The US Supreme Court has handed Biden a historic series of defeats, reports Reuters

By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden endured a sustained series of defeats on the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rising conservative majority blew holes in his agenda and overturned precedents long valued by American liberals.

Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve it, the court – which includes six conservative justices and three liberals – overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade in 1973, which recognized a constitutional right to abortion.

The court in 2023 rejected his administration’s championed race-conscious admissions policies, which have long been used by colleges and universities to increase the number of black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, it expanded gun rights and rejected its administration’s position, and in 2024 it lifted a federal ban on “bump-stock” devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire as quickly as machine guns.

The justices blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief program in 2023. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a series of rulings that limited the power of federal regulators.

“I think it’s the toughest series of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt declared many New Deal programs unconstitutional in the 1930s,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, referring to another conservative court that frustrated a Democratic president.

John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department lawyer under former Republican President George W. Bush, said Biden suffered “an astonishing number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.

“It is hard to imagine 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 UC Berkeley School of Law.

Biden began his presidency three months after the U.S. Senate confirmed his Republican predecessor Donald Trump’s third nomination, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the court, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. In his first term, Trump appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime posts on the court alongside his conservative colleagues John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Biden only appointed a single judge. Ketanji Brown Jackson was the first black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, her 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 a chance to renew 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 is to be expected, Chemerinsky said, thanks to “the ideological difference between the majority of the Supreme Court and the Biden administration.”

Biden expressed frustration after some of his most devastating defeats, once describing the top U.S. justice department as “not a normal court.” In his final year in office, Biden proposed major changes, including 18-year term limits and binding and enforceable ethics rules.

In making the proposal, Biden said that “the extreme opinions expressed by the Supreme Court have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections.”

His proposal failed amid opposition from Republicans in Congress.

“RECIPE FOR DEFEAT”

According to Yoo, Biden’s administration failed to adapt when the court made clear that it would interpret the Constitution using the methods preferred by conservatives, based on the document’s “original understanding, history and tradition.”

By refusing to accept the change, the government has “made itself irrelevant on the most important constitutional issues of the day,” said Yoo, a former law clerk at Thomas. “That’s a recipe for defeat.”

Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called the “war on the administrative state” — aimed at reining in federal agencies that regulate many aspects of the American economy and life — and have found a receptive audience on this court, as Biden did in experienced several high-profile speeches.

Presidents, particularly Democratic ones, have increasingly relied on federal regulators to advance their policy goals in recent decades due to the declining productivity of a U.S. Congress often deadlocked in partisan political positions.

During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle called the “Major Questions Doctrine,” which gives justices broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of “significant economic and political significance” unless Congress is deemed to have approved them has clearly approved.

The court invoked that doctrine to block student debt relief that Biden promised as a candidate in 2020 and to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.

“The environmental law and student loan cases demonstrate the Court’s contempt for democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of movement in Congress means that executive action remains the only avenue for policy progress of any kind in the United States,” said Gautam, a professor at Cornell Law School said Hans.

In another blow to federal regulatory powers, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had given U.S. authorities deference in interpreting the laws they administer and ruled again against Biden’s administration. This teaching, known as “ Chevron (NYSE:) Deference” had long been opposed by conservatives and business interests.

Biden secured some victories.

In their final ruling of his presidency, the justices on Friday upheld a law signed by Biden and defended by his administration that would require the popular app TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or banned in the United States on national security grounds.

The court in 2024 upheld a federal law that the Biden administration had defended that makes gun ownership a crime for people experiencing domestic violence. It also maintained the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under the Democratic-backed Wall Street reform law of 2010.

But some other victories relied on the court’s finding that challengers to policies supported by the Biden administration lacked the standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and the matters could resurface in the future. These cases concerned: access to the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare.

These cases “didn’t really make an impact to validate the Biden administration’s policy goals,” Hans said.

These victories could prove to “prevent even greater losses” if the court were to revisit these issues in more detail and come to different conclusions, Hans added.

Trump immunity

Although Biden has often faced disappointments in court, Trump has racked up victories during his time in office – notably in three cases decided last year.

In the biggest case, the court accepted Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal crimes related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden – the first time it recognized any level of presidential immunity from prosecution . The ruling states that former presidents enjoy extensive immunity for official actions taken while in office.

Biden called the ruling “a dangerous precedent.”

Steve Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the Biden administration is amid longer-term trends in which the court has curtailed the power of federal agencies and increased presidential power.

These changes “will have a dramatic impact on the overall enforcement of federal law,” Schwinn said. “We will see this immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to take full advantage of these trends.”