By Luc Cohen and Jacob Bogage
June 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court handed conservatives major victories on presidential power, immigration, elections and social issues during its nine-month term, while placing significant limits on President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, boosted the longstanding Republican aim of expanding executive power by weakening independent agencies, but also restricted presidential control over monetary policy and trade.
The justices backed a Republican-led effort to redraw electoral maps to bolster their prospects, while protecting safeguards on mail-in voting that Trump and many of his fellow Republicans oppose.
The Supreme Court largely backed Trump’s restrictive policies on both legal and illegal immigration, while striking down the president’s attempt to overturn a longstanding principle that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.
On so-called “culture war” issues, in major cases involving transgender rights and gun rights, the court handed conservatives a clean sweep.
Here are the takeaways on the court’s record during the term ending this week:
PRESIDENTIAL POWER
The Supreme Court ruled on three cases in which Trump sought to vastly expand the power of the presidency. He lost two of them, but his lone victory could lead to the president exerting greater political control over federal regulatory agencies that Congress sought to entrust to nonpartisan experts.
Trump sought to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose a worldwide regime of tariffs, asserting the law, which does not include the word “tariff,” gave him broad power to impose import taxes. In a February ruling the justices disagreed but left open other pathways for Trump to impose tariffs on imported goods.
The other loss came this week in Trump’s battle with the Federal Reserve, whose board did not lower interest rates at the rapid clip the president desired. The justices held that Fed Governor Lisa Cook could remain in her job despite the president’s effort to fire her. Administration officials had accused Cook of mortgage fraud while presenting little evidence in an effort to claim Trump met the “for-cause” standard to fire her.
In a separate case on the same day, the justices delivered a major win for conservatives by expanding presidential power over other regulatory agencies, overturning a 1935 precedent that had recognized the authority of Congress to protect leaders of certain agencies from presidential removal at will.
The case involved Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat. In its decision, the Supreme Court ruled against her and invalidated the tenure protections for agency leaders. The ruling means that similar appointees at government agencies can be summarily dismissed by the president.
IMMIGRATION
In three cases decided along ideological lines, the Supreme Court smoothed the way for Trump to fulfill his campaign pledge to crack down on immigration and pursue large-scale deportations.
The court’s conservative majority let the administration strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a status that shielded them from deportation while their home countries remain unsafe, backed the government’s authority to physically block asylum seekers from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and made it easier to prevent lawful immigrants accused of committing a crime from returning after trips abroad.
The court’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship was a blow to one of his signature immigration policies. Ordered on his first day back in office, it would have denied citizenship to hundreds of thousands of babies born to non-citizen parents each year on U.S. soil.
In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote that there was “scant evidence” for the Trump administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of the bedrock U.S. law.
VOTING AND ELECTIONS
With Republicans locked in a tight battle to keep control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, the justices handed Trump and his party major victories on voting rights and mixed results on election administration cases.
In April, the court rolled back vast portions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act to allow states to redraw congressional districts. Many Southern and Republican-controlled states used those rulings to eliminate majority-minority districts in moves that election experts say could lead to many Black members of Congress losing reelection bids.
The court struck down limits on the amount of money political committees can spend in coordination with individual candidates, overturning a 25-year-old precedent. Previously, federal law capped how much major party committees could contribute to campaigns.
Vice President JD Vance, in his 2022 senatorial campaign, challenged those restrictions as a violation of parties’ freedom of speech. The justices agreed, handing Republicans another in a string of recent campaign finance victories.
Trump and Republicans suffered a defeat on mail-in voting. The court held that states may count mailed ballots postmarked prior to Election Day, but received after polls closed. Trump has without evidence repeatedly assailed the safety of mail-in voting, and he has sought to prevent mostly Democratic-controlled states from issuing mailed ballots.
SOCIAL ISSUES
The court nearly universally backed conservative positions on issues affecting the rights of LGBTQ individuals and gun owners, sometimes with support from the court’s liberal minority.
On Tuesday, the court’s conservative majority upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that banned transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams at public schools. All three of the court’s liberals joined the conservatives in finding that the state laws did not violate a civil rights statute that bars discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.” However, the three dissented from the majority’s conclusion that the measures also do not violate the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection.
In an 8-1 ruling in March, two of the court’s liberals joined conservatives in rejecting a Colorado law that banned psychotherapists from using conversion talk therapy intended to change an LGBTQ minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The justices ruled that the state’s law ran afoul of free speech rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Last week in a ruling along ideological lines, the court struck down a Hawaii law restricting the carrying of handguns in private businesses. The court had earlier in June unanimously ruled that a ban on gun ownership by the millions of Americans who use marijuana went too far, in a case that united right-leaning gun rights advocates and left-leaning civil libertarians.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York and Jacob Bogage in Washington; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)
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