The Supreme Court’s recently completed term featured several major disputes that will have lasting impact on the judicial and executive branches of government, court watchers from both sides of the political aisle say.
But instead of listing the most significant cases, they pointed more generally to four main issues the justices grappled with, including disputes involving former President Donald Trump, abortion, gun control and the administrative state.
“This is really a blockbuster term — not only in terms of how much impact the court had in particular areas, but how many areas that they did work in,” said Elliot Mincberg, senior fellow at People For the American Way.
“It was a very consequential Supreme Court term, so it’s hard to choose the handful of cases with the most significant impact,” said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice.
Trump
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Probably the high court’s most consequential case dealt with whether a former president enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for actions taken in office. The dispute was brought by Mr. Trump, who challenged special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Mr. Trump argued that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution, but the justices did not adopt that broad argument.
Instead, in a 6-3 ideologically divided ruling on the court’s last day of its term, the justices said presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions taken under their core duties and are presumed to have immunity from criminal prosecution for other behavior. But the justices said a president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution for unofficial acts.
The ruling wasn’t an out-and-out win for Mr. Trump, as it sent directives to a lower court on how to weigh his official versus unofficial conduct in an indictment from Mr. Smith.
Still, the ruling is likely to delay pending trials against Mr. Trump beyond Election Day.
Earlier this year, the justices in a unanimous ruling declined to remove Mr. Trump from the Colorado ballot after a state court had said he was barred due to the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
Critics had said the former president was ineligible to have his name appear on the ballot because of the Constitution’s Insurrection Clause, which states anyone who participated in a rebellion is barred from holding public office.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the clause at issue, reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The court said only Congress can enforce the Constitution’s insurrection language through laws. The justices said that allowing states to make decisions about who can appear on a presidential ballot would result in “chaos,” with no end to potential mischief.
Abortion
The Supreme Court batted away two major disputes involving abortion, one over the limits of the abortion pill and another over whether states that ban abortion have to provide the procedure in hospital emergency rooms under federal law.
The justices dismissed an attempt by pro-life doctors to scuttle the abortion pill, saying they lacked standing to challenge the government’s approval of the drug.
In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the doctors’ moral objections to mifepristone may be valid but aren’t enough to show legal injury.
The legal battle involved whether the pill could be dispensed through the mail or required doctor visits and if it could be used for 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of the original Food and Drug Administration’s approved seven weeks.
The justices also declined to issue a decision on whether federal law requires states that have banned abortion to perform the procedure in emergency scenarios in hospital emergency rooms.
The court said it had granted review in the matter too early as the issue is still pending in lower court.
The Biden administration tried to refashion at least some national standards for abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned by using the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which applies to hospitals that take federal Medicare money. Under that law, hospitals must deliver stabilizing treatment to emergency patients.
The administration argued Idaho’s law restricting abortion violates EMTALA.
Idaho lost in U.S. District Court, which issued an injunction of the state law, and in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the injunction.
Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, said it appears the justices were doing things this term with concerns about the November election. He noted that if Mr. Trump wins, the immunity and abortion issue could dissolve with a change of administrations.
“They are doing things that are sort of punts where the issue may never come back if Trump wins,” Mr. Blackman said.
Guns
The justices issued a pair of rulings on gun rights after having delivered a major Second Amendment ruling in 2022 in which the justices held that any gun control measure must be consistent with history and tradition dating to the nation’s founding.
In one case, the justices said bump stocks don’t qualify as machine guns under federal gun controls, nixing the Justice Department’s attempt to ban the devices.
The 6-3 ruling split along the court’s ideological lines.
In a less divisive ruling, the justices ruled 8-1 that a person under a domestic violence protective order could be disarmed temporarily without running afoul of the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court decided that some “dangerous” people could be disarmed, but the narrow ruling didn’t resolve scores of questions about bans against semiautomatic rifles, carrying permits or whether immigrants without documentation and drug users can possess firearms.
The justices said only that a dangerous person who is subject to a domestic violence protection order can temporarily be disarmed.
The ruling came after the justices issued their 2022 decision. A Texas man’s attorneys used that ruling to challenge his conviction after he was disarmed under a domestic violence order — but still possessed a gun and was allegedly involved in a series of shootings.
Felons, immigrants without documentation and others have since brought challenges to courts, saying their ban is not grounded in the history and tradition surrounding the Second Amendment.
The decision did not address those arguments, but it did uphold the Texas man’s conviction.
Administrative state
In a pair of cases involving fishers, the justices took a “significant bite out of the power of the administrative state,” Mr. Levey said.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling, overturned a 40-year-old precedent in the Chevron case and said courts should no longer defer to agencies’ interpretations of federal law in cases where what Congress wrote is ambiguous.
The result, legal analysts said, is a groundbreaking rewrite of modern U.S. government that will constrain the ability of bureaucrats to meddle in policy and will heap pressure on Congress to be more clear in writing laws.
The fishers challenged a 2020 federal rule that had them footing the bill for federal agencies to monitor their catch.
The fishers said the original law as written didn’t envision any such payment requirement, and the agency was acting illegally in passing the compliance costs on to the privately owned boats.
Lower courts had sided with the agency, citing the Chevron principle that bureaucrats’ actions be given deference when the underlying law is unclear and an agency’s interpretation is considered reasonable.
The justices’ move to side with the fishers overturned the Chevron doctrine.
• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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