After three federal judges in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington issued injunctions preventing Trump’s order from taking effect nationwide, the administration argued that federal courts should award relief only to the parties to the suit. And it seems the high court agreed. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained how the practice of granting universal injunctions came about fairly recently: “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” she wrote, adding: “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
And indeed, legal analysts have argued that the powerful judicial tool has prevented Republican and Democratic presidents alike from governing effectively. “In the last decade or so, the nationwide injunction has basically been a veto on the executive branch. When the president does something, a district court judge blocks it. Now, I think it’s harder to do that,” Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law, told TMD. “Courts are designed to grant relief to parties before them,” he added, “not everyone in the world.”
So, where does the decision leave birthright citizenship? For now, the issue will remain unresolved—the high court sent the cases back to the lower courts, where federal judges will adjust their rulings accordingly. In the meantime, Trump’s executive order will remain paused for at least 30 days from Friday.
In this ruling and others of the term, Case Western Reserve University professor Jonathan Entin said he was struck by “the extent of deference to or sympathy for executive power,” noting that nearly all of the Republican-appointed justices (with the exception of Barrett) worked in the executive branch at some point in their career. “Where you stand depends on where you sit,” he told TMD. “If your prior governmental experience has been in the executive branch, you’re likely to have thought about things from an executive branch perspective.”
Others have argued the ruling is not an outright win for the Trump administration as it seeks to push its birthright citizenship order through. Barrett expressly left open the possibility of nationwide block through class-action litigation, and, as of Monday, at least two class-action suits challenging the order have been filed. William Powell, a lawyer who filed one of the suits and senior counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told reporters Friday that he believed the relief would be “just as effective, just as broad as the nationwide injunction that was previously in place.”
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
Also on Friday, the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ ability to enforce a law that seeks to shield minors from sexual content online. An adult entertainment trade association argued that the legislation, by requiring people to verify their ages on porn websites, violated the First Amendment by interfering with adults’ ability to access protected speech. But in a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines, the justices affirmed the state’s authority to require age verification for such websites.
The ruling could have nationwide reverberations, with at least 20 states imposing age limits on sensitive content online. It also suggests a new approach from the high court, which in the 2004 case Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, also known as Ashcroft II, struck down a federal law seeking to regulate online content deemed harmful to minors. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas attributed the shift to changing circumstances: “With the rise of the smartphone and instant streaming, many adolescents can now access vast libraries of video content—both benign and obscene—at almost any time and place, with an ease that would have been unimaginable at the time of … Ashcroft II.”
United States v. Skrmetti
In another 6-3 decision dividing conservative and liberal justices, the court upheld a Tennessee law that bars medical providers from providing hormone therapy and puberty blockers to transgender minors. Three transgender teenagers, together with their parents and a doctor, argued that the ban constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which requires the government to treat similarly situated individuals equally. But the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the law to take effect, and, in June, the Supreme Court affirmed its decision.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts maintained that the law is not subject to heightened scrutiny because it bars health care providers from offering the treatments to minors “for certain medical uses” regardless of their sex. According to an analysis by KFF, similar bans in 25 states will stand as a result of the ruling.
Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services
In a unanimous decision last month, the Supreme Court sided with an Ohio woman who claimed she was discriminated against after her employer denied her a promotion because she is heterosexual. The justices rejected a lower court ruling stating that members of a majority group must meet a heightened bar to prove that they’ve been the victim of discrimination.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned the court’s nine-page decision, arguing that employment discrimination law extends protections to individuals under the same standards. “By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” she wrote.
Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond
This Supreme Court has often sided with religious institutions seeking funds that are available to secular recipients. But in a May decision from which Barrett recused herself, the court was evenly divided on whether the state of Oklahoma can put public funding toward the country’s first religious charter school.
The case began in 2023, when an Oklahoma school board approved an online Catholic school formed with the explicit purpose of furthering “the evangelizing mission of the church.” Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, filed a lawsuit with the state’s Supreme Court, arguing that a taxpayer-funded religious school would violate both state law and the U.S. Constitution. The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed, blocking the school’s establishment, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s split order left that ruling in place.
Mahmoud v. Taylor
In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the high court ruled in favor of Maryland parents seeking to opt their elementary school children out of lessons related to sexual orientation and gender identity due to religious objections. The decision reversed a lower court decision determining that simply encountering other views didn’t interfere with the children’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued the decision posed a threat to “the very essence of public education.”
Writing for the majority, however, Justice Samuel Alito contended that the school board’s decision to read children LGBTQ-themed books without notifying their parents—and allowing them the opportunity to opt their students out—“substantially interferes with the religious development of their children and imposes the kind of burden on religious exercise” that the Supreme Court ruled against in the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which upheld right of Amish parents to pull their children out of school before the age of 16.
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