By Devin Dwyer
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President Donald Trump has been on a roll at the U.S. Supreme Court, winning more than a dozen interim rulings backing his aggressive use of executive power and a landmark decision curbing the ability of individual judges to block his policies nationwide.
The big question now: Will the streak last?
The nine justices return to the bench Monday for a new term that features marquee disputes over the scope of presidential power with major implications for Trump, the global economy, American foreign policy, and the midterm elections.
“This term will tell us whether or not there are limits to the court’s broad view of the unitary executive power,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
“If the court does prevent President Trump from using executive orders to end birthright citizenship or to impose tariffs, then it won’t look like it’s in his pocket anymore,” Rosen said.
In what could be the term’s biggest blockbuster, the court will decide whether Trump’s sweeping global reciprocal tariffs are an illegal use of emergency authority granted by Congress – and whether tens of billions of dollars collected so far must be refunded.
“It is a staggeringly important case from an economic perspective and from a separation of powers perspective,” said Hofstra Law professor and ABC News legal contributor James Sample. “If you think of a tariff as a tax, this is one of the biggest tax hikes in American history, and it didn’t go through Congress at all.”
The court will also review Trump’s firings of Democratic members of independent federal agencies without cause, despite 90 years of legal precedent forbidding such terminations, and his unprecedented attempt to remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Lisa Cook, over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud.
“Does the president, and future presidents, have the power to essentially shape the Federal Reserve at his or her whim? That’s a monumental question,” Sample said.
The justices are also poised to take up the constitutionality of Trump’s Day 1 move to end birthright citizenship by executive order, challenging more than a century of legal precedent governing who is American at birth under the 14th Amendment.
“There’s a broad view that birthright citizenship is the most likely place the court will place limits on Trump,” Rosen said.
Decisions in many of the Trump cases could come in early 2026.
“So much of what people have been calling ‘wins’ for Donald Trump have actually been these very temporary decisions to allow a policy to move forward while the case proceeds in the lower courts,” said SCOTUSblog editor and ABC News legal contributor Sarah Isgur.
While the conservative majority has given the president significant leeway — at least temporarily — in overhauling the federal government and aggressively enforcing immigration laws, it has also mandated due process for detainees, signaled support for independence of the Federal Reserve, and required some foreign aid payouts for work already completed.
“Where the president’s actions conflict with laws passed by Congress — those are the areas where I think Donald Trump will have the most trouble moving forward,” Isgur said.
Some legal analysts suspect the court’s conservative majority may be eager to counter widespread public perception that it has disproportionately favored Trump.
Seventy-one percent of Republicans have a favorable opinion of the court compared with 26% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to the Pew Research Center.
“To maintain its institutional reputation — at least some of the justices, I think, are very concerned about that — I predict the court is likely to split the baby in some ways when it comes to wins for the Trump administration,” said University of Chicago Law professor and former Supreme Court clerk Jennifer Nou.
“Although, I do think that the net result is going to be an increase in the institutional power of the president,” Nou said.
Aside from presidential power, there are consequential cases on the docket involving the Voting Rights Act, free speech and mental health care, and transgender athletes in school sports that could put the court back at the center of the culture wars and transform American society.
A case from Louisiana asks the justices to strike down one of the state’s two majority-black congressional districts on the eve of the midterm elections and outlaw any consideration of race when drawing election maps going forward — a direct challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Right Act which has long prohibited districting plans that dilute the vote of minority voters.
“If the court accepts those arguments, it could effectively dismantle Section 2,” said George Washington University law professor Spencer Overton. “And if that happened, that could allow legislatures like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, to dismantle districts where black and Latino voters have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”
A Christian therapist from Colorado is asking the justices to strike down a state ban on so-called “conversion therapy” — efforts by a licensed counselor to change a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity during treatment — claiming it violates her freedom of speech. Twenty-seven states have similar measures aimed at protecting LGBTQ teens from alleged harms.
“If it’s a client who’s suffering from gender dysphoria and doesn’t want to feel that way, and said, ‘I would like to feel comfortable in the body I was born in, can you help me?’ That’s the type of talk therapy that Ms. Chiles wants to offer,” said Georgetown Law professor Stephanie Barclay of the plaintiff in the case. The state says it’s engaged in legitimate medical regulation.
A pair of cases from West Virginia and Idaho ask the justices to weigh in for the first time on state restrictions against transgender girls participating in girls school sports.
The plaintiffs — two trans female student athletes — claim the laws violate Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, while the states say they are essential for student safety and fair competition.
“We are going to be looking in these cases not just at the impact on transgender girls and women who are really being excluded from an educational program,” said Josh Block, senior counsel of the ACLU LGBTQ and HIV Project, “we’re also going to be looking to whether the case is used to issue a broader ruling against transgender folks more generally.”
The court will gavel in the new term on Monday at 10 a.m., as Chief Justice John Roberts marks 20 years on the bench. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2005.
In recent years, the court’s conservative majority overruling of major, longstanding precedents has become a defining feature of Roberts’ tenure. There are several more landmark precedents that could be struck down in the months ahead.
“The Roberts Court overturns precedents at one half to one-third the rate, in terms of cases overturned, than prior post-war courts,” said William & Mary Law School professor Jonathan Adler. “They seem to all be pushing in one direction, but in terms of the volume or the number, it’s actually less.”
Benjamin Mizer, former Acting Associate U.S. Attorney General during the Biden administration, says the significance of the precedents being trashed should not be overlooked.
“What matters is not just what they’re overturning, but how they’re doing it. I think that they are showing an eagerness to do so,” Mizer said. “When people start to doubt the stability of stare decisis, then I think the court itself is creating problems for its own reputation.”