U.S. Supreme Court
Is it as divided as it seems?
The most important thing we can do to restore faith in all our sacred institutions is to make sure everyone gets the facts about them – instead of the usual political propaganda.
These days, for example, the prevailing narrative from the political Left is that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is running roughshod over the left-leaning minority, creating a bitterly divided Court. However, the facts don’t necessarily support this.
Although cultural topics that are typically viewed as partisan get the most attention (i.e., abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights, religious liberty), the Supreme Court’s voting patterns are often more complicated than the familiar “six conservatives versus three liberals” narrative suggests.
The Wall Street Journal reported that, in the Supreme Court term that concluded at the end of June 2025, only six cases overall – or 9 percent – resulted in the liberal Justices dissenting as a bloc (resulting in an ideologically split 6-3 outcome). In only four cases – or 6 percent – there was an ideological split in the other direction, with Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissenting as a bloc.
Given the panicked chatter from the Left, it may also come as a surprise that 42 percent of the rulings in the last term were unanimous. These decisions included a ruling to eliminate the “background circumstances” test for reverse discrimination claims under Title VII; a decision that found Wisconsin was wrong to deny a tax exemption to a Catholic Charities nonprofit; a decision that constrains lower-court judges who tried to intervene in federal environmental reviews; a decision that said American victims of terrorism are not prevented from suing the Palestine Liberation Organization in American courts; and upholding a law that effectively banned TikTok in the United States unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company.
Yet another surprise may be that Justice Elena Kagan – one of the Court’s most liberal Justices – was in the majority of the non-unanimous outcomes 70 percent of the time, while super conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were each at 62 percent (tied with Justice Sonia Sotomayor). Justice Neil Gorsuch clocked in at 61 percent.
It’s true that the 2025–26 term seemed considerably more ideologically divided. Nearly 29 percent of the Court’s decisions were decided 6–3, and roughly 23 percent of all decisions split along conventional ideological lines, with the six conservative Justices opposed by the three liberal Justices – more than double the share from the previous term. But even then, significant cross-ideological coalitions remained. In the major birthright-citizenship case Trump v. Barbara, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson in holding that President Trump’s executive order violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the order could not stand, but on statutory rather than constitutional grounds.
… and then there is this. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is based in New Orleans, covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most conservative federal appellate courts. In the 2024–25 term, the Supreme Court reversed or vacated 10 of the 13 Fifth Circuit cases it reviewed – a reversal rate of 76.9 percent –including major cases involving “ghost guns,” the Affordable Care Act and the Universal Service Fund, which provides billions of dollars to support telecommunications and broadband services.
And the pattern continued. In the 2025–26 term, the Fifth Circuit was once again reversed more times than any other federal appellate court – the third consecutive term in which it led the nation in total Supreme Court reversals. The Justices reversed eight of the 11 Fifth Circuit decisions they reviewed on the merits, or roughly 73 percent.
Another narrative coming from the political Left is that the conservative majority on the Court is making decisions specifically to do the bidding of Donald Trump. However, the facts don’t support this either.
Don’t misunderstand, we absolutely believe Donald Trump wants the Court’s help in making him a king. Don’t believe us? Just ask him.
On February 2025, he posted, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” – along with a picture of himself wearing a crown. Four days before, he had posted the quote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a quote largely attributed to Napoleon, a dictator who restricted freedom of speech, press, and women’s rights; re-imposed slavery; empowered a greedy nobility; stole elections; and literally crowned himself emperor. No one ever excused this man of being subtle.
After his first term, Americans could be forgiven for thinking his decisions had been a one-off made by a rookie president, or maybe they didn’t even know about them at all. But after the 2024 campaign, no one can say they didn’t know his intentions because he certainly wasn’t shy about telling the world exactly what they were.
On the 2024 campaign trail, for example, he said he would “use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings” – which basically meant he planned to refuse to spend money Congress has appropriated if he didn’t like what they appropriated it for. Never mind that, far from this being a “long-recognized” power, Congress severely limited this type of scheme during the Nixon administration.
So, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that, in his first year alone, he did – or tried to do – the following: unilaterally impose import taxes; hold migrants at Guantánamo Bay; abruptly fire civil servants, government watchdogs, independent agency members and a Federal Reserve member; bypass the confirmation process; seek to end birthright citizenship; dismantle/disrupt/destroy government agencies; target law firms, universities, and students over speech he didn’t like; use troops on domestic soil; federalize the National Guard; centralize control over independent agencies; direct criminal investigations; expedite deportations; order military boat attacks; seize Venezuela’s leader; and bomb Iran.
His “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach led to the actions and activities of the Trump/Vance administration dominating the Supreme Court’s time, energy, press and emergency docket in 2025. As of September 2026, Just Security – an independent law and policy journal based at New York University School of Law’s Reiss Center on Law and Security – was tracking 963 legal challenges to Trump administration executive actions.
As of September 2026, Just Security – an independent law and policy journal based at New York University School of Law’s Reiss Center on Law and Security – was tracking 963 legal challenges to Trump administration executive actions.
The administration frequently encountered resistance in the lower federal courts, particularly during the first months of 2025. But when those disputes reached the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, the administration initially fared much better. During the Court’s 2024–25 term, it granted the Trump administration relief in 19 of 21 emergency cases with clear outcomes – about 90 percent.
Those rulings allowed the administration to move forward, at least temporarily, with some of its most consequential policies, including large-scale reductions in the federal workforce, layoffs at the Department of Education, the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in education grants, and the termination of temporary immigration protections for hundreds of thousands of people.
That said, most of those were emergency rulings, not final decisions that the administration’s actions were lawful (they generally determined whether a lower-court order would remain in effect while litigation continued).
In the end, as major disputes subsequently received full consideration, the administration’s record became considerably more mixed. In 2026, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s use of emergency economic powers to impose sweeping tariffs, struck down President Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, and rejected his effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. At the same time, the Court handed the administration an important victory in Trump v. Slaughter, substantially expanding presidential authority to remove officials from independent regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission.
Even still – unsurprisingly – many of the Court’s decisions have caused outrage among Democrats, feeding directly into the we’re going to lose our democracy because the U.S. Supreme Court is doing the bidding of Donald Trump narrative. But personally, we don’t think that is what’s really going on here.
What’s really going on is that many Democrats are confusing losing our democracy with just plain ‘ol losing. Just because you don’t agree with a Supreme Court decision doesn’t mean your way is better, or that our entire democracy is about to crumble. It more likely means that the Justices on the current Court take a more originalist and/or textualist view of legal questions than you do.
< An originalist interprets the Constitution according to the original public meaning of its words when the relevant provision was adopted. A textualist focuses primarily on the ordinary meaning of the words actually enacted, generally rejecting reliance on lawmakers’ subjective intentions or purposes that cannot be found in the text. These two approaches often overlap. A living constitutionalist, by contrast, believes that constitutional principles can be applied and understood in light of changing social conditions, contemporary values and circumstances rather than being confined to their historical understanding at the time of adoption.>
When it comes to Supreme Court decisions, people get so caught up in the topic of the case that they forget there are also underlying legal questions involved. Take abortion, for example. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The majority concluded that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returned the issue to “the people and their elected representatives.”
This is important because the majority’s reasoning reflected principles frequently associated with originalism. Although the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause protects some rights that are not expressly mentioned in the Constitution, the Court said such rights must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and implicit in the nation’s “scheme of ordered liberty.” After examining the historical regulation of abortion, the majority concluded that abortion did not meet that test.
So, regardless of the Justices’ personal views about abortion, Dobbs cannot accurately be understood simply as a decision about the abortion procedure itself. The majority framed it as a constitutional question: whether the judiciary had authority to recognize abortion as a right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment or whether abortion policy should instead be determined through the democratic process.
The dissenting Justices saw the issue very differently. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty” should not be limited to rights recognized when the amendment was ratified in 1868. In their view, broad constitutional principles must be interpreted in light of the nation’s evolving history, subsequent precedents and changing understanding of individual liberty. They also argued that Roe and Casey had become important precedents on which Americans had relied for decades.
That disagreement goes to the heart of the debate over constitutional interpretation: Should judges look primarily to the Constitution’s text, history and original understanding, or can broad constitutional principles acquire new applications as society changes?
And it may also be true – personally, we think it’s 100% true – that the current decisions being made by the Supreme Court have nothing at all to do with Donald Trump the person. In fact, our guess is that most of the Justices can’t stand him (we've actually heard this from several of our friends in “the know”). Rather, the current decisions being made by the Supreme Court are based on the individual Justice’s approach to interpreting the United States Constitution.
Obviously, the Trump/Vance administration is fully aware of each Justice’s proclivities, which is why Donald Trump chose Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in the first place (remember Democrats, losing elections has huge consequences).
The Constitutional approach of these three Justices – together with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts – are the main reason the Trump/Vance administration feels so empowered to test the scope of Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 (the Vesting Clause) that says “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” – embracing a concept called the unitary executive theory. The unitary executive theory holds that executive power ultimately belongs to the president, who therefore must possess substantial authority to supervise and remove officials exercising that power.
In 2020, in the majority opinion for Trump v. Mazars, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government.” Many people used his words as tea leaves to predict what the Supreme Court would do amid the Trump/ Vance administration’s unprecedented power grabs (this is also a huge reason for the Democrats’ we’re going to lose our democracy because the U.S. Supreme Court is doing the bidding of Donald Trump narrative).
… but Justice Roberts’ words weren’t necessarily wrong. It is a fact that Article II of the Constitution says, “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Of course, for some people, that short sentence is screaming for clarity. What does “executive power” mean? Does it have any limits? If so, what are they?
The Court provided such clarity in Trump v. Slaughter in 2026, holding that the Federal Trade Commission exercises executive power and that Congress generally cannot prevent the president from removing its commissioners, substantially limiting the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had permitted Congress to protect FTC commissioners from removal except for cause.
But the Court has also made clear that presidential power has limits. The Federal Reserve provides a particularly important example. The Court distinguished it from ordinary independent regulatory agencies because of America’s long historical tradition of independent central banking. In Trump v. Cook in June 2026, the Court rejected the administration’s attempt to immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, leaving her in office while litigation continued and emphasizing that Congress deliberately protected Fed governors from presidential removal except “for cause.”
This distinction helps explain what otherwise might appear contradictory. Many of the administration’s early Supreme Court victories involved control over the executive branch – removing executive officials, reducing the federal workforce, accessing government data, or temporarily withholding grants while litigation proceeded. Those decisions often fit naturally within the larger constitutional debate over how much control Article II gives a president over the executive branch. And many were preliminary emergency orders, not final rulings that the administration’s policies were lawful.
But when the administration has claimed powers extending beyond executive-branch management, the Court has drawn sharp boundaries – and gone against the fervent wishes of President Donald Trump.
In December 2025, for example, the Court refused to allow the administration to federalize the Illinois National Guard for deployment in the Chicago area while litigation continued. The Court concluded at that preliminary stage that the government had not demonstrated the statutory authority necessary to do so.
Then came an even more consequential decision. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sweeping global tariffs. The Court concluded that Congress had not granted the president the virtually unlimited tariff authority the administration claimed.
The ideological alignment was striking. Chief Justice Roberts was joined on the controlling portions of the decision by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson—and by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts went as far as saying, “the president’s assertion of authority was “extravagant by any measure.” Accepting the legal arguments presented, Roberts continued, “would replace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked presidential policymaking.”
Taken together, these decisions reveal a more complicated Supreme Court than the simple narrative that it either supports or opposes Donald Trump – or believes America should have a “King” or that no one is above the law. The Court has strengthened presidential control over much of the executive branch while simultaneously imposing significant limits when it concludes that the president has exceeded authority granted by the Constitution or Congress.
Listen, we get that many of Donald Trump’s actions are frightening, and we also worry about the long-term effects many of his decisions will have on our democracy. Surely that is crystal clear by now.
But the idea that, since Donald Trump is such a “danger” to this country, we have the right to fight back with anything and everything we have at our disposal – even if it means sacrificing a few basic rules of our own here and there – is even more dangerous than he is. The only thing more destructive than having a president with autocratic tendencies is to overcompensate for him. When it comes to preserving democracy, two wrongs do not make a right.
Take the case Trump v. United States, decided in July 2024. Trump argued that a former president was absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts and that prosecution could not occur unless the president had first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. The Supreme Court agreed to decide a narrower question: “Whether and if so to what extent” a former president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct involving official acts while in office. In a 6–3 decision divided along ideological lines, the Court rejected both extremes. It rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity for all official acts but also rejected the government’s argument that a former president generally enjoys no immunity from criminal prosecution.
Instead, the Court established three categories. A former president has absolute immunity for actions within his core constitutional powers; at least presumptive immunity for other official acts; and no immunity whatsoever for unofficial acts. The Court also did more than simply send the entire question back to the lower courts. It held that Trump was absolutely immune from prosecution for his alleged discussions with Justice Department officials and that his communications with Vice President Mike Pence involved at least presumptively immune official conduct. But it left the lower courts to determine the status of other alleged conduct, including Trump’s interactions with state officials, private individuals and the public concerning the 2020 election.
Well, it goes without saying that Democrats went berserk, saying that the Supreme Court was obviously in Donald Trump’s “pocket” and that they had essentially made him “a king.” President Biden said that “this nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each of us is equal before the law” – but that had now “fundamentally changed.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) chimed in, saying: “This disgraceful decision by the MAGA Supreme Court – which is comprised of three justices appointed by Mr. Trump himself – enables the former President to weaken our democracy by breaking the law.”
In her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor went as far as to write that the ruling reinvented post-presidential immunity “through brute force,” and that it “makes a mockery of the principle” that “no man is above the law.”
These reactions are ridiculous. That IS NOT what the Court did in the least. Chief Justice Roberts was 1000% right when he said that Justice Sotomayor’s words “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually” did. Apparently, Democrats believe the Supreme Court should have ruled on whether Donald’s actions in this case were “official” or “unofficial,” which wasn’t the question before them.
The case before the Supreme Court wasn’t whether presidents are simply “above the law” – the majority expressly said they are not. It was about how much protection the Constitution requires for official presidential conduct so that the threat of later criminal prosecution does not interfere with a president’s ability to perform the duties of the office. And the Court did not declare all of Trump’s conduct surrounding the 2020 election immune. It decided that some alleged conduct was protected, established the constitutional framework for evaluating the rest, and sent the case back to the lower courts to apply that framework.
Unfortunately, the same pattern emerged after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. CASA, significantly limited the power of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions – a decision Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called “an existential threat to the rule of law” that created “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes,” where “all bets are off.”
It’s important to remember that, even though this case involved birthright citizenship, the Court didn’t address the constitutionality of President Trump’s Executive Order to end it. The decision they made was specifically about what the proper role of the federal courts are within our constitutional system.
Based on their horrified reactions to the ruling, the political Left evidently believes that universal injunctions – which are court orders that halt the enforcement of government policies for everyone across the country, not just the parties involved in any specific case – are a tool that should be used to provide a check on the Executive Branch (at least as long as Donald Trump is president).
But it’s not the job of federal courts to conduct general oversight of the Executive Branch. The role of federal courts is to resolve cases and provide relief to plaintiffs consistent with the authority given to them by Congress. All the Supreme Court did was confirm that nationwide injunctions give individual judges, particularly at the district court level, outsized power – which they do.
It’s also important to remember that, at the same time they made this decision, the Court paused Trump’s birthright-citizenship order for thirty days, giving potential challengers time to block the order in one of several other ways.
One way was to reframe the legal challenge as a class-action lawsuit that sought to protect all children born to families without permanent legal status (class action lawsuits allow large groups of people who have the same issue a chance to come together and sue as a group. If a judge sides with the group against a federal law or policy, the judge can then issue a binding order that protects everyone in the group from being subject to the law or policy).
… which is exactly what happened. Within hours of the Court’s decision, one of the groups challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy refiled it as a class action and, within two weeks of that move, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante of New Hampshire approved a request to certify a class-action lawsuit against the administration on behalf of U.S.-born children or future children whose automatic citizenship could be jeopardized by the president’s executive order. Then he placed a new nationwide block on Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship.
That case eventually became Trump v. Barbara, and in June 2026 the Supreme Court finally confronted the underlying issue that CASA had deliberately avoided. This time, the administration lost: the Court held that Trump’s restriction on birthright citizenship could not stand. The two decisions therefore addressed very different constitutional questions. In CASA, the administration prevailed on the scope of federal courts’ power to issue universal injunctions. In Barbara, it lost on the underlying birthright-citizenship policy itself.
Let’s get real here. After Trump v. United States – the case where the high court left it in the hands of the lower court to decide whether Trump was acting “officially” or “unofficially” when he challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election – Democrats were lashing out, not over the merits of the case, but because Donald’s attorneys were able to delay his trial until after the 2024 election. Meaning they were mad that the Supreme Court didn’t play better politics – WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAY REPUBLICANS DO!
They were outmaneuvered yet again, and it infuriated them. So, what do they do? They start disparaging the United States Supreme Court, which undermines our institutions and cause people to lose trust in our system – WHICH, AGAIN, IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ACCUSE REPUBLICANS OF DOING!
Make no mistake, Democrats doing things like this is every bit as dangerous as anything Donald Trump has said or done regarding the Supreme Court or anything else. Undermining our institutions is undermining our institutions, regardless of how pious and patriotic you try to sound when you do it.
Check out 1787's Plan of Action for the Supreme Court here!