By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden experienced a sustained series of defeats on the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rising conservative majority blew holes in his agenda and destroyed 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, overturned the historic Roe v. decision in 2022. Wade in 1973 that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
In 2023, the court rejected race-conscious admissions policies championed by his administration and that had long been used by colleges and universities to increase the number of black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, he expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration’s position, and similarly in 2024 invalidated a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The judges blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief plan in 2023. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a series of rulings limiting the power of federal regulatory agencies.
“I think it’s the toughest series of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s had many New Deal programs declared unconstitutional,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, 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 experienced “a staggering number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It’s hard to think of another president in our lifetimes 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 US Senate confirmed his Republican predecessor Donald Trump’s third appointee to the court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. In his first term, Trump also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime seats on the court along with their conservative colleagues John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden appointed only one judge. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced a retiring fellow 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 may have a chance to rejuvenate the court’s conservative majority by replacing some or all of his three senior 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 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 toughest losses, at one point describing America’s highest judicial body as “not a normal court.” In his final year in office, Biden proposed major changes, including 18-year term limits and binding, enforceable ethics rules.
In making the proposal, Biden said that “the extreme opinions the Supreme Court has handed down have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections.”
His proposal went nowhere, given opposition from 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 the document’s “original understanding, history, and tradition.”
By refusing to accept this change, the administration “made itself irrelevant on the most important constitutional issues of the day,” said Yoo, Thomas’ former law clerk. “That’s a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called a “war on the administrative state” – aiming to control the federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life – and have found a receptive audience in this court, as Biden learned in several high-profile speeches. cases.
In recent decades, presidents, particularly Democrats, have increasingly relied on federal regulatory agencies to advance their policy goals due to the declining productivity of a U.S. Congress often gridlocked along partisan lines.
During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the major issues doctrine, that gives judges broad discretion to invalidate actions by executive agencies of “vast economic and political importance” unless the Congress clearly authorized them.
The court invoked this doctrine to block the student debt relief plan that Biden had 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 how dismissive the court is toward 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. said Hans.
In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had given deference to U.S. agencies when interpreting the laws they administer, again ruling against the Biden administration. This doctrine, known as “ Chevron (NYSE:) deference”, had long been rejected by conservatives and business interests.
Biden scored some victories.
In their latest ruling during his presidency, the justices on Friday upheld a law signed by Biden and championed by his administration that requires the popular TikTok app to be sold by its Chinese parent company or 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 for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns. It also preserved the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under the 2010 Wall Street reform legislation backed by Democrats.
But some other victories were based on the court’s conclusion that opponents of policies backed by the Biden administration lacked the necessary legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and the issues could arise again. in the future. These cases involved: access to the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare.
These cases “didn’t really resonate to validate the policy goals of the Biden administration,” Hans said.
These victories can “avoid even greater losses” if the court revisits these issues more thoroughly and reaches different results, Hans added.
TRUMP’S IMMUNITY
While Biden often experienced disappointments in court, Trump, while out of office, racked up victories, particularly in three cases decided last year.
In the largest of them, the court accepted 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 any degree of presidential immunity from the prosecution. The ruling established that former presidents have broad immunity for official acts performed 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 has found itself in the midst of long-term trends in which the court has restricted the power of federal agencies and enhanced the power of the presidency.
These changes “will have dramatic impacts on federal law enforcement across the board,” Schwinn said. “We will see this immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to make the most of these trends.”