By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years in office, Democrat Joe Biden has suffered a sustained string of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose emerging conservative majority has blown holes in his agenda and overturned precedents long held by American liberals.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve this right, in 2022 the court – which includes six conservative justices and three liberals – overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
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The court in 2023 rejected the race-conscious admissions policies championed by his administration and long used by colleges and universities to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, it expanded gun rights and rejected his administration’s position, and similarly in 2024 it invalidated a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The justices blocked Biden’s plan for $430 billion in student loan repayments by 2023. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a series of rulings limiting the power of federal regulators.
“I think this is the worst set of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt had many New Deal programs declared unconstitutional in the 1930s,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, referring to another conservative court that saw a Democratic president frustrated.
John Yoo, who worked as a Justice Department attorney under Republican former President George W. Bush, said Biden has experienced “an astonishing number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It is difficult to think of another president in our lifetime who has lost so many high-profile cases on issues so near and dear to his constitutional agenda,” said Yoo, now a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Biden began his presidency three months after the US Senate confirmed his Republican predecessor Donald Trump’s third appointment to the court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. Trump also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime posts on the court in his first term, along with fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden appointed only one judge. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first black woman to serve on the field. Because Jackson replaced a retiring fellow liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, her confirmation did not change the court’s ideological collapse.
Biden’s presidency ends on 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 the top three conservatives with younger jurists — and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves during his term.
Biden’s painful record on major cases was expected, Chemerinsky said, thanks to “the ideological difference between the Supreme Court majority and the Biden administration.”
Biden expressed frustration after some of his most searing defeats, at one point describing America’s top judicial body as “not a normal court.” In his final year as president, Biden proposed major changes, including an 18-year term and binding and enforceable ethics rules.
In making the proposal, Biden said that “extreme opinions expressed by the Supreme Court have undermined long-standing civil rights principles and protections.”
His proposal went nowhere, given the opposition from Republicans in Congress.
‘PRICE 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 the “original understanding, history and tradition” of the document.
By refusing to accept this change, the government “made itself irrelevant on the most important constitutional issues of the time,” said Yoo, a former clerk to Thomas. “That’s a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called a “war on the administrative state” — aiming to rein in federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life — and have found a receptive audience on this court, as Biden learned in several high-profile conversations. fallen.
Presidents, especially Democratic ones, have increasingly relied on federal regulators to achieve their policy goals in recent decades, reflecting the declining productivity of a U.S. Congress that has often been deadlocked along partisan lines.
During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, the so-called “big questions doctrine,” which gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of “enormous economic and political significance” unless it is deemed Congress has clearly approved this.
The court invoked this doctrine to block the student debt relief plan that Biden promised as a 2020 candidate and to roll back the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.
“The environmental law and student loan cases demonstrate the court’s disdain for democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of congressional action means executive action remains the only avenue for any kind of policy progress in the U.S.,” said Gautam, a professor at the Cornell Law School. said Hans.
In a new blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had given deference to U.S. agencies in interpreting the laws they administer, ruling again against the Biden administration. This doctrine, known as “Chevron deference,” has long been opposed by conservatives and business interests.
Biden did have some victories.
In their final ruling of his presidency, the justices on Friday upheld a law signed by Biden and championed by his administration that requires the popular app TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or kept in the United States for national security reasons be prohibited.
The court in 2024 upheld a federal law that the Biden administration defended that makes it a crime for people experiencing domestic violence to own guns. It also retained the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under the Democratic-backed 2010 Wall Street reform legislation.
But some other victories were based on the court’s finding that challengers to the Biden administration’s backed policies lacked the necessary legal standing to bring a lawsuit, meaning the underlying legal issues had not been resolved and that things could return in the future. These cases concerned: access to the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden’s Immigration Enforcement Priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.
These cases “didn’t really sound like an endorsement of the Biden administration’s political objectives,” Hans said.
These victories may prove to have “prevented even greater losses” if the court revisits these issues in a more in-depth manner and reaches different outcomes, Hans added.
TRUMP IMMUNITY
Even though Biden often experienced disappointment in court, Trump scored victories in his absence — especially in three cases decided last year.
In the largest of these, the court embraced Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden — the first time it recognized some degree of presidential immunity from prosecution . The ruling stated that former presidents have broad immunity from official acts performed while in office.
Biden called the ruling “a dangerous precedent.”
Steve Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the Biden administration was in the midst of a long-term trend in which the court has limited the power of federal agencies and increased the power of the presidency.
These shifts “will have dramatic consequences for enforcement of federal law across the board,” Schwinn said. “We will see this immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has pledged to take full advantage of these trends.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)