Despite some losses for Trump, Supreme Court delivers enduring conservative wins
WASHINGTON — In the consequential Supreme Court term that ended Tuesday, the justices rejected some of President Trump’s marquee policies that were personally important to the president.
Chief Justice John Roberts and two justices appointed by Trump joined with the three liberals to invalidate the president’s sweeping tariffs. The court struck down Trump’s order to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship for the US-born babies of immigrants lacking permanent legal status and temporary visitors. And the justices prevented him from immediately firing a leader of the influential Federal Reserve.
But even as the justices chose key moments to push back on Trump, the court’s conservative supermajority delivered generational, long-sought wins, including by expanding executive power, as the court that Trump remade in his first term continued a project of pushing the law to the right.
The court endorsed Republican-backed efforts to lift limits on campaign financing, expanded presidential reach over immigration policy and the federal bureaucracy, and dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights law.
“The headline might be ‘Court checks Trump,’ but the through line is a concentration of power towards the presidency, towards the court itself and away from Congress, federal agencies and voters,” said Deepak Gupta, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who regularly argues before the court. Gupta said the decisions could “fundamentally change the relationship between citizens and their government.”
In the final days of a contentious term that began in October, the conservative majority overruled a 90-year-old precedent, clearing the way for Trump and future presidents to fire independent regulators over policy disagreements despite laws passed by Congress intended to insulate agencies from political pressure.
That 6-3 ruling upends the structure of the federal government and weakens Congress’ ability to restrain the president. It also raises questions about whether such agencies will continue to operate independently of whomever occupies the White House to regulate major parts of American life, from labor disputes to broadcast television to workplace discrimination.
There was one exception: The court shielded the independence of the Federal Reserve by blocking Trump from immediately firing one of its governors, Lisa Cook, over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud.
The majority also fulfilled another long-held goal of the chief justice, who joined the bench in 2005, when it agreed in April to significantly weaken the Voting Rights Act. The ruling cleared the way for a Republican push throughout the South to redraw congressional maps, carving up voters and dismantling majority-Black districts in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
“Conservatives are running the table,” said Daniel Epps, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican nominee who was considered an unpredictable swing vote before his retirement in 2018.
In public appearances, the justices often take pride in the percentage of cases in which they are unanimous.
“We’re able to talk to one another and listen to one another, and find common ground a surprising amount of the time,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s nominees, told David French of The New York Times in a recent interview. “You give us the 70 hardest cases in the country every year, where lower court judges have disagreed, and we’re able to reach unanimity that much. I think that’s a miracle, right?”
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The justices did find unanimity 45 percent of the time, up 2 points from last term. They joined together, for instance, to say a Texas man could not be prosecuted for violating a law banning drug users from gun possession merely because he frequently used marijuana, and they agreed that a New Jersey anti-abortion group could bring a challenge in federal court to government efforts to seek its donor list.
There were also examples of ideologically diverse lineups during the term.
In a 5-4 vote Monday, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in supporting Mississippi’s grace period for late-arriving mail-in ballots, rejecting a push by the Trump administration to invalidate a state law.
Barrett also joined Roberts’ majority opinion this week to uphold birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds. Trump appointed Barrett to the court in his first term, and her tendency to occasionally rule against his priorities has drawn harsh criticism from the president’s allies.
Gorsuch, who has a libertarian streak, also aligned at times with his colleagues on the left, more often than he has in the past. He sided with them in a case about the rights of criminal defendants who have entered into plea bargains with prosecutors and joined a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, in a case thwarting people’s ability to sue the manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup in state courts.
But even so, a conservative bloc routinely controlled the outcome in cases large and small, with the center of the bench shifting considerably to the right and delivering 13 ideologically divided decisions in which all six justices nominated by Republican presidents were in the majority and all three Democratic nominees were in dissent. That was nearly a quarter of all rulings in which nine justices participated, compared with 11 percent in the term that ended in June 2025.
Those rulings included decisions that strip deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from Haiti and Syria and allow the administration to turn away asylum seekers fleeing persecution at the US-Mexico border.
The majority continued a trend in recent years of limiting transgender rights after the justices’ expansion in 2020 of workplace protections for gay and transgender workers. The justices upheld state laws from West Virginia and Idaho prohibiting transgender females from playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Gorsuch, all conservatives, voted in the majority far more often than last term. In contrast, Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, who has at times found compromise with her conservative colleagues, found herself more frequently in dissent this term, according to an analysis prepared for the Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin at Washington University in St. Louis and Michael Nelson at Penn State.
“The six-person conservative juggernaut many predicted in 2020 was in full force this term,” Epstein, a political scientist, said in reference to the year Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, and solidified the supermajority.
The court’s rulings were more favorable to the administration as it defended the government broadly this year than during Trump’s first term or compared with all recent administrations since George W. Bush’s.
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