In one of the most consequential terms in recent history, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down decisions that will reshape the law for years to come.
The court’s combined output this term highlights three broader trends. First, the court’s near completion of its long-term project to dismantle the Voting Rights Act and equal protection jurisprudence more generally. Second, continued concentration of power in the presidency. And third, increased limitations on ordinary people’s ability to access court and judicial remedies.
Dismantling Voting Rights
Among the court’s most notable—and most devastating—decisions was Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 along ideological lines. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The opinion upended the 40-year-old framework governing redistricting challenges by now requiring plaintiffs to “control for” party affiliation by proving that a districting plan was driven by race rather than partisanship. Given that racial identity and political affiliation are tightly correlated in many states, this makes it nearly impossible for advocates to establish when redistricting is racially discriminatory.
The practical effect is profound. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, the majority has rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter” in the states where it matters most.
The aftermath was swift: within seven days, several Southern states moved to redraw their maps, eliminating Black opportunity districts. The cumulative effect of those efforts will almost certainly tilt midterm election outcomes in Republicans’ favor. For that reason, history will likely regard Callais as the most heavy-handed foray into partisan decision-making since Bush v. Gore.
Beyond its immediate impact, Callais is the culmination of the court’s decades-long project to gut voting rights protections, dating back to Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. It also reflects the conservative justices’ ideological hostility to government attempts to address racial discrimination, including affirmative action. For the Callais majority, any government effort to use race to remedy historical racial bias is constitutionally suspect; but a state legislature’s use of “party affiliation” as a proxy for race becomes a lawful way to disenfranchise minority communities.
Concentrating Power in the Executive Branch
The court also issued a series of decisions reinforcing its long-term goal of concentrating power in the executive branch—and especially the president. Although the court ruled against the Trump administration on birthright citizenship and tariffs, the dominant story is the consolidation of presidential control and the diminution of congressional power.
In the Temporary Protected Status cases (Mullin v. Dahlia Doe and Trump v. Miot), the court’s 6-3 opinion held that courts cannot review whether the executive branch followed legally required procedures when terminating people’s temporary status. This paves the way for the Trump administration to strip status from more than 1.3 million people with no judicial oversight—the largest de-documentation campaign in U.S. history.
And in another 6-3 opinion, Trump v. Slaughter, the court overruled a 90-year-old precedent to now allow the president to fire commissioners or even heads of independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board at will. (Interestingly, the Supreme Court punted on the same question about the Federal Reserve.) These decisions build on earlier rulings, like Trump v. United States, that have steadily stripped away judicial and congressional checks on presidential power.
Stripping Judicial Remedies for Rights Violations
Finally, this term accelerated another shift in the balance of legal power, one that conservative legal scholars and advocates have pursued for decades. In several under-the-radar merits decisions, the court has made it difficult, if not impossible, for people to get judicial remedies for violations of their rights. And on its increasingly prominent “shadow” docket, the court has consistently curtailed lower courts’ power to issue relief, especially in the early stages of litigation.
Between 2001 and 2017, the U.S. government sought emergency relief from the court only eight times. Trump’s first administration sought it 41 times; the Biden administration, 19 times. Since Trump’s return to office, his administration has filed more than 33 emergency applications in just over a year—most seeking to halt lower court injunctions blocking executive action. The court has sided with the administration in nearly all cases, typically through unexplained emergency orders issued without full briefing or oral argument.
Each of these decisions is damaging on its own terms. But the erosion of lower courts’ power to grant relief against government overreach is, in the long run, just as devastating a blow to the ability of advocates and ordinary people to use the courts as a meaningful check on executive power.
Despite these strong headwinds, we continue to win important victories in federal courts through creative and determined lawyering—from hindering the Trump administration’s mass immigration arrest and detention campaign, to defending the First Amendment rights of protesters. And we also use the tools of litigation in state court, advocacy before Congress, and continued public mobilization, all of which will be more important than ever as part of the ACLU’s strategy
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