The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a big win on June 27, 2025 by limiting the ability of judges to block Trump administration policies across the nation.
But Trump has not fared nearly as well in the lower courts, where he has lost a series of cases through different levels of the federal court system. On June 5, a single judge temporarily stopped the administration from preventing Harvard University from enrolling international students.
When presidents have tried to make big changes through executive orders, they have often hit a roadblock: A single federal judge, whether located in Seattle or Miami or anywhere in between, could stop these policies across the entire country.
But on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court significantly limited this judicial power. In Trump v. CASA Inc., a 6-3 majority ruled that federal courts likely lack the authority to issue “universal injunctions” that block government policies nationwide. The ruling means that going forward, federal judges can generally only block policies from being enforced against the specific plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, not against everyone in the country.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated a nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion and returned the authority to regulate abortion to the states.
The Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has vastly reshaped the national abortion landscape. Three years on, many states have severely restricted access to abortion care. But the decision has also had a less well-recognized outcome: It is increasingly jeopardizing access to contraception.
President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by its assault on the federal workforce. With Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of federal workers, jeopardizing services that working families across the country rely on. Yet the attacks on workers have gone beyond firing public sector workers and will not end just because Musk has left the government.
Federal judges and at times Supreme Court justices have repeatedly challenged – and blocked – President Donald Trump’s attempts to reshape fundamental aspects of American government.
Many of Trump’s more than 150 executive orders, including one aimed at eliminating the Department of Education, have been blocked by injunctions and lawsuits.
When a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled on May 16, 2025 that the Trump administration could not deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants without first giving them the right to due process in court, Trump attacked the court.
This much we know: Alabama’s gender-affirming care ban will be law for the foreseeable future.
Attorneys for transgender young people and their families sued to overturn it. But after a three-year battle, the plaintiffs and the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The attorneys for the families said their clients had “to make heart-wrenching decisions that no family should ever have to make, and they are each making the decisions that are right for them.”
To be sure, the broader legal landscape looks threatening. The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to uphold a similar ban on gender-affirming care in Tennessee. One can hardly blame parents for giving up on an unjust legal system.
President Donald Trump told an NBC interviewer on March 30, 2025 that he was “not joking” about a third term as president, despite such a term being barred by the Constitution.
“There are methods which you could do it,” he said in the interview.
For months, Trump has been hinting – in joking tones – that he’s interested in finding a way to continue in the White House past the legal limit of two terms. But the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution is clear that Trump can’t be elected again. The text of the amendment states:
I learned basic civics in my public school. But mostly, because it was more interesting, I also learned civics after school while watching the animated series “Schoolhouse Rock,” often with my abuela – my grandmother – who took care of me.
Back then, “Schoolhouse Rock” had a wonderful episode, “Three Ring Government.” In singing narration, the characters explained “about the government, and how it’s arranged, divided in three, like a three-ring circus.”
For many Americans, Donald Trump’s head-spinning array of executive orders in the early days of his second term looks like an unprecedented effort to roll back democracy and the rights and liberties of American citizens.
But it isn’t unprecedented.
As we have written, American history is not a steady march toward greater equality, democracy, and individual rights. America’s commitment to these liberal values has competed with an alternative set of illiberal values that hold that full American citizenship should be limited by race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
Valentine's Day is all about the power of love. Here are five times people used their First Amendment freedoms to promote love – or used love as a form of protest.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to implement sweeping policy changes affecting American immigration and immigrants, one of the issues under scrutiny by his allies appears to be birthright citizenship – the declaration in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationalities or immigration status.
Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.
Back on the morning of Jan. 26, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the state’s prison officials for a “textbook” nitrogen gas execution.
“The [Alabama Department of Corrections] deserve a great deal of thanks and credit for being willing to be the one to step up, first in the country to do so,” Marshall said, adding that he suspected “many states will follow.”
This is what happened. Kenneth Eugene Smith convulsed for two minutes and gasped for at least seven more as he choked to death.
Abortion is on the agenda not just in the United States but worldwide.
A majority of people in developed democracies increasingly favor abortion rights and self-determination. And, in most places, laws are shifting to reflect public opinion. Since 2020, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, among others, have legalized abortion. In 2024, France adopted the right to an abortion as a “guaranteed freedom” in its constitution.
Abortion is a critical, if not the most important, issue for many voters – especially women, according to polls – ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August 2024, she has been vocal about her support for abortion rights. Specifically, she supports Congress passing a federal law that would protect abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court in 2022 overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down federal abortion rights affects much more than reproductive health.
Exhibit A: the battle over Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming medical care.
Here’s some background. Gov. Kay Ivey signed the law, which prohibits the prescription of puberty blockers and hormones to transgender youth under the age of 19, in April 2022. U.S. District Judge Liles C. Burke blocked it the following month. The judge wrote that the statute burdened parents’ ability to make decisions for their children.
Few constitutional principles are more familiar to the average American than the separation of church and state.
According to the Pew Research Center, 73% of adults agree that religion should be kept separate from government policies. To be sure, support varies by political or religious affiliation – with Democrats supporting the principle in much higher numbers – and depending on the specific issue, such as prayer in public schools or displays of the Ten Commandments monuments. Yet only 19% of Americans say the United States should abandon the principle of church-state separation.
That said, criticism appears to be on the rise, particularly among political and religious conservatives. And such criticism comes from the top.
Two recent Supreme Court rulings on congressional redistricting will have starkly different consequences for Black voters in the 2024 election.
One ruling boosted Black voting power in Louisiana, while another decision upheld a South Carolina congressional map that the lower court had declared “illegal racial gerrymandering.”
Despite these seemingly contradictory outcomes, there is a through line.
Jenice Fountain could not believe what she was hearing.
Was that Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, on talk radio, threatening to go after her tiny organization, which is dedicated to supporting pregnant Alabamians seeking legal abortion care?
For the 2022 midterm elections, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use congressional districts that violated the law and diluted the voting power of Black citizens.
A 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court in February 2022 let Alabama use these illegal districts during the election while the court heard the state’s appeal on the case known as Allen v. Milligan. In that case, voters had sued Alabama, arguing that its new congressional district map violated the Voting Rights Act by unfairly reducing Black voting power. Only one of seven congressional districts on Alabama’s new map had a majority Black population despite Black residents making up a quarter of the state’s population.
Since the end of the 19th century, the filibuster—a political procedure used in the U.S. Senate by one or more members to delay or block legislation—has emerged as a preeminent institutional tool used to deny rights and liberties to tens of millions of Black and brown Americans. Over the past two centuries, it has been abused repeatedly during some of the darkest periods of America’s history to prevent the passage of legislation that would protect the civil rights and voting rights of Black Americans, including to block anti-lynching legislation.
