How This Term’s Supreme Court Cases Are Reshaping America

The decisions of the Supreme Court reverberate throughout the nation, defining the limits of government power and often directing our culture.

The 2024-2025 term of the Supreme Court is now coming to a close, bringing with it a wide range of cases.

I spoke with Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, on the latest episode of “Heritage Explains.” He is the host of the weekly Heritage legal podcast, “Case in Point,” which discusses important cases in the news affecting politics, culture, and everyone’s daily lives.

Listen to the full episode or read a lightly edited transcript below.

Mark Guiney: We want to talk about some of the highlights that have happened this past year, especially vis-à-vis the Trump administration.

Hans von Spakovsky: Let me devise into two areas. One is the substantive decisions that have come down and we’ve had some pretty good decisions.

In one case out of Ohio, a woman sued the state of Ohio. She was a state employee saying, “I was discriminated against because I’m not gay.” It’s kind of reverse discrimination.

The lower courts imposed a higher standard of proof on her than if she’d been gay, basically saying, “Well, because you’re a heterosexual and therefore you’re part of the majority, you’ve got a higher standard of proof.”

The Supreme Court unanimously said, “No, the same standard of proof applies in any kind of discrimination case like that.”

It was a very good, very fair decision and an easy decision because of the way the statute’s written. 

Another great case for the Second Amendment, and frankly gun owners across the country, is the fact that the government of Mexico sued what I call the seven sisters, the seven major gun companies in America.

In essence, Mexico sued saying, “You’re responsible for all the criminal violence in Mexico.” 

The Supreme Court came back again unanimously and said, “No, there’s a federal statute that bars that kind of liability. You cannot sue.”

This was actually a great example of the Mexican government trying to blame somebody else for the fact that it can’t do anything about the cartel violence down there.

Another terrific win was a case involving Catholic Charities. The state of Wisconsin refused to give them a tax exemption that goes to church organizations because basically they said, “You’re not churchy enough in your charitable work. For example, when you’re helping poor people, you don’t proselytize, you don’t try to convert them.

Obviously, the state doesn’t understand Catholicism since it’s part of the creed, part of the beliefs that you should help people regardless of who they are and what their potential religious beliefs are.

Again, the Supreme Court came in and said, “You can’t do that. The state cannot make that kind of a judgment on a church or religious organization.”

Not quite as important, but something that’ll make people feel good is they ruled in favor of a family whose house was mistakenly destroyed by an FBI SWAT raid that went wrong.

They went to the wrong place, and the federal government refused to pay for it, saying, “Oh, we’re immune, you can’t make us pay it.”

The Supreme Court came back and said, “No, this fits with one of the exceptions to what’s called the Federal Tort Claims Act. And yes, you can sue the government for the damages they caused to your home.”

Given how often in this country people are now experiencing this kind of thing because cranks or people who don’t like them politically will call and the police will show up mistakenly because of that, that’s actually a good thing.

Of course, we also got a really important decision, U.S. v. Skrmetti. That was out of Tennessee.

Tennessee passed, frankly, a law to protect kids and it was followed by about two dozen other states saying, “You can’t engage in, basically, surgical mutilation and abusive drug treatments to try to make someone look like a different gender.”

The American Civil Liberties Union sued and again, the Supreme Court said, “No, that that’s within the protective authority of a state to protect minors under something like that.” …

I interviewed Tennessee’s solicitor general, Matt Rice, about it. That was his first argument for the U.S. Supreme Court, and he won.

The other thing that’s been really more active than usual is what they call the emergency docket. The emergency docket is when the Supreme Court isn’t making substantive decisions the way it did in these cases.

They have gotten a lot of emergency appeals filed by the Trump administration because of these nationwide injunctions that have been issued all over the country.  

In fact, just this past Monday, the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay of an injunction that had been issued by a judge in Massachusetts.

Folks will recall that the Trump administration detained and removed a whole passel of illegal alien criminals—child rapists, murderers, etc. and took them to Sudan even though they’re not originally from Sudan.

This judge said, “Oh, you can’t do that” and issued an injunction.

The Supreme Court just issued a decision staying that injunction, which means basically suspending it. [That] means that the Trump administration can restart deporting aliens to third countries, in other words, not the country that is the native country of that alien.

Those are the kind of emergency appeals that we’ve been getting, and the Trump administration has been pretty good at winning those.

Guiney: What is the state overall of a lot of these injunctions? Do you expect that we’ll continue to see the Supreme Court challenge them? Do you think it’s going to be a mixed bag? What’s the state of play there?

von Spakovsky: We have a bunch of important decisions that we’re still waiting on, including a case involving pornography out of Texas, a case involving a school board in Maryland where they refuse to let parents opt their kids out of gender propaganda and DEI education.

One of the other cases we’re waiting for that’s important to this is a case on birthright citizenship. Now the substantive issue is not before the court.

The court is not going to decide whether or not President Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment is correct or not. What’s up before the court again is part of this emergency docket.

The Department of Justice filed an emergency appeal asking the court to stay or suspend three nationwide injunctions that have been issued by three different judges in three different courts. That’s what the fight is about.

Frankly, what a lot of people are hoping, including me, is that when the Supreme Court issues its decision in that case, it will issue very strict rules on nationwide injunctions—not just in this case, but in general—that will hopefully restrict judges from issuing these all over the country.

Guiney: Based on what you’ve seen this term, is this a divided or partisan or compromised Supreme Court?

von Spakovsky: Just a week or so ago, we had one unanimous decision after another, and even in the cases that weren’t unanimous, we had some strange combinations of a liberal and generally conservative justice, for example, dissenting.

The places you see the divide are in the cases over immigration and over what are considered social issues, like the Skrmetti case … [and] stopping that injunction against the removal of criminal aliens.

In a lot of the other cases, you don’t get that kind of a split. I think that says a lot about the court and anybody who thinks it always divides up between the liberal justices on the court and those who are generally considered conservative, obviously haven’t looked at the record of the court.

Guiney: Is there anything that you might expect to see coming down the pike?

von Spakovsky: Well, back to the emergency dockets, we’ve had one immigration case after another. We’ve had one case after another involving what the president has been doing in trying to lay off federal employee, what DOGE has been doing.

Many of those have gone to the Supreme Court, but only on the emergency basis where the Trump administration is asking for a stay of a nationwide injunction issued by a lower court judge.

Those cases are going to work their way through the courts and finally get up back to the Supreme Court on the substantive issues. Did the president, for example, have the power to lay off lots of employees in particular departments?

I expect those cases probably will work their way through the summer—while the Supreme Court is off—at the lower courts, the district courts, courts of appeal, and they will start arriving at the court when the new term starts, which is October of this year.

Also, the other case that’s sure to be back is birthright citizenship, but this time, not just on the nationwide injunctions, but on the substantive question of, “How do you interpret the 14th Amendment on that?”

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