Executive Theory, which the right-wing legal movement made up to justify gutting the agencies most committed to workers’ rights, consumer welfare, and Americans’ health and safety. The majority, meanwhile, created an unreasoned exception for the Fed to protect Wall Street from the consequences of the UET’s logical conclusion. Justice Kagan, in a dissent joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote, “If the idea is to reassure the markets, a simpler—and more judicial—approach would have been to deny the President’s application for a stay on the continued authority of Humphrey’s.”
A week after returning to power, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender servicemembers from the military because “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Trump followed this bigoted and evidence-free statement, offered without any evidence, with yet another animus-soaked sentence that “a man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” The supermajority, however, let Trump move forward with expelling transgender servicemembers while the administration appeals a lower court order blocking the ban as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
What the majority wants us to think:
The supermajority provided no reasoning to its shadow docket order, but sent the message that it will not get in the way of Trump’s power to conduct military affairs, no matter how hateful or bigoted.
What the majority is really doing:
The supermajority may be signaling that its upcoming decision in Skrmetti, which is likely to declare transgender people virtually unprotected from governmental discrimination, will affect how the appeals courts must assess the district court orders against Trump’s transgender servicemember EO. But the EO, even under Skrmetti, would still be unconstitutional because, as the lower court held, the order “is not rationally related to the government’s stated interest”— unless the Roberts Court says Trump can do whatever he wants under his broad Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief.
The Trump administration illegally abducted Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Venezuelan man protected by court order from removal, and sent him to CECOT, a notorious Salvadorian torture camp. A district court ordered the Trump administration to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. The Roberts Court, however, said the lower court could not command Trump to return the man. Instead, the Court held that the administration must follow only the district court’s order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson wrote separately to urge District Judge Xinis to apply maximum pressure to the administration within the bounds of the judiciary’s authority.
What the majority wants us to think:
The supermajority presented itself as a reasonable actor reining in “resistance” judges overstepping their role.
What the majority is really doing:
The supermajority was avoiding an outright constitutional confrontation with Trump in the hopes that the administration would follow the law. The administration, however, has continued to defy the courts by interpreting “facilitate” so narrowly as to render it meaningless, repeatedly making clear that Abrego Garcia will never be returned.
The Trump administration ordered an en masse layoff of all federal workers on “probationary status”—that is, within a year or two of being on the job. A federal judge blocked the blanket layoffs as likely illegal as to 16,000 of those workers. But the Roberts Court let Trump proceed with those layoffs while the administration appeals the lower court order. The brief, unsigned order suggested the district court had wrongly found the plaintiffs had standing to sue the administration. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson noted that they would have kept the lower court order reinstating the laid-off workers in place.
What the majority wants us to think:
This is not about whether Trump acted illegally, but rather about whether the proper parties sued the administration—and that makes the Roberts Court a reasonable actor reining in “resistance” judges who are overstepping their role.
What the majority is really doing:
As Justice Jackson suggested, the majority is using standing doctrine as a substitute for the merits to throw Trump a bone, when at this stage of the litigation, the question should be which side is more likely to suffer irreparable harm—the administration that wants to illegally lay off federal workers or the federal workers who have lost their livelihoods.
Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a Founding-era law invoked only three times in American history as a wartime measure, to expel Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison without due process. Lawyers for the immigrants immediately sued and District Judge James Boasberg, during an emergency hearing, ordered the administration to turn its plane around and return the immigrants to the United States. The administration defied Boasberg’s order. Chief Justice Roberts led a 5-4 right-wing majority to override District Judge Boasberg’s order blocking Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison without due process.
What the majority wants us to think:
The majority was not rewarding Trump for defying Boasberg’s order. Rather, they confirmed “detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal”—but in the district where they had been detained before being deported, which was not in Boasberg’s D.C.-based court.
What the majority is really doing:
As Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent for herself and Justices Kagan and Jackson, “[t]hat a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible.” Justice Barrett split from her right-wing colleagues to join the parts of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent excoriating the majority for rushing to make such a major judgment on the shadow docket.
The Trump administration ordered the blanket freezing of Congressionally-appropriated foreign aid funding. A federal district court ordered that funding be restored, but the Roberts Court, responding to a Trump administration request, told District Judge Amir Ali to narrow his order. After Judge Ali did so, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett joined Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson to require Trump to release illegally frozen federal foreign aid funding under Judge Amir Ali’s order guided by the justices’ earlier interventions.
What the majority wants us to think:
The court can communicate with lower court judges to reach reasonable results that will neutralize Trump’s attacks on the judiciary and encourage this administration to abandon its lawlessness.
What the majority is really doing:
Roberts and Barrett are engaging in a dangerous dance with an administration that has shown no interest in letting up on its lawlessness or avoiding confrontations with the judiciary.
The court said the Trump administration violated the due process rights of Venezuelan migrants when it tried to summarily deport them under the Alien Enemies Act.
What the majority wants us to think:
The majority is pushing back against Trump and standing up for the rule of law.
What the majority is really doing:
The majority is simply affirming our country’s constitutional baseline, and that was too generous even for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Meanwhile, they declined to weigh in on whether Trump could enforce a rarely-used wartime law during peacetime with a tortured definition of “invasion.”
A district court blocked Trump’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Venezuelan nationals, but the Supreme Court allowed the terminations to proceed while the appeals process plays out. Only Justice Jackson noted her dissent.
A district court blocked Trump’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals, but the Supreme Court allowed the terminations to proceed while the appeals process plays out. Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, dissented, writing that the majority has determined “that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
A district court blocked DOGE from accessing the Social Security Administration’s record systems, and the 4th Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request to stay the ruling pending appeal. But the Roberts Court’s right-wing supermajority issued the stay over the dissents of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. “[T]his Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” wrote Justice Jackson, by voting to “give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now—before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful” and creating “grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process.”