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Al Jazeera
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
What cases did the US Supreme Court decide at the end of its 2024 term?
The United States Supreme Court has ended its latest term with a host of blockbuster decisions, touching on everything from healthcare coverage to school reading lists. On Friday, the court issued the final decisions of the 2024 term before it takes several months of recess. The nine justices on its bench will reconvene in October. But before their departure, the justices made headlines. In a major victory for the administration of President Donald Trump, the six-person conservative majority decided to limit the ability of courts to issue universal injunctions that would block executive actions nationwide. Trump has long denounced court injunctions as an attack on his executive authority. In two other rulings, the Supreme Court's conservative majority again banded together. One decision allowed parents to opt out of school materials that include LGBTQ themes, while the other gave the go-ahead to Texas to place barriers to prevent youth from viewing online pornography. But a decision on healthcare access saw some conservative justices align with their three left-wing colleagues. Here is an overview of their final rulings of the 2024 term. Court upholds preventive care requirements In the case of Kennedy v Braidwood Management, the Supreme Court saw its usual ideological divides fracture. Three conservative justices – Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts – joined with the court's liberal branch, represented by Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, for a six-to-three ruling. At stake was the ability of a government task force to determine what kinds of preventive healthcare the country's insurance providers had to cover. It was the latest case to challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, a piece of legislation passed under former President Barack Obama to expand healthcare access. This case focused on a section of the act that allowed a panel of health experts – under the Department of Health and Human Services – to determine what preventive services should be covered at no cost. A group of individuals and Christian-owned businesses had challenged the legality of that task force, though. They argued that the expert panel was a violation of the Appointments Clause, a section of the Constitution that requires certain political appointees to be chosen by the president and approved by the Senate. The group had previously secured an injunction against the task force's decision that HIV prevention medications be covered as preventive care. That specific injunction was not weighed in the Supreme Court's decision. But writing for the majority, Justice Kavanaugh affirmed that the task force was constitutional, because it was made up of 'inferior officers' who did not need Senate approval. Court gives nod to Texas's age restrictions on porn Several states, including Texas, require users to verify their age before accessing pornographic websites, with the aim of shielding minors from inappropriate material. But Texas's law came under the Supreme Court's microscope on Friday, in a case called Free Speech Coalition v Ken Paxton. The Free Speech Coalition is a nonprofit that represents workers in the adult entertainment industry. They sued Texas's attorney general, Paxton, arguing that the age-verification law would dampen First Amendment rights, which protect the right to free expression, free association and privacy. The plaintiffs noted the risks posed by sharing personally identifying information online, including the possibility that identifying information like birthdates and sensitive data could be leaked. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, warned that Texas's law 'robs people of anonymity'. Writing for the Supreme Court's conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged that 'submitting to age verification is a burden on the exercise' of First Amendment rights. But, he added, 'adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification' altogether. The majority upheld Texas's law. Court affirms children can withdraw from LGBTQ school material The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority also continued its streak of religious freedom victories, with a decision in Mahmoud v Taylor. That case centred on the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland, where books portraying LGBTQ themes had been approved for use in primary school curricula. One text, for example, was a picture book called Love, Violet, which told the story of a young girl mustering the courage to give a Valentine to a female classmate. Another book, titled Pride Puppy, follows a child searching for her lost dog during an annual parade to celebrate LGBTQ pride. Parents of children in the school district objected to the material on religious grounds, and some books, like Pride Puppy, were eventually withdrawn. But the board eventually announced it would refuse to allow parents to opt out of the approved material, on the basis that it would create disruptions in the learning environment. Some education officials also argued that allowing kids to opt out of LGBTQ material would confer a stigma on the people who identify as part of that community – and that LGBTQ people were simply a fact of life. In the majority's decision, Justice Samuel Alito asserted that the education board's policy 'conveys that parents' religious views are not welcome in the 'fully inclusive environment' that the Board purports to foster'. 'The curriculum itself also betrays an attempt to impose ideological conformity with specific views on sexuality and gender,' Alito wrote. Court limits the use of nationwide injunctions Arguably, the biggest decision of the day was another ruling decided by the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority. In the case Trump v CASA, the Trump administration had appealed the use of nationwide injunctions all the way up to the highest court in the land. At stake was an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office for his second term. That order sought to whittle down the concept of birthright citizenship, a right conferred under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. Previously, birthright citizenship had applied to nearly everyone born on US soil: Regardless of their parents' nationality, the child would receive US citizenship. But Trump has denounced that application of birthright citizenship as too broad. In his executive order, he put restrictions on birthright citizenship depending on whether the parents were undocumented immigrants. Legal challenges erupted as soon as the executive order was published, citing Supreme Court precedent that upheld birthright citizenship regardless of the nationality of the parent. Federal courts in states like Maryland and Washington quickly issued nationwide injunctions to prevent the executive order from taking effect. The Supreme Court on Friday did not weigh the merits of Trump's order on birthright citizenship. But it did evaluate a Trump administration petition arguing that the nationwide injunctions were instances of judicial overreach. The conservative supermajority sided with Trump, saying that injunctions should generally not be universal but instead should focus on relief for the specific plaintiffs at hand. One possible exception, however, would be for class action lawsuits. Amy Coney Barrett, the court's latest addition and a Trump appointee, penned the majority's decision. 'No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law,' she wrote. 'But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation – in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.'
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Liberal supreme court justices' dissents reveal concerns that the US faces a crisis
On Friday the conservative-dominated US supreme court handed down a series of important judgments on issues ranging from the power of the judiciary to religious rights in schools. Media attention generally focused on the wording of the rulings and their impact. But the court's liberal minority of just three justices penned dissenting opinions that were similarly potent, revealing the sharp divisions on America's top legal body and also showed their deep concern at the declining health of American civic society and the authoritarian bent of the Trump presidency. Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered an acidic sermon against the court's 6-3 decision to end lower courts' practice of issuing nationwide injunctions to block federal executive orders, reading her dissent directly from the bench in a move meant to highlight its importance. The decision is seen as limiting the power of judges to halt or slow presidential orders, even those whose constitutionality has not yet been tested, such as Trump's attempt to remove the right to automatic US citizenship for anyone born inside US borders. 'No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,' states Sotomayor's dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. 'Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.' As opinion season ends in the first months of Donald Trump's second presidency, the court's decisions have expanded the power of the presidency and limited the power of lower courts to block Trump's agenda. The opinion in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v Casa Inc, in which the court was silent on the underlying question about the constitutionality of Trump's executive order, nonetheless undermines the rule of law, Sotomayor said. Even though defending the order's legality is 'an impossible task' given the plain language of the 14th amendment, the court's opinion means each person must challenge the order individually in states that are not a party to the suit, unless class-action status is granted. In a concurring dissent, Jackson explained the burden it places on people to defend their rights in court. 'Today's ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,' Jackson's dissent states. 'This perverse burden shifting cannot coexist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law.' Jackson added ominously, the ruling was an 'existential threat to the rule of law'. Reading from the bench has historically been an uncommon act meant to emphasize profound disapproval of a justice to a ruling. The court's liberal wing has made it less rare lately, inveighing against profound legal changes wrought by the court's six-judge conservative bloc. Other decisions handed down on Friday also permit parents to opt their children out of classroom activities that depict LGBTQ+ characters in books (Mahmood v Taylor), and allow states to require age verification on pornographic web sites (Free Speech Coalition Inc, v Paxton), both decided on ideological lines. Age verification has already begun to drive porn website operators out of Texas, given a cost estimated at $40,000 for every 100,000 verifications, Kagan noted in her acerbic dissent. The Texas law creates a barrier between adults and first amendment-protected content that previous supreme court decisions on speech would not have permitted, she noted. Providing ID online is fundamentally different than flashing a driver's license at a bar. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion 'It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits – respecting speech many find repulsive – to a website operator, and then to … who knows?' she wrote. 'The operator might sell the information; the operator might be hacked or subpoenaed.' The ruling granting a religious exemption will have a chilling effect on schools, which may strip classroom material of any reference to LGBTQ+ content rather than risk costly litigation, Sotomayor wrote in dissent. Her dissent highlights the deliberate work done by the Montgomery county school board to create an inclusive curriculum, adding 'Uncle Bobby's Wedding' to its library in 2022. The children's book, one of five with LGBTQ+ characters, describes a same-sex couple's wedding announcement and plans. 'Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent's religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,' she wrote. 'The Court's ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards.' In three of the five decisions handed down on Friday, that conservative bloc had the majority. But in two cases the conservative bloc split: Kennedy v Braidwood Management, which reversed lower court rulings that declared an appointed board overseeing preventive care under the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, and FCC v Consumers' Research, which upheld the constitutionality of fees collected for a rural broadband program. Each of these cases split conservatives between those who support more expansive executive power – Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett – and others at war with the administrative state: Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas. But collectively, conservatives on the court have continued to upend longstanding precedent, while weakening the legal avenues of challengers to use the courts to defend their rights, the court's remaining liberal justices lament. 'The rule of law is not a given in this Nation, nor any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival,' Sotomayor wrote in dissent on the birthright citizenship case. 'Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort.'
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Amy Coney Barrett tears into liberal fellow Supreme Court justice over birthright citizenship
Friday's bombshell Supreme Court opinion featured brutal exchanges between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and dissenter Ketanji Brown Jackson, with legal discourse providing clues to growing discord on the court. Barrett, 53, a Trump appointee, repeatedly rips Jackson's arguments in her 6-3 majority opinion in a major birthright citizenship case, with comments that come close to mocking her intellectual rival. 'Rhetoric aside, Justice Jackson's position is difficult to pin down,' Barrett writes in just one of her missives. Some lines resemble jabs from a political debate. 'Justice Jackson appears to believe that the reasoning behind any court order demands 'universal adherence,' at least where the Executive is concerned,' goes one. In perhaps the most sneering comment, Barrett writes: 'We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.' The tough opinion – which gave Trump a freer hand to act without facing nationwide injunctions, raising alarms he couldn't be stopped from lawless actions – came in the a ruling on a major birthright citizenship case. The opinion immediately registered with President Donald Trump, who has reportedly stewing that Barrett has been 'weak' after joining with liberals on some key opinions. 'I want to thank justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,' Trump wrote, before running through the names of each conservative who voted for it. He called them all 'great people.' Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, had issued ominous warnings in her own blistering dissent. 'Disaster looms,' she warned. 'What I mean by this is that our rights-based legal system can only function properly if the Executive, and everyone else, is always bound by law. Today's decision is a seismic shock to that foundational norm. Allowing the Executive to violate the law at its prerogative with respect to anyone who has not yet sued carves out a huge exception—a gash in the basic tenets of our founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound,' she wrote. 'What is more, to me, requiring courts themselves to provide the dagger (by giving their imprimatur to the Executive Branch's intermittent lawlessness) makes a mockery of the Judiciary's solemn duty to safeguard the rule of law,' she added. Jackson, 71, cited a ruling about the 'accretion of dangerous power, and wrote that the Court has 'cleared a path for the Executive to choose law-free action at this perilous moment for our Constitution—right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law's constraints.' 'I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.' She warned of a 'rule-of-kings governing system' compared to a 'rule of law regime.' 'At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government's self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot.' Jackson even began the opening section of her argument by dispensing with the traditional saying that she 'respectfully' dissents. 'With deep disillusionment, I dissent,' she wrote.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Takeaways from the Supreme Court's term: largely good news for Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has been very good to President Donald Trump lately. Even before he won a new term in the White House, the court eliminated any doubt about whether Trump could appear on presidential ballots, then effectively spared him from having to stand trial before the 2024 election on criminal charges he tried to overturn the 2020 election. That same ruling spelled out a robust view of presidential power that may well have emboldened Trump's aggressive approach in his second term. In the five months since Trump's inauguration, the court has been largely deferential to presidential actions, culminating in Friday's decision to limit the authority of federal judges who have sought to block Trump initiatives through nationwide court orders. The decisions from a court that includes three justices Trump appointed during his first term have provoked a series of scathing dissents from liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They accuse the conservative supermajority of kowtowing to the president and putting the American system of government 'in grave jeopardy,' as Jackson wrote Friday. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, author of the opinion limiting nationwide injunctions, responded to Jackson's 'startling line of attack' by noting that she 'decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.' To be sure, the court has not ruled uniformly for Trump, including by indefinitely stopping deportations to a notorious prison in El Salvador without giving people a reasonable chance to object. But Trump's victories have dwarfed his losses. Here are some takeaways from the Supreme Court's term: The real action was on the court's emergency, or shadow, docket That's where the court deals with cases that are still in their early stages, most often intervening to say whether a judge's order should be in effect while the case proceeds through the courts. While preliminary, the justices' decisions can signal where they eventually will come out in the end, months or years from now. Emergency orders are generally overshadowed by decisions the justices issued in the cases they heard arguments between last fall and the spring. Almost since the beginning of Trump's second term, the court's emergency docket has been packed with appeals from his administration. For a while, the justices were being asked to weigh in almost once a week as Trump pushed to lift lower court orders slowing his ambitious conservative agenda. Trump scored a series of wins on issues ranging from the revocation of temporary legal protections for immigrants to Elon Musk's dramatic cost cutting at the Department of Government Efficiency. And that was before Friday's decision on nationwide injunctions, court orders that prevent a policy from taking effect anywhere. Many of the recent orders are in line with the conservatives' robust view of executive power. Transgender people and their advocates suffered major setbacks The three liberal justices dissented from each of three cases involving transgender rights or LGBTQ issues more generally. Trump has moved aggressively to roll back the rights of transgender people and the court has rebuffed attempts to stop him. In another emergency appeal, the court's conservatives allowed a ban to take effect on transgender members of the military, even after lower courts had found the policy unconstitutional. In mid-June, Roberts wrote the opinion for a conservative majority that upheld Tennessee's ban on certain medical treatment for transgender youth, rejecting arguments that it amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. The decision probably will affect a range of other pending court cases on transgender issues, including those involving access to health care, participation on sports teams and gender markers on birth certificates. On the final day of decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Maryland parents with religious objections who don't want their children exposed to public school lessons using LGBTQ storybooks. The case was about religious freedom, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision 'threatens the very essence of public education.' Supreme Court dissents can be withering In 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court's decision in favor of Guantanamo Bay detainees 'will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.' That opinion was written in an era when conservatives were sometimes on the losing end of the term's biggest cases. Times have changed, as has the tilt of the court. 'It is important to recognize that the Executive's bid to vanquish so-called 'universal injunctions' is, at bottom, a request for this court's permission to engage in unlawful behavior,' Jackson wrote Friday. Objecting to the court's order in yet another emergency appeal to allow the resumption of quick deportations to third countries, Sotomayor wrote that her conservative colleagues were 'rewarding lawlessness.' Sotomayor also dissented from the transgender health care decision. 'It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them,' she wrote. Everyone seems to be staying put The court left for its long summer break without any retirements, despite talk that one of older conservative justices, 77-year-old Clarence Thomas or 75-year-old Samuel Alito, might step aside so that Trump could keep a conservative in their seats for the next few decades. But with Republicans in control of the Senate at least through the end of 2026, a justice could retire a year from now with sufficient time to have his replacement confirmed. Thomas, the longest-serving of the current justices, has just under three years to go until he would become the longest-serving justice in U.S. history. The record is held by William O. Douglas, whose 36-year tenure began during FDR's presidency in 1939 and ended when Gerald Ford was in the White House, in 1975.
Associated Press
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Associated Press
Takeaways from the Supreme Court's term: largely good news for Trump
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has been very good to President Donald Trump lately. Even before he won a new term in the White House, the court eliminated any doubt about whether Trump could appear on presidential ballots, then effectively spared him from having to stand trial before the 2024 election on criminal charges he tried to overturn the 2020 election. That same ruling spelled out a robust view of presidential power that may well have emboldened Trump's aggressive approach in his second term. In the five months since Trump's inauguration, the court has been largely deferential to presidential actions, culminating in Friday's decision to limit the authority of federal judges who have sought to block Trump initiatives through nationwide court orders. The decisions from a court that includes three justices Trump appointed during his first term have provoked a series of scathing dissents from liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They accuse the conservative supermajority of kowtowing to the president and putting the American system of government 'in grave jeopardy,' as Jackson wrote Friday. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, author of the opinion limiting nationwide injunctions, responded to Jackson's 'startling line of attack' by noting that she 'decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.' To be sure, the court has not ruled uniformly for Trump, including by indefinitely stopping deportations to a notorious prison in El Salvador without giving people a reasonable chance to object. But Trump's victories have dwarfed his losses. Here are some takeaways from the Supreme Court's term: The real action was on the court's emergency, or shadow, docketThat's where the court deals with cases that are still in their early stages, most often intervening to say whether a judge's order should be in effect while the case proceeds through the courts. While preliminary, the justices' decisions can signal where they eventually will come out in the end, months or years from now. Emergency orders are generally overshadowed by decisions the justices issued in the cases they heard arguments between last fall and the spring. Almost since the beginning of Trump's second term, the court's emergency docket has been packed with appeals from his administration. For a while, the justices were being asked to weigh in almost once a week as Trump pushed to lift lower court orders slowing his ambitious conservative agenda. Trump scored a series of wins on issues ranging from the revocation of temporary legal protections for immigrants to Elon Musk's dramatic cost cutting at the Department of Government Efficiency. And that was before Friday's decision on nationwide injunctions, court orders that prevent a policy from taking effect anywhere. Many of the recent orders are in line with the conservatives' robust view of executive power. Transgender people and their advocates suffered major setbacks The three liberal justices dissented from each of three cases involving transgender rights or LGBTQ issues more generally. Trump has moved aggressively to roll back the rights of transgender people and the court has rebuffed attempts to stop him. In another emergency appeal, the court's conservatives allowed a ban to take effect on transgender members of the military, even after lower courts had found the policy unconstitutional. In mid-June, Roberts wrote the opinion for a conservative majority that upheld Tennessee's ban on certain medical treatment for transgender youth, rejecting arguments that it amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. The decision probably will affect a range of other pending court cases on transgender issues, including those involving access to health care, participation on sports teams and gender markers on birth certificates. On the final day of decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Maryland parents with religious objections who don't want their children exposed to public school lessons using LGBTQ storybooks. The case was about religious freedom, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision 'threatens the very essence of public education.' Supreme Court dissents can be withering In 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court's decision in favor of Guantanamo Bay detainees 'will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.' That opinion was written in an era when conservatives were sometimes on the losing end of the term's biggest cases. Times have changed, as has the tilt of the court. 'It is important to recognize that the Executive's bid to vanquish so-called 'universal injunctions' is, at bottom, a request for this court's permission to engage in unlawful behavior,' Jackson wrote Friday. Objecting to the court's order in yet another emergency appeal to allow the resumption of quick deportations to third countries, Sotomayor wrote that her conservative colleagues were 'rewarding lawlessness.' Sotomayor also dissented from the transgender health care decision. 'It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them,' she wrote. Everyone seems to be staying put The court left for its long summer break without any retirements, despite talk that one of older conservative justices, 77-year-old Clarence Thomas or 75-year-old Samuel Alito, might step aside so that Trump could keep a conservative in their seats for the next few decades. But with Republicans in control of the Senate at least through the end of 2026, a justice could retire a year from now with sufficient time to have his replacement confirmed. Thomas, the longest-serving of the current justices, has just under three years to go until he would become the longest-serving justice in U.S. history. The record is held by William O. Douglas, whose 36-year tenure began during FDR's presidency in 1939 and ended when Gerald Ford was in the White House, in 1975.
