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supreme court
SCOTUS as Tyrant: Handmaiden to Corporate America
In exercising its power today, the Supreme Court’s priority is not the state of the nation, but the well-being of corporate enterprise.
Jul 22, 2026
The Supreme Court of the United States today is the final arbiter of public policy—deciding incontestably which laws will stand and which will not—but that power was simply asserted by the court years ago, never bestowed by the Constitution or in law.
Merriam-Webster defines a tyrant this way: an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution; a usurper of sovereignty. Close enough?
In exercising its power today the court’s priority is not the state of the nation, but the well-being of corporate enterprise in America.
A recent example: On June 29, 2026 the court issued its decision in the case of Trump v. Slaughter. It found unconstitutional the statutory isolation of the Federal Trade Commission from partisan political interference. It said President Donald Trump could fire Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter not for cause—inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance, as specified in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914—but only because she is a Democrat.
By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.
The largest winner by far was not Donald Trump, but every corporation in America regulated by law. There are dozens of other independent regulatory agencies protecting the American people from harmful activities, conditions, and practices. So critical are these agencies to the health, safety, and welfare of the nation, Congress intentionally set them apart from the executive branch, to insulate them from the back-and-forth of partisan politics. The court has upended that safeguard, exposing the agencies to the whims of Donald Trump—who can staff them now with corporate-friendly Republicans. (Trump wasted no time in decapitating the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the agency funding election security measures at the state level.)
Note how the Supreme Court jeopardized the regulatory agencies. It declared as unconstitutional the provision in the Federal Trade Commission Act protecting commissioners from capricious removal. The court can do this because it holds a power known as judicial review. It measures the laws underlying its cases against the Constitution, and strikes down those it finds inconsistent.
Supreme Court justices were never elected, but they nullify laws enacted by people who were—the Congress and the president. Every time it does so the court literally overrides democracy. Isn’t that tyranny?
This is not remotely what the Framers of the Constitution intended.
Article III Section 2 specifies what the Supreme Court can do. Except for infrequent interstate and international litigation the court functions with appellate jurisdiction. The court can do either of two things: It can uphold a lower court decision, or overturn it. Nothing else. That’s it. The court is empowered to sit in judgment of law cases. Nowhere is it empowered to sit in judgment of the laws.
The Framers meant the court to be subordinate. In Federalist 78 Alexander Hamilton said this:
The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of powers... it can never attack with success either of the other two [branches]…
And in Federalist 81 he was explicit:
...there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration [i.e. the Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution…
Today’s Supreme Court invalidates laws without a speck of constitutional authority, and it has done so for 233 years.
That takes us back to 1803 and the Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison.
Federalist President John Adams in the last days of his term appointed 16 new lower court judges—all of Adams’ Federalist persuasion. Among them was William Marbury. The judges’ commissions were to be delivered by the secretary of state, as specified in the Judiciary Act of 1789, but in the scurry of a departing administration they were not. Then Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president. Intending to appoint judges of his own party instead, Jefferson ordered his Secretary of State James Madison not to deliver the commissions. Marbury sued for his, citing the 1789 law. John Marshall’s Supreme Court found Madison guilty, but also saw the Judiciary Act as slightly askew of the Constitution. It was the pickiest technicality, but on that basis the court dismissed the case.
Chief Justice Marshall said in the court’s written decision, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is... a law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” So said John Marshall, but nobody else, certainly not the writers of the Constitution.
Marshall claimed judicial review simply by fiat and set the subordinate court on the road to tyranny.
Note where our Supreme Court is today. By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.
Judicial review was initially benign. After Marbury it wasn’t invoked again for 57 years, and might have remained tolerable had not the court paired it with another appalling action: a decision enabling corporate enterprise eventually to dominate the writing of public policy.
In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court simply declared chartered corporations were persons as described in the 14th Amendment, with rights guaranteed by the Constitution: free speech, equal protection under the law, etc. The declaration violated the protocols for establishing legal precedents, but later courts cited the case anyway. Corporate personhood—prima facie preposterous—became a matter of stare decisis, “settled law.”
If corporations have constitutional rights and if they can prove in court those rights are violated by a law, they can sue to have the law overturned. They can use judicial review as a weapon.
And after Santa Clara County they did.
The 14th Amendment was meant to grant citizenship to Black Americans, freed from enslavement by the Emancipation Proclamation, and to guarantee their equal treatment under the law.
Three-hundred and seventy-seven cases based on the 14th Amendment were heard by the Supreme Court over the 27 years following Santa Clara County: 19 of them dealt with Black citizens seeking equal protection under the law; 288 were initiated by corporation citizens, also seeking equal protection—primarily to invalidate irksome laws.
As the centuries turned corporations succeeded in overturning minimum wage laws, child labor laws, laws limiting the workday, workmen’s compensation statutes, laws limiting corporate lobbying, and laws regulating utility companies. They sued for and won additional constitutional rights, those granted by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—rights of privacy and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Between 1905 and the mid-1930’s, the Supreme Court found some 200 corporate-restraining laws and regulations to be unconstitutional.
As the 20th century progressed the toxicity grew. The combination of judicial review and corporate personhood would prove in time to be fatal to democracy.
In a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valero, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act, a law strictly limiting the money political candidates could spend campaigning. No, the court said, spending money is a form of free speech, and the Congress cannot abridge that right. Dollars are words? Isn’t that also prima facie preposterous? Two years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the court overturned the 1907 Tilman Act, prohibiting corporations from spending money on political campaigns. Citing Buckley, the court said the equivalence of money and speech applied to corporations as well.
Bellotti, however, clashed with an existing law, not prohibiting but sharply limiting corporate campaign contributions: FECA, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1972.
In 2010 the case of Citizens United v. FEC resolved the clash. If corporations could not be restrained at all, then how much they spent was immaterial. Section 441b of FECA was unconstitutional. Out with it. Corporations can spend as much as they please.
But not to worry, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:
...independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption…The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in democracy.
Yes, prima facie preposterous, as documented in a 2026 study by the Brennan Center: 92% of registered voters surveyed said corruption is a major problem in politics and government, citing campaign contributions from corporations and billionaires as the causative factors.
After Citizens United a torrent of corporate money cascaded into the political campaigns of both parties, protected by the right of free speech. And for years corporate lobbying had been protected by their right of petition. The corporate grip tightened in a frontal attack on democracy.
Corporations today outspend citizen interest groups in lobbying by a factor of 86:1. In the 2024 election cycle corporations and their PACs and super PACs contributed 71% of the total of campaign donations, about $10.65 billion. “Large private donors” (read billionaires) contributed another $2.85 billion, 19% of the total. Small individual donations came to $1.5 billion, about 10%.
By any measure corporations and to a lesser extent billionaires are the dominant influencers of federal governance today. Their financing of political campaigns renders elected officials into indentured servitude, open to corporate requests. Then corporate lobbyists specify the details.
Public policy today routinely advances not the well-being of the American people, then, but the preferences of corporate America and its embedded billionaires.
This is what the Supreme Court has enabled, after Marbury, after Santa Clara County, after Buckley, after Bellotti, after Citizens United, after Trump v. Slaughter,
Dollars outweigh votes.
This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Normalized Fraudulent Warfare, Devastated a Thriving Nation, and Enabled the Trump Presidencies.
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The Supreme Court's 2026 Term Was a Power Grab in Legal Garb
The term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government to empower the president at the expense of Congress.
Jul 02, 2026
How will we remember this Supreme Court term?
For Louisiana v. Callais, which demolished the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For near misses, too, as when the Constitution’s plain-language guarantee of birthright citizenship was recognized by only a bare majority of the justices. (As JD Vance crowed, that core protection is now “hanging by a thread.”)
I think the term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government. It was a power grab in legal garb, undermining Congress, granting presidents more authority, but with key decisions ultimately in the hands of the nine unelected officials now redesigning government.
In 2005, The New York Times Magazine published a story about a cadre of intense anti-government legal activists. They bemoaned “the Constitution in exile,” what they saw as an epic wrong turn in the 20th century. That was the era when Congress and presidents created expert independent agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to police Wall Street, and the Federal Trade Commission, to protect consumers. To most Americans, that was how we grew a modern, fair, prosperous economy. To those activists, it was all a terrible mistake.
A future president may be a populist progressive, now with new levers of power to address climate change or boost union power. To quote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “What goes around comes around.”
One of the few adherents of this eccentric theory, the Times reported, was an unknown young federal judge named John Roberts. Soon he would become chief justice.
Trump v. Slaughter, announced on Monday, marked a key moment in Roberts’s long drive to write pro-business dogma into the Constitution. On this, Roberts is far from a Midwestern country club Republican cheerfully calling “balls and strikes.” This is not about wins or losses for Donald Trump. These justices have wanted to do this since Trump was cavorting at Studio 54.
Congress established the first independent agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, to set railroad rates in the 1880s. Since then, laws created nearly 60 agencies to police the economy or serve as watchdogs over the government, and tried to wall them off a bit from political pressure and partisan politics.
Congress has now been blocked from imposing removal protections for the heads of most federal agencies, a critical bulwark against presidential meddling. Consider a consequential, complex current question: Could an effective new agency regulate artificial intelligence? The Slaughter ruling could make it considerably harder to insulate such a powerful body from political interference.
Of course, independent agencies are not a purely partisan issue. Over the course of American history, they have frustrated presidents of both parties, who want control of the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
The Slaughter ruling overturned a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor. William Humphrey was a reactionary and thoroughly unpleasant Federal Trade Commission member whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to fire. Humphrey kept going to work even after he was dismissed, then died while the legal challenge to pry him from his office was being heard. His heirs sued for his back pay.
The Supreme Court ruled that even FDR, at the peak of his power, could not fire grumpy old Mr. Humphrey. “That damn little case,” recalled FDR aide Robert Jackson (later a justice himself), “made Roosevelt madder at the court than any other decision... [He] thought they went out of their way to spite him personally.”
Slaughter is one of the most significant expressions of the pretentiously named “unitary executive theory.” This is the idea that because a single individual, the president, is elected to lead the executive branch, that means the whole executive branch serves at his whim. Of note, this case revolved around one aspect of it, firing of agency officials.
Indeed, the justices seemed to recognize the havoc their new doctrine would cause. On the same day, a different lineup of justices blocked Trump from firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. The Fed, too, is an independent agency, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in the Progressive Era, but the rationale for independent central banking is well known. The Cook ruling mumbles about tradition and history, but the real answer for the divergent outcomes seemed to be, well, the Fed is just... different. (Of course, business interests revere the Fed and often loathe the FTC.)
A limited version of the unitary executive theory is not entirely crazy. We want a strong president able to guide the balky executive branch. But advocates have taken this idea to a dangerous extreme, turning it into a fancy cloak for an authoritarian executive. By their logic, if all federal employees work personally for a president, as if they were gardeners at Mar-a-Lago, that could demolish civil service protections and other rules that can keep government from being the instrument of executive whim.
Who knows how far this rhetoric of presidential power will go? Russell Vought, the White House budget director, says we live in a “post-constitutional time.” And in Trump v. United States, Roberts wrote that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government.”
Policymakers now must grapple with the justices’ handiwork. How can we have strong inspectors general or independent military lawyers if a president can bark “you’re fired” at will? Can Congress step up by, say, giving the Government Accountability Office greater responsibility to police the executive branch? Such obscure questions will determine how government can work going forward. Necessary reforms can follow abuse and scandal. That’s what happened after Watergate. Now such safeguards must be designed in a world where the Supreme Court has supercharged presidential power.
Let’s not forget Donald Trump is a lame duck. (He is! Really!) A future president may be a populist progressive, now with new levers of power to address climate change or boost union power. To quote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “What goes around comes around.” Of course, this court has also invented tools to stop policies it doesn’t like, such as the “major questions” doctrine it used to block Biden-era climate change rules. Stay tuned.
But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this ruling will make government less effective, more chaotic, and more driven by politics and personality—steered there by a Supreme Court with too much power, now in thrall to an obscure and dangerous philosophy.
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The Supreme Court's Birthday Gift to the US? Killing Off Independent Agencies
Monday’s ruling overturns the basic idea—part of the fabric of our government for well over a century—that Congress has the power to create independent regulatory bodies.
Jun 30, 2026
First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.
I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.
Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is—or was—independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.
The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy—and corrupted the nation’s politics—during the First Gilded Age.
These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations. But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.
Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.
That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people—and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.
We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.
Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.
Hence, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).
The ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Monday marked the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.
Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.
Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.
But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.
It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.
In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau—again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor—said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.
Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued, “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
Two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch—would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”
That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.
Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary—to check and constrain him.
Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.
These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.
But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.
Monday’s ruling overturns the basic idea—part of the fabric of our government for well over a century—that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.
As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.
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SCOTUS’ Rulings on TPS and Asylum Entries Supercharge Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda
With these decisions, the Supreme Court once again bends the knee to Trump’s vile agenda of violence and death; eliminating humanitarian protections and denying asylum to those who need them most betrays every value that makes this nation great.
Jun 26, 2026
On June 25, the Supreme Court drastically expanded the Trump administration’s ability to shape the nation’s immigration system. In two separate 6-3 decisions, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants, as well as physically block asylum-seekers from entering the country and applying for legal protections.
Both rulings are as cruel as they are nonsensical.
Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has sought to end TPS for over 1 million migrants from 13 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Somalia, and Syria. These termination orders have been challenged in court and, to date, seven of them remain paused.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, puts all of them in jeopardy. While it allows DHS to remove legal protections for Haitians and Syrians specifically, it paves the way for the department to terminate TPS for any group with little to no oversight.
if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito claims that the courts are prohibited from reviewing whether DHS’ decision to terminate TPS complied with the legally required procedures needed to cancel the status. For example, whether former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem “inadequately consulted the State Department about conditions in Syria” or, more broadly, whether “her decision that country conditions in Syria and Haiti justified termination of their TPS designations” are exempt from any form of judicial review.
Importantly, the Supreme Court did not rule that DHS followed the proper protocols when ending TPS. Nor did it determine that conditions in those countries were safe—and, in fact, the Trump administration knows they are not. The State Department has active travel advisories warning Americans against traveling to Syria and Haiti “for any reason” due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, limited healthcare, hostage taking, and armed conflict. It is also worth noting that the present conditions in those countries are the direct result of America’s actions in Syria through decades of sanctions and military intervention; and in Haiti, through years of colonial occupation and repeatedly undermining their democratic process.
For the conservative justices, none of this matters. These issues are, in their view, beyond the scope of the courts.
This is a ridiculous assessment. The relevant statute (8 U.S.C. 1254a) reads: “There is no judicial review of any determination […] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state under this subsection.” The court’s conservatives read the word “determination” here to refer to (i) the final decision, (ii) the entire decision-making process, and (iii) every sub-decision within that process. Based on that definition, they conclude that this statute “squarely bars” the courts from assessing the legality of any aspect of DHS’ decision to end TPS.
As Justice Elena Kagan puts it, this interpretation is not only “very broad,” but “very strange.” In her dissenting opinion, she correctly notes that the statute only applies to the final “determination” with regards to whether TPS is actually granted, terminated, or extended. It “does nothing to stop courts from reviewing […] other things” such as “the procedural steps the Secretary must undertake prior to making any determination about country conditions.”
This is not only more consistent with the relevant text but reflects a basic presumption inherent to our system of checks and balances—namely, that “Congress intends the executive to obey its statutory commands and, accordingly, that it expects the courts to grant relief when an executive agency violates such a command.”
After all, if Congress intended DHS to have broad authority to revoke TPS at its sole discretion, then why would it create a multi-step protocol that the department must follow to lawfully end those protections? That fact alone entails that it always intended how DHS reached its “determination” to be subject to judicial and external review.
The conservative majority ignores such considerations. Instead of proper judicial interpretation, they offer a politically motivated and disingenuous rationale designed to give the Trump administration complete control over the humanitarian program.
To this end, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration one more gift: sanitizing its racism.
The court rejected the plaintiff’s claim that terminating TPS for Haitians was racially motivated and thus violated the equal protection clause. For the court’s conservatives, none of President Trump’s past remarks—which include that Haitians are “eating the dogs,” “probably have AIDS,” and that Haiti is a “shithole country”—“were overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” Whatever these “race-neutral justifications” are, the court conveniently fails to elaborate.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas goes even further. He posits that the plaintiff’s suit would fail simply because “aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.” Constitutionally, this is painfully wrong. Morally, this is utterly disgusting.
In one fell swoop, the Supreme Court effectively cleared all legal obstacles against the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS for anyone at any time for any reason. Their ruling renders non-constitutional challenges regarding policy adherence moot from the outset. And if Trump’s gross fearmongering about Haitians eating cats and dogs is not “overtly racial,” then it’s hard to imagine this Supreme Court acknowledging any of this administration’s blatant racism and xenophobia. Their willful ignorance renders the equal protection clause similarly moot.
Asylum Entries
To make matters worse, the Supreme Court was not done. In a separate decision, the court’s conservatives upheld the Trump administration’s “turn-back policy” (also known as “metering”) that allows federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from crossing into the US.
Currently, federal law permits any migrant “who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival […])” to apply for asylum. In Mulin v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration argued that their policy does not violate this law since, insofar as those migrants never step foot onto US soil, they never become entitled to apply for asylum in the first place.
The Supreme Court agreed. Writing again for the court’s majority, Alito claims that this case is “straightforward.” He writes, “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters the place.”
The Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.
Yet, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissenting opinion, the majority’s fixation with the word “in” overlooks the broader context of the statute. Federal law dictates that any migrant “arriving” and “seeking admission” into the country “shall be inspected by immigration officers.” If they are ineligible for admission, they shall be removed unless they indicate “an intention to apply for asylum […] or a fear of persecution.” In that case, “the officer shall refer the alien for an interview.” That clause clearly applies to migrants who haven’t physically entered the US.
This also explains the language Congress uses in that statute. Under the majority’s reading, to “arrive in” the US is synonymous with being “physically present in” the US. But, if this is true, then why would Congress include both phrases if they were so obviously redundant? It’s because, in addition to being physically present, those who have arrived before an immigration official also have the right to apply for asylum even if they are not physically present in the US.
As Sotomayor bleakly remarks, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.”
This point not only underlines the cruelty of the policy, but also its sheer stupidity. Asylum-seekers brave horrible conditions, traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their homes in search of a better life. Sotomayor is obviously correct that some will take the extra steps to enter the country by any means necessary. This is especially true if they believe that doing so is their only means of acquiring asylum. Trump’s policy undermines a system that would allow federal officials to screen migrants at the border, review their case, and provide them proper guidance for one that openly encourages the very kinds of “illegal entries” that his administration consistently bemoans as an existential threat to the nation.
Trump’s Humanitarian Crisis
With these decisions, the Supreme Court once again bends the knee to Trump’s vile agenda of violence and death. Eliminating humanitarian protections and denying asylum to those who need them most betray every value that makes this nation great.
What’s more, the court further exacerbates a humanitarian crisis that Trump is either intentionally or indifferently manufacturing. In his second term alone, he has either threatened or attacked 15 countries including Greenland, Venezuela, Somalia, and Syria; launched over 60 military strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed over 200 people; eliminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—an act that could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030; launched an illegal war that has killed more than 7,300 people in Iran and Lebanon; a war that has also wrecked the global economy and caused fuel and food shortages in the world’s poorest and most remote areas; has consistently aided and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza; imposed a total oil blockade that is economically asphyxiating Cuba; and has made refugee status in the US a privilege nearly-exclusive to white South Africans (who he claims—without evidence—are facing “racially motivated violence”), among many other similarly insidious and corrupted acts.
Our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November.
In short, the Trump administration does not cherish life. The Supreme Court does not value justice. Congress is now the last line of governmental defense against full-on fascism.
Fortunately, even Republicans understand the gravity of this situation. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), for instance, has already called for Congress to extend TPS for Haitians. For all of Trump’s bigotry, migrants remain an indispensable part of the US economy.
Ultimately, we need extensions for every group under threat from the Supreme Court’s reckless decisions as well as new protections for those who have already lost their TPS designations. For now, our best option is to empower Congress to stand up against both the Trump administration and his Supreme Court by working to elect as many progressive candidates in November. Before things get worse, we need fighters in Congress that will serve the people’s interest and stand up to Trump and his cronies.
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There's No Doubt: The Supreme Court Is Part of Trump's Anti-Democracy Movement
Even in the face of two laws in which Congress instructed the executive branch to do certain things, a majority of the current Supreme Court—the abominable Roberts Court—has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.
Jun 26, 2026
The real way to read the immigration decisions the Supreme Court issued on Thursday is not to see them solely as losses for immigrants to the United States or the rights of immigrants. They are much larger losses. They are losses for the authority of Congress to have its laws fully executed by a president who doesn’t agree with them.
Markwayne Mullin vs. Al Otro Lado concerns a 1917 law that requires immigration officers to inspect noncitizens who arrive at ports of entry to determine whether they may enter the United States. Congress amended the law in the Refugee Act of 1980 to allow noncitizens fleeing persecution in their home country to apply for asylum as part of this inspection process.
The act lays out a required set of procedures to guide this process. It says that a noncitizen who seeks admission to the United States “may apply for asylum.” If the noncitizen lacks valid travel documents, the officer “shall order [her] removed” unless she conveys an intention to apply for asylum or a fear of persecution, which in turn requires the officer to “refer” her for further processing of her asylum application.
This system is designed to ensure that the US government considers the application of each person seeking to come into the United States to determine who should be let in, who should be turned away, and who should be allowed to apply for asylum.
This must be seen for what it really is—a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.
But on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s majority held that a president may circumvent these requirements simply by having US immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting foot on US soil—even if the asylum-seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.
What happened to the Refugee Act of 1980 and the specific procedures outlined in it? The Supreme Court ignored it.
The other decision released today, Markwayne Mullin vs. Dahlia Doe, concerns another law, part of the Immigration Act of 1990 called Temporary Protected Status. For over a decade administrations have provided humanitarian Temporary Protected Status relief to Haitian and Syrian nationals coming to the United States.
Today, the Supreme Court’s majority held that federal courts may not review the Secretary of Homeland Security’s compliance with that law. But in fact the Immigration Act of 1990 specifically allows judicial review of whether the secretary adhered to the procedures the law requires—exactly what the plaintiffs disputed.
It would be easy to see these two cases solely through the lens of immigration—and conclude that the Supreme Court’s decisions Thursday simply backed President Donald Trump and his fanatical underling Stephen Miller’s commitment to block noncitizens from the United States or to force them out. And surely these are the consequences of both of the rulings.
But the decisions are even darker and more dangerous than this. Even in the face of two laws in which Congress instructed the executive branch to do certain things, a majority of the current Supreme Court—the abominable Roberts Court—has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.
This must be seen for what it really is—a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.
If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.
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The Supreme Court's Pro-Trump Immigration Rulings Threaten Decades of Progress
The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history.
Feb 18, 2026
The justices on the Supreme Court should not favor the president who appointed them because checks and balances demand that they uphold the law without passion or prejudice. The current Supreme Court has increasingly shown a pattern of siding with the Trump administration—a result made predictable by the court’s conservative majority. Immigration cases have, with rare exception, aligned along these partisan lines.
On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court sidestepped the question of birthright citizenship and overruled lower court decisions that sought to protect it. The original plaintiffs filed suit to enjoin the enforcement of the executive order that identifies circumstances in which a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” thereby restricting the constitutionally guaranteed bestowal of birthright citizenship. The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court, which granted review. The plaintiffs argued that the executive order violates the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, as well as sections 1 and 201 of the Nationality Act of 1940—the constitutional guarantee that birth on US soil confers citizenship.
Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the district court entered universal injunctions barring the application of the executive order to anyone, thereby preserving birthright citizenship, and the appellate court denied the government’s request to postpone the granted relief. In its application to the Supreme Court, the government argued that federal courts lacked equitable authority to issue universal injunctions under the Judiciary Act of 1789, attacking the district court’s authority in order to preserve the president’s propensity to overstep his. The Supreme Court granted the government's application and held that Congress has not granted federal courts authority to universally enjoin the enforcement of an executive order. Reaching all the way back to pre-Revolution English law and the Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court reasoned that no such authority exists. Their reasoning reads as petulant and arbitrary, an invocation of ancient doctrine to narrow modern rights.
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court granted an application for stay by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The decision states that the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes immigration officers to interrogate any alien (or person believed to be an alien) as to “his right to be or to remain in the United States.” They also found that they may briefly detain individuals if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is an alien illegally present in the United States, based on the “totality of the particular circumstances.”
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law, however, takes tremendous liberties with the letter of these laws, essentially recognizing ethnicity as a basis for reasonable suspicion. Specifically, the California District Court enjoined immigration officers from making investigative stops based on, among other factors, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, and race or ethnicity. In a nutshell, the lower court forbade immigration enforcement from racially profiling Latine Angelenos. The Supreme Court overruled the lower court, reasoning that, while ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors. This argument is internally incoherent and contradictory, suggesting that racial bias is at once insufficient and persuasive evidence. Citing the myriad “significant economic and social problems” caused by “illegal” immigration, the Supreme Court sided with DHS, finding that the government would suffer irreparable injury from the injunction. The relevance of socioeconomic problems to the question of racial profiling and potential excessive force in the execution thereof is tenuous at best.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. She argued that “we should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,“ as it would be a loss to our constitutional freedom.
On December 23, 2025, however, the Supreme Court issued an noticeably restrained opinion upholding a lower court’s temporary restraining order (TRO), which barred the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. The court found that, under the Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited from executing the laws, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress. The decision further stated that, before the president can federalize the guard under 10 USC §12406(3), he must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be unable with those forces to perform that function.
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made. The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history. Political expediency may be convenient in the short term, but history will judge harshly those who twisted our most sacred liberties to the advantage of an advantageous few, rather than standing with the people our Constitution was written to protect.
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Congress Must Fight Back Against Supreme Court's Anti-Democratic Crusade
Lawmakers should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country.
Dec 15, 2025
The 2026 election will take place in a political system that is divided, discordant, flagrantly gerrymandered, and marked by widening racial discrimination. Thank Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the Supreme Court. And the supermajority of highly activist justices seems poised, even eager, to make things appreciably worse.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court refused to adopt any standard to police partisan gerrymandering, and it even prevented federal courts from hearing that claim. Fast-forward through a census, six years of line-drawing, and a flurry of lawsuits, and predictably, our democracy has become much less fair.
Redistricting is supposed to take place once a decade, after the census. In fact, that’s why the census is written into the Constitution. But earlier this year, Texas abruptly drew new congressional maps in a gambit to squeeze out five extra seats for Republicans. It was in the middle of the decade and at the behest of someone who doesn’t live there (President Trump) — and all at the expense of Black and Latino voters. Even though 95 percent of population growth in the state came from those communities, the map’s main feature was fewer districts where those voters can elect their preferred candidates.
Bad, right? A panel of three federal judges agreed, temporarily blocking the map from being used in the upcoming election until a full trial could be held. Texas first resisted allegations of a partisan gerrymander, then insisted it was actually acting at the behest of the Justice Department for racial reasons, then said it was, in fact, a partisan power grab. (“I don’t see race. Just Democrats.”) Talk about a Texas two-step! Amid these gyrations, the court found it illegal.
Enter the Supreme Court. Last week it blocked the lower court’s ruling, thus allowing the election to go forward with freshly gerrymandered maps. It’s yet another brazen use of the shadow docket — the Court’s supposed emergency docket (with limited briefing and no oral argument) — to hand Trump a win with only a few sentences of explanation.
Where does that leave things? The Texas seat grab set off a partisan arms race across the country. Furious Democrats acted. California voters overwhelmingly supported drawing new Democratic-leaning congressional districts there to counter the GOP gains in Texas. Republicans in Indiana and Florida are moving to redraw lines, while Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia aim to do the same.
With all this headbutting, the gerrymander war of 2025 could turn out to be close to a wash in partisan terms. Moreover, voters may have their own ideas. If Democrats win big, as recent races have suggested is possible, the gerrymander might produce extra GOP losses. (The technical term for this, believe it or not, is a “dummymander.”)
All that sound and fury, in short, might signify . . . not exactly nothing, but not a decisive partisan gain.
That’s where the next big intervention by the Supreme Court would come in. And its impact could well be even more dramatic — and if possible, more harmful.
The Court seems poised to demolish the effectiveness of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Two weeks ago, in Louisiana v. Callais, it heard arguments about whether the law’s Section 2 remains constitutional. For decades, that provision effectively barred states, particularly in the South, from enacting maps that dilute or cancel out the voting power of racial minorities. As our friend-of-the-court brief pointed out, the provision has transformed both Congress and legislative bodies across the country. And the disparity in registration rates between white and Black voters dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 percentage points just a decade later. Now the justices seem ready to wreck Section 2 if not strike it down entirely.
This would not only mark a shameful retreat from federal action to protect racial equality and fair representation. It could have a dramatic and specific impact: A bad ruling, especially early, could be followed by another wave of redistricting in coming months, maybe even in time for the 2026 election.
As my colleague Kareem Crayton writes, “The argument invites a return to the era when race was a barrier to entry for political representation — the cruel and painful experience of political exclusion that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place.”
Nate Cohn of The New York Times has crunched the numbers and predicts that an extreme Supreme Court ruling could allow Republican states to eliminate between 6 and 12 districts currently held by Democrats. That would be a margin larger than the House majority either party has had in recent years.
When politicians pick voters — whether based on race or politics — instead of the other way around, our elections become less fair and less democratic. The country would slide toward even greater division and balkanization. Republican voters in Massachusetts (where there are no Republican members of Congress even though Trump won 37 percent of the vote) have no party representation in Congress, while Democrats in Texas (where Kamala Harris won 42 percent) would have only about 7 of the state’s 38 seats. John Adams famously said that the legislature must be an “exact portrait of the people at large.” The current portrait doesn’t bear much of a resemblance.
So what’s the answer?
There must, above all, be national standards that apply to red states and blue states alike. The Constitution gives Congress that power. It should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country. In 2022, it almost did: The Freedom to Vote Act would have banned mid-decade redistricting and set other standards. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have strengthened protections against racially discriminatory maps. Both came achingly close to enactment.
And then the ideologues on the Supreme Court should stop meddling in elections. Over the past 15 years, the Court demolished campaign finance rules in Citizens United, wrecked the Voting Rights Act starting in Shelby County, and gave ex-presidents vast and unprecedented immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — thus ensuring no legal accountability for candidate, now president, Trump.
In a season when it seems increasingly clear that the justices plan to hand President Trump even more power, inexcusable rulings and interventions in partisan politics will leave a very sour taste for many voters. The Supreme Court itself, increasingly, will become an issue in American politics. That’s as it should be.
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Trump's Denaturalization Rhetoric Violates the Laws and Spirit of America
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable.
Dec 05, 2025
You might think that when you are a US citizen, you cannot have that status taken away. You would be wrong, it turns out. And behind that fact is a long and often ugly history.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump said that he would “absolutely” denaturalize American citizens if he could. It comes after a wave of harsh rhetoric directed toward immigrants after the tragic shooting of two National Guard members last week.
Yes, the words that the president says have been discounted. But there’s policy behind the rhetorical provocation.
Denaturalization is the process of stripping citizenship from someone who obtained it illegally, such as by not meeting the requirements or by committing fraud or lying during the application process. At first, government interpreted that standard loosely, leading to years of abuse.
As my colleagues Faiza Patel, Margy O’Herron, and Kendall Verhovek explain:
More than 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship between 1907 and 1967 based on political affiliations, race, and gender, according to denaturalization scholar Patrick Weil. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration began denaturalizing German- and Asian-born citizens during World War I, along with anarchists and people who spoke out against the war. During World War II, a push for denaturalization of naturalized citizens from Germany, Italy, and Japan intensified. A primary target included members of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund for disloyalty and insufficient attachment to the principles of the Constitution.
After the war, the Second Red Scare took hold of a country fearful of domestic communism amid its emergence abroad. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
As Weil puts it, a process that was intended to redress fraud and illegality in the naturalization process became used to “expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens.” But even during wartime, the Supreme Court responded, limiting its use.
Throughout the 20th century, the court issued several rulings setting a high bar for denaturalization. In 1943, the court struck down a move to denaturalize Russian-born William Schneiderman over ties to the Communist Party, requiring a “heavy burden” for rescinding citizenship. And in 1946, the court warned against the use of denaturalization as a “ready instrument for political persecutions.” It’s why in recent decades, denaturalization attempts have been appropriately rare... until now.
Over the summer, Trump directed Justice Department lawyers to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.” At the time, a spokesperson said that “denaturalization proceedings will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process.” Trump’s parameters seem to be much broader. In his Thanksgiving Truth Social post, he said he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.”
Among his targets? Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is open to denaturalizing New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). When asked about Elon Musk, he told the press, “We’ll have to take a look.” It appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty; the law isn’t so much a motivation as impulse.
But we shouldn’t mistake impulse for foolishness.
It’s all part of a broader effort to target the rights of immigrants and redefine who is an American. That started on Inauguration Day with the effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, a right that is explicitly in the Constitution. And it’s part of efforts to reverse what top administration officials have called a conspiracy to alter the makeup of the electorate. In an interview, the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, accused previous administrations of admitting immigrants to “make them all citizens and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere in the country.” And on the campaign trail last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable. More than a century ago, the Supreme Court held that naturalized citizens are on the same footing as those born in the country, and for decades, the Supreme Court has made clear that stripping citizens of their citizenship due to their views or expressions “would run counter to our traditions.”
We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out.
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The Words We Use to Describe Homelessness Will Get People Killed
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. We should see them for who they are: a person suffering and vulnerable, deserving of our empathy.
Dec 01, 2025
Last month, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said of people living with mental illness on our streets: “Involuntary lethal injection… Just kill ’em.” He apologized—after the clip ricocheted across the internet—but the words were said, on air, to millions.
I run a nonprofit that directly serves the homeless. We meet people where they are—under overpasses, on subways, in shelters and supportive housing. I see, daily, how language like “vagrant,” or “zombie” strips people of their personhood. It lowers the public’s guard against cruelty and raises the political ceiling for punitive policies. We cannot afford to pretend that words don’t matter.
“Vagrancy,” once a legal catch‑all used to police and punish poor and Black Americans, is being rehabilitated in public discourse; historians have warned what that signals. And major tabloids routinely label our neighbors “vagrants” in crime headlines, blending poverty status with criminal identity in ways that echo the past.
Even federal policy is now framed around “fighting vagrancy.” That phrase isn’t from a century‑old placard; it’s the heading and premise of a July 2025 executive order, which opens by declaring “endemic vagrancy” a public menace and directs federal agencies to prioritize encampment removals and civil commitment.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators.
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. To them, a person living on the street is barely a person at all but rather an indication of broader disorder that must be swept away or removed. But where should they be removed to? What should happen to them when they get there? Those questions are unimportant to certain portions of the media and political ecosystem.
The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024 cleared the way for cities to punish sleeping outside even when shelter is unavailable. Some jurisdictions have read that as a green light for broader crackdowns rather than investments in housing and health care—turning survival behaviors into ticketable or jailable offenses. The July executive order doubled down, instructing federal agencies to preference grants for jurisdictions that enforce bans on “urban camping and loitering” and to support encampment removals with federal dollars. Words like “vagrancy” aren’t just stigmatizing; they now allocate money and power.
This year we saw what happens when the politics of sweeps outrun basic safety. In January, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer during an encampment clearance in Atlanta—first chalked up to overdose, later shown by autopsy to be blunt‑force trauma. And in my home city of New York, Debrina Kawam was fatally set on fire by a stranger while she was sleeping in a subway car. Vocabulary that treats people as nuisances rather than neighbors makes such tragedies more likely.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators. In California’s landmark CASPEH study, 38% of participants experienced violence during their current episode of homelessness, and nearly three quarters reported violence at some point in their lives. Mortality data tell the same story of precarity. In Los Angeles County alone, 2,508 people experiencing homelessness died in 2023—an average of nearly seven people every day. The rate remains multiple times higher than that of the general population.
As a sector, we’ll keep doing our part: street outreach, housing navigation, medical and behavioral health care, and prevention. But leaders in government and media must stop normalizing language that primes the public for harm. Phrases like “person without housing” or “person who is homeless” more accurately reflect that homelessness is a temporary status, not an identity or permanent state of being. And in most cases, we can refer to our neighbors in media stories or political policy without any reference to their housing status.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see. They are sons, daughters, parents, veterans, and caregivers. Some are literally recovering from yesterday’s assault. They are not “vermin.” They are not “zombies.”
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Cautious Celebration as Supreme Court Allows Marriage Equality to Remain Law of the Land
"We cannot take those protections for granted," said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who helped to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide a decade ago.
Nov 11, 2025
In one of vanishingly few US Supreme Court rulings protecting equal rights, the majority-conservative court on Monday rejected efforts to overturn the decade-old precedent of marriage equality.
Without issuing a comment, the court denied an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was ordered to pay $360,000 in compensation after she refused to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple in defiance of the precedent set by the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
Amid a flurry of rulings that have rolled back sexual and reproductive freedom in other realms—including for the LGBTQ+ community—the court's refusal to hear Davis' appeal was considered a small but still invigorating victory.
“The bar is in hell,” wrote Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on social media. “But this is a win for decency and compassion.”
The ruling came as a relief to advocates for equal rights, who long feared that marriage equality might soon become the next target as the conservative movement grows increasingly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
In 2022, as the court's right-wing majority overturned the right to an abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, the archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas signaled in a concurring opinion that it should be the start of efforts to fully revise the court's recognition of "substantive due process," that is, the recognition of rights not explicitly granted by the US Constitution.
He questioned not just the right of same-sex couples to marry, but the court’s entire recognition of the right to privacy established by the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling, which has been the basis for rulings against bans on homosexual relationships and the right to contraception.
Thomas was one of the four conservative justices who dissented from the majority's ruling in Obergefell. Two others—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito—also still serve on the court. The other three conservative justices who have been appointed since, all by President Donald Trump during his first term—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—have remained relatively coy on how they’d rule if marriage equality were to come back up, though they have sided with conservatives in cases that pitted religious liberty against discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people.
In 2023, the six conservatives ruled that a Christian web designer was allowed to decline services to same-sex weddings, overturning a Colorado law that banned discrimination against gay people. Notably, the designer who brought the case had not actually been asked to design a website for any gay couple, but the court's right-wing majority accepted her case regardless.
This apparent zealousness to intervene in favor of discrimination appeared to be a red flag, but as Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman wrote for Bloomberg, Monday's ruling "is best read as a signal that the conservative majority has little interest in revisiting gay marriage," even as "the conservative constitutional revolution at the Supreme Court remains underway."
He notes that just four justices are required for a case to be heard by the court. And while it has aggressively rolled back the rights of transgender people, ended affirmative action, and recognized unprecedented executive authority for President Donald Trump, when it comes to same-sex marriage, "their silence is noteworthy."
Public support for marriage equality has grown considerably in the decade since Obergefell. In July 2015, a month after the court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, 58% of Americans said in a Gallup poll that they agreed that same- sex couples should have the same rights as opposite-sex pairs. That number ballooned to a high of 71% in 2023, and even as attacks on LGBTQ+ people have ratcheted up intensely within the conservative movement, support for marriage equality remains stubbornly steady—68% of Americans still say gay marriages should be valid.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who represented two of the plaintiffs in the 2015 case, said that while she welcomes the court's decision Monday not to erode the hard-won rights of gay people further, advocates should not become complacent.
"I am relieved for today’s decision reaffirming same-sex couples’ continued right to dignity and protection under the law, but we cannot take those protections for granted," Nessel said in a news release. “Members of this Supreme Court have already told us they are willing to overturn Obergefell. It’s only a matter of time before they do.”
Her state of Michigan is one of more than two dozen in which same-sex marriage would become illegal or face restrictions if Obergefell is overturned. She said that Monday's decision "allows us a reprieve, an opportunity to bring our state Constitution into alignment with the protections our residents are entitled to and have enjoyed for more than a decade. Now is the time to act."
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