Four major rulings. Four 6-to-3 votes. The Roberts Court has a conservative supermajority — and this term, it used it on some of the most consequential questions in decades. The term is not over yet. But the pattern is settled.
The Supreme Court has nine seats. Six are held by conservatives: Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush, 2005), Justice Samuel Alito (Bush, 2006), Justice Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush, 1991), Justice Neil Gorsuch (Trump, 2017), Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Trump, 2018), and Justice Amy Coney Barrett (Trump, 2020). Three are held by liberals: Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Obama, 2009), Justice Elena Kagan (Obama, 2010), and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Biden, 2022).
What 6-3 means in practice: the majority can lose a vote and still win. One conservative can side with the three liberals and the outcome does not change. The last time liberals reliably held a majority on the Court was in the late 1960s. By most measures, it is the widest ideological margin conservatives have held in more than fifty years.
This term, the majority held together in every major case. The vote, in each one, was 6 to 3.
The background: Following a successful challenge under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a lower court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map was discriminatory and ordered the state to draw a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidates. Louisiana drew that district. Then a group of non-Black voters filed suit, arguing the VRA-compliant map was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The ruling: The Supreme Court sided with the challengers, 6-3. The majority held that drawing a congressional district based primarily on race — even to comply with a federal court order enforcing the VRA — can violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three dissenters, said the ruling makes it “nearly impossible” for plaintiffs to succeed in redistricting challenges and amounts to gutting Section 2 entirely.
The effect was immediate. Florida called a special legislative session within hours of the decision and passed new maps reducing Black representation. Tennessee followed within days. Several other Southern states held similar sessions. The Section 2 challenge — the primary legal tool used to protect minority voting rights in redistricting since 1965, and under its current results-based enforcement standard since 1982 — has been made circular: states may be ordered by courts to draw majority-minority districts, but those same districts can then be challenged as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
Race should not be the primary factor in drawing any district. The 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee applies to all citizens, regardless of race. A map drawn to produce a predetermined racial outcome is a racial gerrymander — whether it benefits Black voters or white ones. The Constitution does not permit government to sort voters by race, even with remedial intent.
The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to address the specific, documented reality of states diluting Black political power through redistricting. Section 2 was the enforcement mechanism Congress provided. The Court has now rendered that mechanism unworkable: comply with the VRA and face a constitutional challenge; don’t comply and face a statutory one. The practical outcome, critics argue, is that states can redraw maps to dilute minority voting power with no meaningful legal recourse.
On the same day, the Court handed down two immigration decisions that together narrowed who can seek legal protection in the United States and who can ask a court to review that decision.
Temporary Protected Status — created by Congress in 1990 — shields people from countries experiencing disasters or ongoing armed conflict from deportation. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals and 6,000 Syrian nationals. Those affected filed suit. The government argued that the TPS statute contains a provision barring “judicial review of any determination” related to a TPS designation, and that this language foreclosed the courts from hearing any challenge.
The Court agreed, 6-3. Justice Alito wrote for the majority that the statutory bar was “clear” and “very broad.” The 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians whose TPS was terminated now have no statutory avenue to challenge that termination in federal court.
A separate 6-3 ruling cleared the way for the Trump administration to revive a border policy that turns away migrants before they physically cross into the United States. The question: does federal law require immigration officers to process asylum claims from people who present themselves at a port of entry but are still on the Mexican side of the border?
No, the Court held. Justice Alito, again writing for the majority, ruled that a person “arrives in the United States” only when they cross the border itself. Someone standing in Mexico at a port of entry has not arrived in the United States and is therefore not entitled to apply for asylum or to be inspected by an immigration officer.
The executive branch has broad, historically recognized authority over immigration and border policy. Congress wrote the judicial review bar into the TPS statute deliberately. Courts do not have unlimited power to override executive branch decisions on national security and borders. On asylum, the plain text of the law conditions the right to apply on being present in the United States — a standard the Court simply applied.
Congress created TPS specifically to protect vulnerable populations through a structured process. The judicial review bar, critics argue, was written to prevent arbitrary reversals of individual status decisions — not to immunize wholesale terminations from any oversight. On asylum, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent argued the ruling allows the government to trap people seeking protection in a physical gap between two countries and deny them the rights Congress wrote into law. Together, the two rulings removed judicial oversight from two categories of executive immigration decisions that Congress had specifically addressed by statute.
Hawaii law made it a crime for a licensed gun owner to bring a firearm onto private property that is open to the public — a restaurant, a gas station, a shop — without the property owner’s explicit, affirmative consent. The law required gun owners to ask. The Supreme Court struck it down, 6-3.
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, held that requiring a person to seek permission before exercising a constitutional right has no historical basis and “hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.” The ruling does not prevent private property owners from banning firearms — but now the default runs the other direction. Lawful carriers may bring weapons anywhere the public is invited unless the owner explicitly posts a prohibition. Hawaii, California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey all had similar laws; all five are affected by the decision.
The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. That right does not disappear when a person walks into a business that serves the public. A law requiring permission before exercising a constitutional right inverts the relationship between citizen and right. The Court has been consistent since Bruen (2022) that gun regulations must be grounded in the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation — and no founding-era tradition required asking permission to carry on public-facing private property.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent put the point directly: “There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm.” Justice Kagan noted that founding-era laws included analogues prohibiting firearms on private property without affirmative consent. Opponents of the ruling argue it overrides a property owner’s authority over their own premises in favor of a gun owner’s preference — and that five states’ worth of policy judgments about public safety were swept aside in a single decision.
As of this writing, the Court is expected to issue additional opinions as early as Monday, June 30. Four significant cases remain undecided.
Trump’s executive order claims that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee does not extend to children born in the United States to parents without lawful immigration status. The administration’s argument turns on an unusual reading of the word “domicile.” Oral arguments in April were skeptical across ideological lines — justices on both sides appeared unconvinced by the government’s position. Birthright citizenship has been the settled interpretation of the 14th Amendment since the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Trump fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee, citing unsubstantiated mortgage fraud allegations that bank records appear to contradict. Federal Reserve governors are protected by statute from removal except “for cause.” Trump claims the president has unrestricted power to remove them regardless of that protection. During January arguments, all nine justices — liberals and conservatives — expressed skepticism about the administration’s position. A ruling upholding Cook’s removal would effectively end the Fed’s independence from presidential direction.
The Court is considering whether state laws banning transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause or Title IX. Twenty-seven states have enacted such bans. After January arguments, most court observers expect the conservative majority to uphold the state laws.
Fourteen states currently accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, provided they are postmarked by the deadline. Republicans have challenged whether that practice is permitted under federal law. The ruling will affect how ballots are counted in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Six to three. That is the vote in every major case this term. The four pending decisions may break differently — the birthright citizenship and Federal Reserve cases drew cross-ideological skepticism at argument. But the Court that will decide them is the same one that decided the four cases above. The same six justices will decide them.
Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, traces how the current 6-3 majority formed, what it has done, and what the accumulated decisions of this Court mean for American law going forward. Published in 2023 — before this term’s decisions landed — but the argument is as current as the vote count.
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