Open Thread: SCOTUS Decisions, End of Term Ahead

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This is the last week of the 2024-2025 term for the Supreme Court. SCOTUS is expected to release multiple decisions at least twice this week; what follows is the first batch.

As mentioned last week, the big decision we are waiting for with the end of this term is Trump v. CASA Inc. regarding nationwide injunctions blocking executive orders, in this particular case related to birthright citizenship.

Decisions released (these summaries from Marcy — Rayne is busy):

Hewitt v. US: 5-4 Jackson decision upholds First Step Act sentencing.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood: 6-3 Republican opinion rules that private plaintiffs can’t enforce Medicaid provision.

Guttierrez v. Saenz: 6-3 Sotomayor opinion, fascists in dissent, rules for death row inmate on DNA testing procedures.

Riley v. Bondi: 5-4 Alito ruling narrowing review in immigration case.

All remaining opinions will be released tomorrow.

 

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26 replies
  1. harpie says:

    Mark Joseph Stern Re: Medina

    https://bsky.app/profile/mjsdc.bsky.social/post/3lsjchebqas2f

    [siren icon] By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court ALLOWS states to defund Planned Parenthood, holding that Medicaid does not give patients a right to obtain care from its providers. All three liberals dissent. [Link]

    Gorsuch‘s opinion for the court holds that Medicaid does not confer a right to patients to choose their health care provider, meaning states can “defund” a provider—here, Planned Parenthood—by refusing to cover care there under its Medicaid program. This will be devastating to Planned Parenthood.

    In her furious dissent, Jackson writes of the Supreme Court’s decision:

    “The project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues.”

    She likens today’s ruling to notorious decisions after the Civil War cutting back civil rights statutes. [screenshot] [Dissent begins on pdf43/64]

    • P J Evans says:

      I’m expecting them to review Plessy and apply it to LGBTQs.
      (They have no idea what PP actually does.)

    • Fancy Chicken says:

      Jeeze. States already limit providers via what MCO a Medicaid client chooses and the providers that MCO covers.

      This concerns me greatly not just on abortion healthcare but on Medicaid itself particularly if the killing cuts to it pass.

  2. harpie says:

    Chris Geidner has a great roundup about what’s left for tomorrow’s final day.
    [This list was actually from the previous decision day…so subtract today’s cases, I guess.]:

    https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lsjd4gicxs24
    June 26, 2025 at 10:20 AM

    BREAKING: Tomorrow — Friday — will be the final SCOTUS decision day of the term, Chief Justice Roberts announces.

    The following cases remain: [link][screenshot]

  3. BRUCE F COLE says:

    The Boston Globe has a hard-hitting oped by Kimberly Atkins Stohr today WRT the DVD shadow-F.U. the cowardly RW “Justices” produced the other day without so much as a vague, shallow reasoning for it. The piece doesn’t sugarcoat it, the title being “The courts will not save us from tyranny.”

    https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/25/opinion/supreme-court-rule-of-law-deportations/

    I don’t know how to do a gift link, so here are a few choice ‘graphs:

    “The Supreme Court just washed its hands of its role in upholding the rule of law, the foundational principle that laws are meant to be followed by everyone, the government included, if we are to have a just society.

    Anyone wondering if the Supreme Court would ever be a check on the Trump administration’s cruel and lawless rapid deportation campaign — or any other part of Trump’s autocratic second-term agenda –got an answer on Monday: a resounding “nope.”
    [snip]
    I don’t know how this court comes back from such an astonishing abrogation of its role at the top of a separate, coequal branch of government tasked with, among other things, being a check against tyranny from the executive branch. If last year’s ruling granting Trump broad immunity for illegal acts committed during his presidency was the shot, this weeks order was the bitter chaser.”

    She also amply quotes Stotomayor’s brilliant, scathing rebuttal.

    • BRUCE F COLE says:

      Here’s a report just out from the Bangor Daily News that does a good job of demonstrating just how deep in the shitter we are now:

      https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/06/26/bangor/bangor-police-courts/border-patrol-homeland-security-agents-raid-bangor-restaurant/

      Read especially the comments of the local State Rep (D) from Bangor at the end of the piece.

      If the shoe was on the other foot, wirh agents refusing to produce ID, or even insignia in many cases, Red state governors would be telling their constituents to assume anyone who barges into your surroundings, armed and threatening, and refusing to prove their credentials, should be considered a lethal threat and dealt with according to the Holy Second Amendment, Thank You Jesus.

      • P J Evans says:

        I’ve seen comments elseweb from people in other countries, including Canada, who say they won’t come to the US, because they’re afraid of being tossed into a prison with no charges and no contact with anyone else.

        • BRUCE F COLE says:

          Our daughter from the EU is coming here on Sunday. She has both passports and she’s white, but I’m still worried.

  4. Ginevra diBenci says:

    For all you grammar and usage fans, Hewitt (the First Step Act case) contains a discussion comparing the present perfect and past perfect verb tenses! Such linguistic precision sucked me into the law in the first place; it’s exciting when those writing it decide to make the seams show, as they say in the fashion world. (You need to have confidence in a garment’s structure to render it inside-out.)

    Needless to say, Sam Alito would never explicate phrasing on this level, because he’s incapable of writing on this level. At least SOMEONE is.

    • P J Evans says:

      You can tell people who have gotten familiar with grammar, because they know that “may have” is present tense conditional, and “might have” is past tense conditional. So many people don’t get that…

    • Peterr says:

      The problem, of course, is that this presumes the folks who wrote the law were linguistically precise, which in my reading of history presumes facts not always in evidence.

      A precise reading of an imprecisely written law is by definition imprecise. [That is, “Garbage in, garbage out”]

  6. CaptainCondorcet says:

    Gorsuch continues to prove an intriguing case. Almost certainly the swing vote in Hewitt, joined the doomed minority in Riley, but joined an extraordinarily different minority in Gutierrez. Only silver lining to me is this offers a tiny shred of hope for Trump v CASA

    • harpie says:

      So, to catch up, RE: Medina [See also my comment a the top]

      1] Supreme Court’s conservatives give “defund” Planned Parenthood efforts a win The legal issue: A sharp dispute over the civil rights law that formed the basis for the group’s lawsuit against South Carolina when the state barred it as a Medicaid provider. https://www.lawdork.com/p/supreme-courts-conservatives-give
      Chris Geidner Jun 26, 2025

      2] https://bsky.app/profile/evanbernick.bsky.social/post/3lsjeaiwxz227
      June 26, 2025 at 10:41 AM

      There’s something really interesting going on here methodologically in Justice Jackson’s Medina v. Planned Parenthood dissent. You can see it in one footnote.

      In short, Jackson is emphasizing that Black Americans are part of the original “public” about which “originalists” should be concerned. [THREAD]

  8. harpie says:

    https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lslodgwyuk2t
    June 27, 2025 at 8:47 AM

    OK, I’m off to SCOTUS, where we are expecting all of the final opinions for the term today, starting at 10a. I’ll be there, posting here, and then writing at Law Dork. Subscribe now: [link][screenshot]

    For those new to this: These are only opinions in argued cases that are released at 10a.

    Pending shadow docket matters, including in both govtwide and Eduction RIF cases, will not be at 10a. They could come any time.

    The orders out of Thursday’s conference could come later today or next week, TBD.

    • harpie says:

      Steve Vladeck is following along, too:
      https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3lslrkoj6f222
      June 27, 2025 at 9:44 AM

      Three reminders ahead of #SCOTUS news at 10 ET:

      1) Decisions come out in reverse seniority order by who wrote it (so KBJ first; Chief last);
      2) Anything unsigned (“per curiam”) comes *after* anything signed; and
      3) This is just for *argued* cases; other business can (and will) come up all summer.

      We expect six rulings; five in “merits” cases, and a ruling on the birthright citizenship applications (which we expect because, unlike other applications, they were argued).

      As for what order, there are good guesses out there about who’s writing what, but we’ve also (regularly) been fooled before.

      I’ll be posting top lines and opinion links as soon as we get them, but folks should be patient; last-day rulings are often more than a little complicated (and that could easily include whatever we get in the birthright citizenship cases).

      And I’ll have longer-form analyses later, via “One First”:

      https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3lslsp5h3s22j
      June 27, 2025 at 10:05 AM

      First #SCOTUS ruling today is birthright citizenship.

      Justice Barrett, for a 6-3 majority (with the three Dem. appointees dissenting) holds that universal injunctions are only appropriate when necessary to provide “complete” relief to parties, and stays these injunctions insofar as they go further: [screenshot]

        • harpie says:

          Geidner: June 27, 2025 at 10:20 AM

          Jackson, dissenting:

          “Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected.”

        • harpie says:

          And Mark Joseph Stern:
          https://bsky.app/profile/mjsdc.bsky.social/post/3lslskbbwmc2e
          June 27, 2025 at 10:02 AM

          By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court rules that universal injunctions likely exceed federal courts’ authority and rolls back the injunctions protecting birthright citizenship from Trump’s attack. [link]

          The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority just took away lower courts’ single most powerful tool for reining in the Trump administration’s lawless excesses, stripping them of authority to issue universal injunctions that block illegal policies nationwide. [THREAD]
          […]
          I want to reiterate that countless conservative judges issued universal injunctions against the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court never halted the practice. Now, barely five months into Trump’s second term, the court puts an end to these injunctions. A brazen double standard.

        • harpie says:

          BARRETT mentions JACKSON 12 times in her majority Opinion, I think.

          The second one:

          [pdf27/119] The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain, like the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity. JUSTICE JACKSON, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. […]

        • harpie says:

          #12:

          In other words, it is unecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too. […]

          THANKS RAYNE…thought I checked that…OY!

        • gmokegmoke says:

          Since the Judicial Council refused to examine Clarence Thomas’ congenital inability to fill out financial disclosure forms correctly and, from what I understand, doubted their duties under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, the Supreme Court is no longer, really, “bound by law.” There is no entity that can discipline them if they go astray.

          This makes two institutions of government that no longer have checks on them the [Republican] Presidency which was given immunity by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court itself.

          If we ever lived in a real democracy, we do not now. Isonomy, equality under the law, is a dead letter in USAmerica.

          Now, what are we going to do about it?

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