The Journal. - The Supreme Court’s Season Finale, Explained

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

SCOTUS wrapped up a busy session, giving states room to restrict transgender medical care for minors, allowing the federal government to strip legal status for Venezuelan migrants and, in one of its final acts on Friday, clipping the power of federal judges to block President Trump’s policies nationwide. Jessica Mendoza speaks to WSJ’s Jess Bravin about the emergency cases filling the Supreme Court schedule and what that signals for the future. Further Listening: -Is There an Ethics Problem at the Supreme Court?  -Trump 2.0: A Showdown With the Judiciary  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last Friday, the Supreme Court issued its final rulings of the session, and they included a major decision. The decision that the entire country was waiting for, the Supreme Court ruled on universal injunctions. This is the power of a single judge to block an executive order for the entire country. The decision, which resulted from a case related to an executive order on birthright citizenship. This is a big win for President Trump. The court ruled 6-3 along partisan lines.

That ruling wasn't even on the Supreme Court's original schedule. It's one of many cases this session that the justices were asked to weigh in on. Our colleague Jess Braven covers the High Court, and he says that it's those cases that are coming to define this moment in the Court's history. I think this last Supreme Court session, how it's remembered, will depend a lot on what happens in the next Supreme Court session. And the reason is this, is that the most suspenseful

and perhaps important decisions that we got in this past term were not from the regular docket. I mean, historically, those have been the most important cases, but not this term. The ones that I think have been most significant have been what they call the emergency docket or the shadow docket. And we won't have final decisions on the merits

of those arguments, at least until the end of next term. And it looks good for the administration based on most of the emergency decisions the Supreme Court has made, but they're still preliminary decisions. So I think we have to say this is really the first act, and there's kind of a cliffhanger. Another season of SCOTUS under Trump 2.0. Right. Haven't jumped the shark yet. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, June 30th.

Coming up on the show, the SCOTUS season finale explained. So President Trump took office in late January, and things heated up almost immediately. How did his administration sort of change things for the court? Change the schedule for the court in some ways? Well, in one way it was not a big surprise. President Trump made clear he had a very ambitious, aggressive agenda. And so, the things that he was talking about, the things that his supporters were talking about, were very aggressive interpretations of power, very dramatic changes to the way the government was organized and operated. And the president, as promised, the day he

took office, he began issuing executive orders and presidential statements and so forth that very sharply tried to change a lot of things about the government. Many of those executive orders met legal challenges and ended up in federal court. Normally, what happens in those cases is that one side wins and the other side files an appeal to a higher court. That process can continue until the case reaches the highest court in the land.

But Jess says that this year, a lot of cases wound up in front of the Supreme Court through a sort of shortcut, the emergency docket. It's the emergency docket because it involves asking the Supreme Court to intervene in litigation that's already going on. So there's already a lawsuit in the lower courts and you think that they are so wrong

that if this lower court order is allowed to remain in effect, your rights will be so damaged that it's an emergency. You need the Supreme Court to, like the super friends, to come in in an emergency and rescue you from the villainous lower courts that are interfering with your rights. And so that's what it is. It's an emergency. Has the emergency docket, has that been more packed than usual?

Have we seen a lot more of them this year? Yes, it has. And that's because there are many, many more challenges to Trump administration policies. And that's because there are many, many more provisional orders blocking those policies, which come from many, many more lawsuits. I mean, what does that mean for the court? How are they able to keep up with that new workload?

It's a lot more work for them, and this is likely to continue over this summer. So it has changed their workload a lot, and justices have sometimes talked about that, sometimes viewing it as kind of an annoyance, sometimes more substantively into saying, look, we're making very consequential decisions based on very little information, and that's a problem, and maybe we should be having more hearings or find a way to make this at least more regular than it is. Right, these cases are these big, impactful decisions,

and they only have so much time to really review the information, and they're not hearing oral arguments, It's just case after case after case. This year, the court has taken emergency cases over a variety of the Trump administration's actions. They include a ban on transgender service members in the military, the removal of officials from independent government agencies, and the repeal of temporary protected status for some migrants. In those cases, and others like them,

the court has often ruled in favor of the administration, allowing the policy changes to take place. And so, after the rulings from this session, how would you characterize how this Supreme Court views presidential authority and the power of the executive branch? This Supreme Court is very deferential to that. And so the Supreme Court, the way they're approaching it, at least the majority, is that we're not ruling on Donald Trump. We're ruling on like a generic president.

Most presidents have not tried across the board so many aggressive assertions of unilateral power. And so you could say this court is trying to be very neutral and not have like a Trump-specific type of decision. So we know this is a court that is very deferential to executive power, and that's the message. And on the very last day of this term, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that could change the relationship between the judicial and executive branches of government. That's next.

One of the first executive orders President Trump issued when he took office in January had to do with birthright citizenship. That's the constitutional right that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. He issued an order that said, anyone born in the United States whose parents, or at least who does not have one parent with lawful permanent residency, does not get U.S. citizenship.

And that's an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that's never been applied before. It's always been applied since the 19th century as if you're born in the United States, you're a citizen regardless of your parents' legal status. And so he wanted to change that. And the way he wanted to change that was not by amending the Constitution, which is normally how you change it. It was to say the interpretation of the Constitution that has been the norm for more than a century is wrong, my interpretation

is right, and I'm just going to impose it." And that got immediate pushback. That pushback took the form of lawsuits, brought to court by New Jersey and other Democratic-led states, and one filed by pregnant women concerned about their future children's status. In each case, the Trump administration lost in the lower courts, and federal judges issued nationwide injunctions that stopped the policy from taking effect. In response, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to step in. And it asked the Supreme Court not to say

we are right on the issue, but to say, simply said, tell the lower courts that they have exceeded their power in blocking the policy nationwide. We're not going to challenge the court's right to protect the individual plaintiff from our allegedly illegal action. The person who goes to court, they get an injunction, they are protected, but it shouldn't protect anybody else. Only the litigant. Trump and his administration say that federal judges should not have the power to issue

nationwide injunctions. And they aren't the only ones. Democratic presidents don't like it when a very conservative judge in South Texas issues a ruling that, you know, takes mythopristone off the market or, you know, they don't like that either. And they don't think it's unfair that, you unfair that the litigant can pick a judge somewhere who they think they're gonna get a good hearing from and then stop a project for the whole country.

And as one government lawyer said, our opponents, they just have to win somewhere once. We have to win every single case that's brought against us everywhere in the country about a policy in order to implement our policy. So that question of universal injunctions has been brewing for years, but it has really been an issue for the Trump administration

because they've accused judges who've enjoined some of their policies of being radicals and insurrectionists and tyrannical. So this decision isn't actually about birthright citizenship. It's about whether or not lower courts have the power to pause policy changes that apply nationwide. And in the end, the court ruled in favor of the Trump administration. Do we know what the majority said in its decision?

Yes, the majority said that federal courts don't have a license to stop the government from acting illegally across the board. They only have a license to decide cases that are in front of them between particular litigants. And therefore, they should not issue injunctions that go beyond what is necessary to provide relief to the party before it. What did the president say with regards to this ruling? President was overjoyed. This was a big decision. An amazing decision, one that we're very happy about.

So this is one that he won, at least on this procedural thing, and he was delighted about it. And he thanked the justices and the majority by name for ruling in his favor. To be clear, the court did not weigh on the merits of the case. Arguments over birthright citizenship will likely take place next session. And though the ruling limits the use of nationwide injunctions, the justices did outline cases where federal judges can put a hold on national policy changes. Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave an example of how a remedy can affect everybody even though it's only done in the name of one party.

And the example she gave was this, let's say your neighbor is playing the music too loud at night and you get like a court order or something like turn off the radio after 10 p.m. or something, right? Well, there's no way to enforce that without also bringing relief to all the other people in the neighborhood. So in other words, all the neighbors don't have to file their own lawsuit in municipal court against the guy

with the music after 10 p.m., right? Only one person has to do that, and then if he has to turn off the music, everyone benefits. So she gave us an example of how there's a universal remedy. You know, the only way to give a remedy to the party is to do it in a way that protects everybody. And so, is this ruling as big a victory as Trump says?

It was a significant victory, and it was also significant in that the court really accepted the, you know, procedural framework that the court really accepted the procedural framework that the Justice Department put forward. So it was a big victory. There's no question about that. Does it allow him to do anything he wants, anytime, anywhere? No, it doesn't.

But it makes it easier for the government to implement its policies. So it gives them more of an edge. How much of an edge, we don't know. What about for the balance of power in government more broadly? What does this ruling mean for that? Does it limit the ability of the judicial branch to check the power of the executive branch? It limits the ability of the lower courts to do it.

It doesn't limit the ability of the Supreme Court to do it. In other words, if there's ever any occasion where there's a case before them where they believe that they need to step in, they can always do that. So they can always, and in fact, Justice Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion pointed this out. He said, you know, look, however these lower court injunctions go, people are gonna race up to us either way

and we're gonna get involved if it's that big an issue, sooner probably rather than later. So involved if it's that big an issue, sooner probably rather than later. So maybe this is not that big a deal, because we already were deciding these, you know, whether these injunctions should stay or not up until now. And so, at least for now, the message is, you know, this is what you voted for, America,

and we're not going to interfere with it, you know, unless we feel that we absolutely must. So, Jess, how significant is this moment in SCOTUS history? I mean, I have to say that I think this is a real watershed moment for the Supreme Court, for the separation of powers, because we've never seen a situation where a president has been so aggressive

in pushing the limits of his own power and Congress has been acquiescent to those decisions. The Supreme Court is really the last official check on what the president can do. And what it decides the president can do is going to set the terms not just for this guy, but for all the ones in the future. So this is a real essential time in defining not just what the Supreme Court is and what the presidency is, but really what is the nature of the American constitutional structure. And is it one where maybe you have three co-equal branches, but one is more co-equal than others,

and that's the presidency. I mean, that's the presidency. I mean, that's certainly what President Trump is implementing. I mean, that's what his actions reflect. And the extent to which that is true is something that's going to be decided through a series of cases by the Supreme Court. That's all for today, Monday, June 30th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.