The Supreme Court term that ended Tuesday was one of the biggest in recent years, featuring cases that tested the limits of presidential power, the Constitution’s grant of birthright citizenship and longtime civil rights protections for voters.
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Here are some notable takeaways:
One big question loomed over the Supreme Court term from the outset: Would the justices embrace President Donald Trump’s efforts to vastly expand presidential power, or check it?
At times during the term, Democrats lamented that the conservative majority was handing Trump almost monarchical authority. At other times, Trump lashed out at the justices for reining in his favored policies.
The truth lies somewhere between those extremes.
The administration ran up an impressive string of victories on the court’s emergency docket, allowing Trump for the time being to ban transgender troops from the military, gut the Education Department, freeze some foreign aid and strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants while litigation plays out over those policies.
The justices also blessed Trump’s move to fire the heads of the independent agencies that Congress had sought to insulate from political influence.
But the justices also rebuffed some of Trump’s boldest and most controversial assertions of power. They struck down his sweeping tariffs, his executive order limiting birthright citizenship, his deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago and his bid to exert greater control over the Federal Reserve.
In the end, the court showed that it was willing to support a muscular view of presidential power as long as it was in keeping with longtime conservative legal goals, but that it would not accept some of the sweeping and novel assertions of authority that Trump sought.
One winner emerged from a blockbuster term of election and campaign cases: the Republican Party.
In a landmark ruling, the conservative majority significantly weakened the last pillar of the Voting Rights Act, which required states to draw congressional districts to ensure the voting power of minorities under certain circumstances.
That decision touched off a furious push by Republican-controlled states to carve up districts mostly held by Black Democrats across the South ahead of November’s midterms.
The Supreme Court also allowed Texas to redraw its congressional maps to help Republicans win up to five more seats. The move came at Trump’s behest.
And in one of the term’s final opinions, the justices knocked down restrictions that had blocked political parties from coordinating their spending with individual candidates. GOP party committees have a more than $100 million advantage over their Democratic counterparts, so this could be a major gain for Republicans.
Democrats did notch some wins before the court. The justices rejected a conservative challenge to Mississippi’s practice of tallying mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. More than a dozen other states have similar rules, and mail-in voting tends to be more popular among Democrats than Republicans.
Another victory for Democrats came when the justices approved a plan pushed by California Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional maps to offset Texas’s gerrymander.
Operatives in both parties still expect Democrats to win the House, and possibly the Senate, in the November midterms. But most analysts say this term’s rulings gave Republicans a notable boost.
Trump aggressively cut the federal government in the opening months of his second term, and the Supreme Court largely agreed he could do it.
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The conservative majority ruled again and again for Trump, upholding his moves to radically downsize the federal workforce and give the president nearly unfettered control over the executive branch.
In emergency rulings, the justices allowed Trump to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal Trade Commission without cause.
The rulings cut against a nearly century-old precedent saying Congress could create independent agencies whose leaders the president could remove only for good reason. The justices struck down that precedent, embracing the “unitary executive theory,” which envisions a president with near-total control over federal agencies and employees.
The justices also cleared the way for Trump to fire 16,000 federal workers, cut much of the Education Department, and slash $800 million in National Institutes of Health grants for research that was intended to benefit minority communities.
The court ruled the Trump administration had to repay $2 billion for foreign aid work already performed, but could unilaterally freeze billions more in foreign aid approved by Congress that had yet to be spent.
The one clear line the court drew was in blocking Trump from firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, saying the Fed has a special history that gives its board members added protection.
The high court ruled against LGBTQ+ activists on a slew of issues, most prominently by upholding bans on trans women playing on female sports teams. The court also largely knocked down a ban on “conversion therapy” for minors and halted California policies that discouraged notification of parents when their children were socially transitioning at school.
The decisions continued the court’s trend of emphasizing free-speech, religious and “parental rights” over LGBTQ+ rights. Last term, the court’s conservatives upheld a Tennessee ban on transition treatments — such as puberty blockers — for trans minors. They also ruled in favor of parents who sought to opt their children out of lessons featuring storybooks with LGBTQ+ themes.
There’s more to come. Next term, the court will probably consider a case involving preschools that want participate in Colorado’s universal prekindergarten program while denying admission to the children of LGBTQ+ parents. The justices also took a case involving Washington state laws that provide medical care to homeless transgender youths.
The court’s 6-3 decision rolling back the 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of its biggest rulings on race in recent years. The conservative justices limited the scope of Section 2 of the act, which was meant to combat discriminatory gerrymandering that weakened the power of Black and Latino voters.
The effects of the decision have already rippled into other areas of antidiscrimination law, with the Trump administration saying it applies to agriculture programs and employment.
Race also loomed over the court’s decision letting the Trump administration cancel temporary immigration protections for Haitian immigrants. The Haitian plaintiffs alleged that the Trump administration’s decision to cancel their temporary protected status was driven partly by racial animus. They cited, among other things, Trump’s false claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were killing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
The court’s conservatives said those comments were not enough to prove that race had factored into the administration’s decision, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. saying the comments were not “overtly racial.”
Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, responded, “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.”
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