Written by John Crozel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden has suffered a steady string of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rising conservative majority has poked holes in his agenda and shattered precedents long cherished by American liberals.
Despite the Biden administration's efforts to preserve it, the court — which includes six conservative and three liberal justices — in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
The court in 2023 rejected racially sensitive admissions policies championed by his administration and which colleges and universities have long used to boost the numbers of Black, Latino and other minority students. In 2022, she expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration's position, and likewise in 2024, she rescinded a federal ban on “stock” devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The justices blocked Biden's $430 billion student loan relief plan in 2023. They also limited the scope of the EPA as part of a series of rulings that limit the power of federal regulatory agencies.
“I think it's the hardest string of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s declared many New Deal programs unconstitutional,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, referring to another conservative court that thwarted a Democratic president.
John Yoo, who worked as a Justice Department lawyer under former Republican President George W. Bush, said Biden suffered a “staggering number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It's hard 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 Yu, now a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Biden began his presidency three months after the US Senate confirmed the appointment of his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, as a third member of the court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, forming a conservative majority of 6-3. In his first term, Trump also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime positions on the court alongside fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden has appointed only one judge. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced fellow retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer, her confirmation did not change the court's ideological breakdown.
Biden's presidency ends on Monday with Trump's inauguration for a second term.
Trump may get a chance to replenish the court's conservative majority by replacing some or all of the three senior conservatives with younger jurists — and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves during his term.
Chemerinsky said Biden's painful record on major cases was expected, thanks to “the ideological difference between the Supreme Court majority and the Biden administration.”
Biden expressed frustration after some of his painful defeats, at one point describing America's highest judicial body as “no ordinary court.” In his final year in office, Biden proposed major changes including 18-year term limits and binding, enforceable ethics rules.
In introducing the proposal, Biden said the Supreme Court's “extreme opinions have undermined long-standing civil rights principles and protections.”
His proposal did not achieve any results, due to opposition from Republicans in Congress.
“Recipe for defeat”
According to Liu, the Biden administration failed to accommodate 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 the change, the administration “made itself irrelevant to the most important constitutional questions of the time,” said Yu, a former law clerk for Thomas. “This is a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called the “war on the administrative state” — aiming to rein in the federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life — and they have found a receptive audience on this court, as Biden has learned in many prominent figures. Cases.
Presidents, especially Democrats, in recent decades have increasingly relied on federal regulators to advance their political goals due to the declining productivity of a U.S. Congress that has often deadlocked along partisan lines.
During Biden's term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the Big Questions Doctrine, which gives justices broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of “broad economic and political significance” unless Congress is seen to have clearly authorized them.
The court invoked this principle to block the student debt relief plan Biden promised as a candidate in 2020 and to overturn 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 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. Hans said.
In another blow to federal regulatory authority, the court in 2024 overturned a 1984 precedent that gave deference to US agencies in interpreting the laws they administer, again ruling against the Biden administration. This doctrine is known as Chevron (NYSE:) Respect,” has long been opposed by conservatives and business interests.
Biden has achieved 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 championed by the Biden administration that makes gun possession a crime for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. It also maintained the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under Democratic-backed 2010 Wall Street reform legislation.
But some other victories were based on the court's finding that challengers to policies backed by the Biden administration lacked the legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and matters could come back in the future. These cases included: obtaining the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden's immigration enforcement priorities; And the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
These cases “had no real resonance to validate the Biden administration’s policy goals,” Hans said.
Hans added that these victories may have “prevented greater losses” if the court had addressed these issues again in a more complete manner and reached different results.
Trump's immunity
Even as Biden often suffered disappointment on the court, Trump achieved victories while out of office — particularly in three cases decided last year.
In the largest of those cases, the court adopted Trump's request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges related to his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to Biden – the first time it has recognized any degree of presidential immunity from prosecution. The ruling stipulates that former presidents enjoy broad immunity with respect to official acts they carry out while holding office.
Biden called the ruling a “dangerous precedent.”
Steve Schoen, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the Biden administration finds itself in the middle of long-term trends in which the court has reduced the power of federal agencies and strengthened the power of the presidency.
These shifts “will have enormous impacts on federal law enforcement across the board,” Schoen said. “We will see that immediately in a second Trump administration, with a president who promises to take full advantage of these trends.”
