By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years in office, Democrat Joe Biden has suffered a steady string of defeats on the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rising conservative majority has blown holes in his agenda and destroyed precedents long cherished by American liberals.
Despite efforts by the Biden administration to preserve it, the court — which has six conservative justices and three liberals — in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
In 2023, the court struck down race-conscious admissions policies championed by his administration that colleges and universities have long used to increase the number of black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, he expanded gun rights, rejecting his administration’s position, and similarly in 2024 he reversed a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire as quickly as machine guns.
In 2023, the judiciary blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief plan. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a series of decisions limiting the power of federal regulatory agencies.
“I think it’s the heaviest string of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt declared many New Deal programs unconstitutional in the 1930s,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, referring to another conservative court that frustrated a Democratic president.
John Yoo, who was a lawyer at the Justice Department under Republican former President George W. Bush, said Biden has suffered “an incredible number of defeats” in his biggest cases as president.
“It’s hard to think of another president in our lifetime who has lost so many important cases on issues so near and dear to his constitutional agenda,” said Yoo, now a professor at UC Berkeley Law School.
Biden began his presidency three months after the US Senate confirmed his predecessor Donald Trump’s third nominee to the court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, creating a conservative 6-3 majority. In his first term, Trump also appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to life posts on the court along with fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Biden appointed only one judge. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first black woman to serve in the field. Because Jackson replaced fellow retiring liberal justice Stephen Breyer, her confirmation did little to change the court’s ideological breakdown.
Biden’s presidency ends Monday with Trump’s inauguration for a second term.
Trump could get a chance to rejuvenate the court’s conservative majority by replacing some or all of the top three conservatives with younger lawyers — and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves during his term.
Biden’s painful record in major cases was expected, Chemerinsky said, thanks to the “ideological difference between the Supreme Court majority and the Biden administration.”
Biden has expressed frustration after some of his worst defeats, at one point describing America’s top judicial body as “not a normal court.” In his final year in office, Biden proposed sweeping changes including 18-year term limits and binding and enforceable ethics rules.
In making the motion, Biden said “the extreme opinions expressed by the Supreme Court have undermined long-established principles and protections of civil rights.”
His proposal went nowhere, given the opposition of Republicans in Congress.
‘RECIPE FOR DEFEAT’
According to Yoo, the Biden administration failed to adapt when the court made clear it would interpret the Constitution using methods favored by conservatives based on the document’s “original understanding, history and tradition.”
By refusing to accept this change, the administration has “made itself irrelevant to the most important constitutional issues of the day,” said Yoo, Thomas’ former law clerk. “That’s a recipe for defeat.”
Conservatives have waged what is sometimes called a “war on the administrative state” — aiming to rein in federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life — and have found a receptive audience with this court, as Biden has learned in several high-profile cases.
Presidents, especially Democratic ones, have increasingly relied on federal regulatory agencies in recent decades to advance their political agendas due to the declining productivity of a US Congress that is often deadlocked along party lines.
During Biden’s tenure, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the major issues doctrine, that gives judges broad discretion to overturn executive agency actions of “overwhelming economic and political significance” unless they are deemed to have been clearly authorized by Congress.
The court invoked the doctrine to block the student debt reduction plan that Biden promised as a 2020 candidate and to end the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.
“The environmental law and student loan cases show how disdainful the court is for democratic executive action, precisely because the lack of movement in Congress means that executive action remains the only avenue for any policy progress in the US,” Professor Gautam of Cornell Law School said Hans.
In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that gave deference to US agencies in interpreting the laws they enforce, again ruling against the Biden administration. This doctrine, known as “ Chevron (NYSE:) respect,” has long been opposed by conservatives and business interests.
Biden secured some victories.
In their final ruling of his presidency, the justices on Friday upheld a law signed by Biden and defended by his administration that requires the popular app TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company or be banned in the United States on national security grounds.
In 2024, the court upheld a federal law championed by the Biden administration that criminalized guns for people under domestic violence restraining orders. It also preserved the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under the 2010 Wall Street reform legislation backed by Democrats.
But some other victories were based on the court’s finding that challengers to policies supported by the Biden administration did not have the necessary legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and things could come back in the future. These cases included: access to the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.
These cases “didn’t really resonate as an endorsement of the policy goals of the Biden administration,” Hans said.
Those victories could turn out to have “preempted even greater losses” if the court revisits the issues more intensively and reaches different outcomes, Hans added.
TRUMP’S IMMUNITY
While Biden has often experienced disappointment in court, Trump has racked up victories while out of office — notably in three cases decided last year.
In the biggest of them all, the court accepted Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges involving his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden — the first time he had recognized any degree of presidential immunity from prosecution. The ruling stated that former presidents have broad immunity for official actions taken in office.
Biden called the ruling a “dangerous precedent.”
University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Steve Schwinn said the Biden administration found itself in the middle of long-term trends in which the court has limited the power of federal agencies and increased the power of the president.
The moves “will have a dramatic impact on federal law enforcement across the board,” Schwinn said. “We’ll see that right away in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to take full advantage of these trends.”
