CNN
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Major legal rulings that dismantled the use of race in college admissions, undermined protections for LGBTQ people and scrapped President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program spelled the end of a Supreme Court mandate in which the conservative supermajority continued to exercise its dominance.
The majority also doubled down on a controversial legal theory that limits the power of federal agencies to take unilateral action.
Meanwhile, the justices rejected a far-fetched argument that would have limited the role of state courts in election disputes and rejected an aggressive attempt to challenge the Biden administration’s immigration policy, both areas where right-wing lawyers could have exaggerated in his arguments.
But even in Supreme Court rulings that brought together liberals and some conservatives, there were sometimes subtle gestures on the right that foreshadowed future attempts to remake the law in favor of conservatives, said Justin Levitt, one from Loyola Law School. professor and expert in constitutional and electoral law.
“This court didn’t bite the bullet,” said Levitt, who previously served in the Biden White House and the Justice Department under President Barack Obama. “With every crazy rejection, there are little drops that the goalposts have moved, just because it was suggested crazy.”
This is what the conservative majority did last term:
The justices stayed in their usual corners in cases on legal issues that for years have been divided along ideological lines. Chief among them was the decision that struck down most uses of race in college admissions, a long-held goal on the right that was finally achieved in challenges to affirmative action programs from Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long expressed skepticism about the use of race in government policy, wrote a 6-3 opinion for the majority. Roberts also authored the majority opinion in the ruling that blocked Biden’s student debt relief program. Although the policy, which was never allowed to take effect, is less than a year old, the ruling tapped into a growing war between liberals and conservatives over the limits the court has placed on executive branch policy.
In some ways, the term returned Roberts to his central role, with him writing conservative rulings on affirmative action and student loan forgiveness, as well as election law decisions that tied liberals with some appointed judges by the GOP
“They’re on issues that have been closer to their central focus throughout their time on the court, sometimes with conservative majorities and sometimes with a newer variety of justices,” said Adam White, an academic at the conservative American Business Institute.
The court’s last week included another 6-3 ruling, in which conservative justices said certain businesses involved in creative expression could turn away LGBTQ customers. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who just three years ago wrote a landmark decision enshrining anti-discrimination protections in the workplace for LGBTQ people, framed the case as a dispute over government-mandated speech.
Liberals who dissented in an opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the majority gave “a business open to the public the constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
“I think the judges, in a way, were ships in the night,” said Richard Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who signed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the network of aspirants to marriages. designer who prevailed in the case. “They disagreed about what the case was about.”
Legal experts told CNN that the majority’s language, and the vague way it defined the types of scenarios in which businesses could refuse to serve LGBTQ customers, will likely lead to another wave of litigation that pushes the envelope about who can be rejected and why.
“I think the big problem here, and it has been and continues to be a big problem, is that these kinds of cases don’t solve the problem,” said Jennifer Pizer, legal director of the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal. “It invites a lot more litigation to determine where the boundaries might be.”
In two cases this past term, the court rejected requests by conservative lawyers for the justices to transform the way courts interpret election law.
The case with the most serious potential consequences was a North Carolina redistricting dispute in which the court had to consider whether to accept broad versions of the so-called independent state legislature doctrine. The court, in an opinion written by Roberts, rejected the maximalist version of the theory, which says state courts should have little or no role in interpreting whether federal election rules comply with the law state or a state constitution.
But Roberts’ opinion, signed by conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and three liberals, sparked a debate among election law experts over whether the door had really been closed on the independent state legislature theory or it set the stage for more. legal chaos over electoral rules.
“Just because they didn’t drop a nuclear bomb doesn’t mean you have to ignore conventional troops moving into position,” Levitt said.
The chief justice also wrote a surprising majority opinion, bringing together Kavanaugh and liberals, that refused to dismantle a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which for decades had been the target of attack by the Roberts Court.
In that case, concerning Alabama’s congressional map, the justices confirmed the long-standing legal test courts have used to apply the VRA’s prohibitions on racial discrimination in redistricting. A concurrence of Kavanaugh, however, presented certain arguments against the VRA provision, not presented in the Alabama case, that he might find more persuasive.
The issue of standing—that is, the legal test of whether a litigant has suffered the kinds of harm that make it appropriate for a court to intervene—played a key role in some of the term’s most important cases. While the majority was willing to accept Missouri’s thin arguments about why it was being hurt by Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, an 8-1 court said Texas and Louisiana’s standing arguments didn’t hold up in a challenge to a Biden immigration policy.
While there was some disagreement among the justices as to why the permanency theory brought by the GOP-led states failed, the ruling, in a challenge to deportation priorities set by the administration, continued a line of cases in which the Roberts court gave the executive branch particular leeway in the enforcement of immigration regulations.
“On immigration, the court has wanted to maintain some level of flexibility with the executive branch, for better or for worse, whether to maintain the Muslim ban under the Trump administration or to recognize that, obviously, there needs to be have enforcement priorities. put in place,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal advocacy organization, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the administration in the dispute.
The court gave business a few victories in cases that undermined environmental and union protections, but most stopped short of taking on the strongest arguments that had come before the courts.
The court narrowed the reach of the Clean Water Act, with the majority opinion — made up of the conservative bloc, with the exception of Kavanaugh, who joined the three competing liberals — narrowing what amounted to a “wetland” under the statute. .
An unusual lineup of judges sided with a concrete company seeking to circumvent federal labor law and sue a union in state court over the destruction that striking workers nearly caused to the company’s cement trucks . With two liberals among the four justices who joined Barrett’s majority opinion, the court opened the door to when unions could be sued for strike-related damages, but used narrow reasoning to do so.
“This is a court pattern that reflects economic advantage and power,” said Russ Feingold, president of the left-leaning legal organization American Constitution Society who previously served as a Senate Democrat, including on the Judiciary Committee.
A notable exception to the pro-business trend this past term was a split ruling in which the court, in an opinion authored by Gorsuch, upheld a Pennsylvania law that allows companies doing business in the state to be defendants there, even if they are based elsewhere or the conduct in question took place in another state. The ruling undermines corporations’ tactics to keep lawsuits against them in states with courts that lean in their favor.
In another case, Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for a similarly disjointed court that rejected a pork industry challenge to a California animal cruelty law.
“Judges vote according to our ideological expectations,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “But on issues that haven’t really been the focus of attention, they don’t fit because the questions don’t immediately fit into our preconceived notions of where a conservative or liberal justice fits.”
