By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden suffered a series of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose ascendant conservative majority punched holes in his agenda and shattered precedents long cherished by American liberals.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve it, the court – which has six conservative and three liberal justices – in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
The court in 2023 threw out race-conscious admissions policies championed by his administration that had long been used by colleges and universities to increase their numbers of black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, he expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration’s position, and similarly, in 2024, he struck down a federal ban on “backup” devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire quickly like machine guns.
Justices blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief plan in 2023. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency in a series of rulings limiting the power federal regulatory agencies.
“I think this is the toughest string of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s declared many New Deal programs unconstitutional,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of Chicago Law School. the University of California at Berkeley, referring to another conservative court that frustrated a Democratic president.
John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department attorney under former Republican President George W. Bush, said Biden had experienced “an incredible number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It’s hard to imagine that any other president in our lifetime has lost so many high-profile cases on issues so close to his constitutional agenda,” said Yoo, now a professor at the University’s law school. UC Berkeley.
Biden began his presidency three months after the U.S. Senate confirmed his Republican predecessor Donald Trump’s third nomination to the Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. During his first term, Trump also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime positions on the court alongside fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden has only nominated one justice. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced a retired liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, his confirmation did not change the Court’s ideological collapse.
Biden’s presidency ends Monday with Trump’s inauguration for a second term.
Trump could have an opportunity to rejuvenate the Court’s conservative majority by replacing some or all of its top three conservatives with younger jurists — and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves during his term.
Biden’s painful record in major cases was predictable, Chemerinsky said, thanks to “the ideological difference between the Supreme Court majority and the Biden administration.”
Biden has expressed frustration after some of his most crushing defeats, at one point calling America’s highest court “not a normal court.” In his final year in office, Biden proposed major changes, including term limits of 18 years and binding, enforceable ethics rules.
In making the proposal, Biden said the “extreme opinions issued by the Supreme Court have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections.”
His proposal came to nothing, given the opposition of Republicans in Congress.
‘RECIPE FOR DEFEAT’
According to Yoo, the Biden administration failed to adapt when the court made clear that it would interpret the Constitution using methods favored by conservatives, based on “understanding, history and tradition originals” of the document.
By refusing to accept the change, the administration “made itself useless on the most important constitutional issues of the day,” said Yoo, a former Thomas law clerk. “It’s a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called a “war on the administrative state” – aimed at reining in the federal agencies that regulate many aspects of business and American life – and have found a receptive audience in this Court, as Biden learned at several high-profile conferences. case.
In recent decades, presidents, particularly Democrats, have increasingly relied on federal regulatory agencies to advance their policy goals due to the declining productivity of an often deadlocked U.S. Congress on partisan lines.
During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the major issues doctrine, which gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of “great economic and political importance” unless it should only be considered that Congress has clearly authorized them.
The court invoked this doctrine to block the student debt relief plan Biden promised as a candidate in 2020 and to roll back the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.
“The environmental law and student loan cases show the extent to which the court disdains Democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of movement in Congress means that executive action remains the only path to any kind of political progress in the United States,” said Gautam, a professor at Cornell Law School. Hans said.
In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had shown deference to U.S. agencies in interpreting the laws they administer, once again ruling against the Biden administration. This doctrine, known as “ Chevron (NYSE:) deference,” has long been contested by conservatives and business interests.
Biden has had some victories.
In their latest ruling under his presidency, the justices on Friday upheld a law signed by Biden and championed by his administration requiring the popular app TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or be banned in the United States on national security grounds.
In 2024, the court upheld a federal law championed by the Biden administration that makes it a crime to possess firearms for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. It also preserved the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created as part of the Democratic-backed 2010 Wall Street reform legislation.
But other victories were based on the court’s finding that opponents of policies backed by the Biden administration lacked the legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues have not been resolved and that the cases may recur in the future. These cases involved: access to mifepristone, an abortion pill; Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
These cases “didn’t really help validate the policy goals of the Biden administration,” Hans said.
These victories could prove to have “averted even greater losses” if the court addresses these issues again in more depth and reaches different results, Hans added.
TRUMP IMMUNITY
Although Biden was often disappointed in court, Trump, when out of office, racked up victories — particularly in three cases decided last year.
In the largest of them, the court granted Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges involving his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden – the first time that he recognized some degree of presidential immunity from prosecution. The ruling states that former presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts performed while in office.
Biden called the decision a “dangerous precedent.”
Steve Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the Biden administration is in the midst of longer-term trends in which the court has reduced the power of federal agencies and strengthened the power of the presidency.
These changes “will have dramatic impacts on federal law enforcement at all levels,” Schwinn said. “We will see it immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to take full advantage of these trends.”
