Supreme-Court

In December 2025, bulldozers demolished the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a new ballroom — a roughly $300 million construction project undertaken without congressional authorization, without the historic-preservation review federal law normally requires, and without the president’s earlier promise that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for it. A preservation group sued to stop it. On August 31, 2026, the Supreme Court let construction continue. Here’s the detail worth sitting with: the Court didn’t rule the project was legal. It ruled that the people suing weren’t allowed to ask. ...

Sitting justices almost never testify before Congress. It last happened with any regularity decades ago, and the institution has spent years treating its own internal workings as none of the legislature’s business. On July 14, 2026, that changed — Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to defend a $921 million security budget request. They left having conceded, on the record, something the Court has spent years refusing to say plainly: it doesn’t have settled rules for how it uses the tool that now decides more cases than its actual docket. ...

For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the main legal tool minority voters have to challenge maps that dilute their political power — the thing that forces states to draw a second majority-Black district when residential segregation and racially polarized voting mean one district isn’t enough to give Black voters a real chance to elect anyone. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court redefined what it takes to win that kind of claim, in a way that Justice Kagan says renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” ...

Grants Pass, Oregon has a population of about 38,000 people and, at last count, nowhere near enough shelter beds for its unhoused residents. The city’s answer to that shortfall wasn’t more beds. It was a set of ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside with so much as a blanket, and jailed repeat offenders — including people who had nowhere else to legally exist. In June 2024, the Supreme Court said that was perfectly constitutional. ...

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench on June 30, 2026 — a step justices reserve for cases where they want the disagreement on the public record, not just in print. Her summary of what the majority had just done: “the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” She was describing a ruling that let states ban transgender girls from school sports teams without ever resolving the central factual dispute the case turned on. ...

Federal law caps how much an individual donor can give directly to a candidate at $7,000. That limit exists for an obvious reason: a candidate who owes their campaign to one wealthy check is a candidate who answers to that donor first. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court opened a door around that limit large enough to drive a truck through — by ruling that political parties can spend essentially unlimited amounts in direct coordination with the candidates they’re backing. ...

Most posts on this site are about the Supreme Court taking a right away. This one isn’t — mostly. On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled that “geofence warrants,” the increasingly common police tactic of asking Google to hand over location data for every phone that passed near a crime scene, count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That means police actually have to get a real warrant, based on real evidence connecting a real suspect to a real crime, before casting the net. It’s a genuine win for digital privacy. It’s also a 6-3 decision, which means three sitting justices were prepared to let the practice continue unchecked — and their reasoning is worth understanding, because it’s the same reasoning that could gut this protection the next time the facts are less sympathetic. ...

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court interpreted it — clearly, and with essentially the meaning everyone has understood it to have for over a century — in 1898. Nobody seriously disputed what it meant for 128 years. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that meaning and struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary-visa immigrants. That’s the good news. The bad news is what it took to get there, and what three sitting justices were willing to argue in order to reach the opposite conclusion. ...

For ninety years, a single 1935 precedent stood between the president and total control over the officials who regulate the economy: the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission. Presidents could not simply fire the people who ran these agencies because they disagreed with a ruling or wanted a loyalist in the seat. Congress built them to be insulated — for cause removal only, not at-will. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ended that. And in the very same batch of opinions, it decided the rule didn’t apply to the one agency that matters most to financial markets. ...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has a founding myth. It goes like this: unlike liberal justices who impose their policy preferences onto the Constitution, conservative justices are constrained by the original meaning of the text — what the Founders wrote, what the ratifiers understood. Originalism, in this telling, is not an ideology. It is a discipline. It is the difference between judges who follow the law and judges who make it up. It is a compelling story. It is also, the evidence shows, false. ...

A Court Divided: LGBTQ Rights and Minority Protections in the Balance The Supreme Court does not move in a straight line. Over the past six years, it has handed down decisions that protected LGBTQ workers from job discrimination, then carved out a constitutional escape hatch for businesses that do not want to serve same-sex couples. It has eliminated the federal right to abortion, while a Justice in the majority hinted that marriage equality might be next. Now a new wave of cases is approaching, and the question is no longer hypothetical: what kind of court is this, and who is it for? ...

The Supreme Court ruled today — February 20, 2026 — that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the President the power to impose tariffs. The vote was 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. The Court’s most sweeping executive trade action in modern history has been struck down as unconstitutional overreach. The case is Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated with V.O.S. Selections v. United States. The ruling vacates the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs — the sweeping duties imposed in April 2025 on imports from dozens of countries — and remands the question of refunds to the U.S. Court of International Trade. More than $160 billion in IEEPA tariff revenue has been collected since January 2025. The fight over who gets it back, and how, is now just beginning. ...

Who Owns the Machine’s Work? AI, Copyright, and the Supreme Court’s Coming Reckoning The legal system is struggling to answer a question that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago: when an artificial intelligence creates something — a painting, a news article, a piece of code — who owns it? And when an AI system trains itself by reading millions of copyrighted works without permission, has it stolen something? ...