By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden experienced a sustained series of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose ascendant conservative majority blew holes in his agenda and dashed precedents long cherished by American liberals.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve it, the court – which has six conservative justices and three liberals – in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
The court in 2023 rejected race-conscious admissions policies defended by his administration that long had been used by colleges and universities to increase their numbers of Black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, it expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration’s position, and similarly in 2024 it invalidated a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The justices blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief plan in 2023. They also limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s reach as part of a series of rulings curbing the power federal regulatory agencies.
“I think it is 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 Law School, referring to another conservative court that frustrated a Democratic president.
John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department lawyer under Republican former President George W. Bush, said Biden experienced “an amazing number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It’s hard to think of another president in our lifetimes who 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 appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. Trump in his first term also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime posts on the court alongside fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden appointed just a single justice. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced a retiring fellow 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 rejuvenate the court’s conservative majority by replacing some or all of its three most senior conservatives with younger jurists – and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves during his term.
Biden’s painful record in major cases was to be expected, Chemerinsky said, thanks to “the ideological difference between the Supreme Court’s majority and the Biden administration.”
Biden expressed frustration after some of his most searing defeats, at one point describing the top U.S. judicial body as “not a normal court.” In his last year in office, Biden proposed major changes including term limits of 18 years and binding and enforceable ethics rules.
In making the proposal, Biden said that “extreme opinions that the Supreme Court has handed down have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections.”
His proposal went nowhere, given opposition by Republicans in Congress.
‘RECIPE FOR DEFEAT’
According to Yoo, Biden’s administration failed to adapt when the court made clear 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 “rendered itself irrelevant on the most important constitutional questions of the day,” said Yoo, a former law clerk to Thomas. “That is a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called a “war on the administrative state” – aiming to rein in federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life – and have found a receptive audience with this court, as Biden learned in several high-profile cases.
Presidents, particularly Democratic ones, in recent decades increasingly have relied upon federal regulatory agencies to advance their policy goals due to the decreasing productivity of a U.S. Congress often deadlocked along partisan lines.
During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the major questions doctrine, that gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions of “vast economic and political significance” unless it is deemed that 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 disdainful the court is of Democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of congressional movement means that executive action remains the only avenue for any kind of policy progress in the U.S.,” Cornell Law School professor Gautam Hans said.
In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that had given deference to U.S. agencies in interpreting laws they administer, again ruling against Biden’s administration. This doctrine, known as “Chevron deference,” had been long opposed by conservatives and business interests.
Biden did secure some wins.
In their last ruling during his presidency, the justices upheld on Friday a law signed by Biden and defended by his administration requiring the popular app TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or be banned in the United States on national security grounds.
The court in 2024 upheld a federal law that Biden’s administration defended 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 Democratic-backed 2010 Wall Street reform legislation.
But some other victories were based on the court’s finding that challengers to Biden administration-backed policies lacked the necessary legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and the matters could return 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 resound to validate political goals of the Biden administration,” Hans said.
These victories may prove to have “forestalled even bigger losses” if the court addresses these issues again in a more fulsome way and reaches different outcomes, Hans added.
TRUMP IMMUNITY
Even as Biden often experienced disappointment at the court, Trump while out of office racked up victories – particularly in three cases decided last year.
In the biggest of those, the court embraced Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges involving his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss to Biden – the first time it recognized any degree of presidential immunity from prosecution. The ruling stated that former presidents have broad immunity for official acts taken in office.
Biden called the ruling “a dangerous precedent.”
University of Illinois Chicago law professor Steve Schwinn said the Biden administration found itself in the middle of longer-term trends in which the court has curtailed the power of federal agencies and enhanced the power of the presidency.
These shifts “will have dramatic impacts on the enforcement of federal law across the board,” Schwinn said. “We’ll see this immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to take full advantage of these trends.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
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