On the last Monday in June, Chief Justice John Roberts announced two decisions from the same bench, minutes apart, both answering the same question: can the president fire whoever he wants? Rebecca Slaughter, a Federal Trade Commissioner fired without cause in March 2025, learned that he can. Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor he has been trying to fire since last summer, learned that he cannot, at least not yet. Same author. Same Constitution. Two answers.
The next morning, the Court told Donald Trump that a baby born in Houston to a mother without papers is an American, no matter what his executive order says. Four months earlier, it told him he could not tax the country by decree. And in between, in a ruling most of the country never read, it handed his party the congressional maps of the South.
The question I keep hearing is whether the Supreme Court finally checked this president. Wrong question. The Court spent this term choosing which president it wants. It refused him the claims that no honest reading of the law could carry, and it granted him the claims that rebuild the federal government around one man and redrew the districts around the rest of us. You have to hold both halves of that sentence to understand what just happened.
What He Lost, and Why He Lost It
Start with the losses, because they were real.
In Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, the Court struck down Executive Order 14160, the January 2025 order declaring that children born here to undocumented or temporary residents are not citizens. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment was written in 1866 for people who looked like my great-great-grandparents: born on this soil, enslaved on this soil, and told for 250 years that the soil owed them nothing. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” The senators who wrote that sentence called citizenship the right to have rights. Even this Court could not pretend that the words say something else.
In Learning Resources v. Trump, decided February 20, the Court ruled 6 to 3 that the emergency-powers law Trump used to tariff the planet contains, in Roberts’s words, “no reference to tariffs or duties.” Article I gives the taxing power to Congress. The Tax Foundation puts the total collected under that law above $160 billion, every dollar of it without legal authority. The refund fight will run for years; by Bloomberg’s count, the administration faced roughly two thousand tariff lawsuits within a week of losing. And within hours of the ruling, Trump declared a new emergency under a different statute and imposed a new 10 percent tariff. The states sued again. That case is still moving.
And in Watson v. Republican National Committee, decided the same Monday as the firing cases, the Court upheld, 5 to 4, the Mississippi law counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day. The Republican National Committee wanted similar laws in more than half the states thrown into doubt four months before the midterms; in many of those states, the grace period exists for one group of voters, deployed troops, and Americans overseas. The plaintiffs who beat the RNC included the Vet Voice Foundation. Ballots from service members were on the line, and the Court barely protected them.
Notice the shape of these losses. Each one asked the Court to erase words on a page: strike the Citizenship Clause, find a tariff power in a statute that never mentions tariffs, add a ballot deadline Congress never wrote. Even six conservative justices would not do that in daylight. The asks were that extreme. That is what the losses tell you, and it is all they tell you.
What He Won
Now the wins because they were bigger.
Trump v. Slaughter overruled Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that let Congress shield the officials of independent agencies from firing without cause. The ruling covers roughly two dozen multimember agencies: the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The agencies that police price gouging, protect union elections, recall the crib you put your grandchild in, and shield civil servants from political purges now serve at the pleasure of one man. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, a step justices take perhaps once a term, when a written objection is not enough, and warned that the ruling “promises only chaos.” Trump celebrated on social media, calling it the “Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.” For once, I take him at his word.
The Court carved out a single exception: the Federal Reserve. Cook keeps her seat while her case proceeds, because five justices decided the central bank has a pedigree the FTC lacks. Read that carve-out closely. The agency that steadies Wall Street got a wall. The agencies that guard your paycheck and your union vote got nothing. Slaughter said afterward that the Court had decided Wall Street gets special treatment while the agencies that look out for everyday Americans do not. She was fired for less honesty than that.
The term also loosened the limits on money that party committees can spend in coordination with their candidates, just in time for the most expensive midterm in American history.
The Quiet One
But the ruling that will decide the most in November came in April, while the tariff headlines were still running. Louisiana v. Callais.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the same 6-to-3 majority, rewrote Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. To challenge a congressional map now, plaintiffs must show a “strong inference” that the state intentionally drew its lines to shut minority voters out. Intent. The standard Congress deliberately removed from Section 2 in 1982, because intent hides in caucus rooms and dilution does its work either way. Justice Kagan, in dissent, called the ruling a demolition of the Voting Rights Act and warned that states can now dilute minority voting power without legal consequence.
Then the Court showed us what the new rule means in practice. A three-judge panel, two of its members appointed by Trump, found that Alabama drew its congressional map with the intent to discriminate against Black voters. Under the old law that finding ends the case. Under Callais, the Supreme Court let Alabama use the map anyway. Southern legislatures took the hint. Several are already redrawing districts that Black voters spent decades winning (Gerrymandering in the South is explained and illustrated here.)
I have written before about the line that runs from Dred Scott through Plessy to Shelby County. Callais belongs on that line. Not because the opinions sound alike; they don’t. Because the mechanism is identical: keep the protection on the page, then raise the proof required until no case on earth can meet it. Jim Crow never banned Black voting either. It set conditions.
ThePpattern
Put the whole term side by side, and the design is hard to miss. The Court blocked the spectacle and blessed the architecture. It denied Trump the claims that would have required rewriting plain text in front of the cameras: citizenship, tariffs, and ballot deadlines. It granted him the claims that restructure power quietly and durably: the administrative state answers to him, the party money flows without limit, and the maps of the South tilt before a single vote is cast.
A stolen election announces itself. A redrawn district just sits there, looking like geography.
November's Call to Action
Here is what I want you to do with this, because analysis without action is weather.
First, find out whether your district changed. If you live in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, or anywhere else a legislature has touched the maps since April, the congressional district you voted in last cycle may no longer exist. Look it up now, not in October.
Second, if you vote by mail, mail early. The Court protected postmark deadlines this year, and Trump answered by demanding Congress pass a bill to strip that protection away. Do not build your vote on a rule that one session of Congress can repeal.
Third, stop waiting for nine justices to save anything. They told you this term, in their own handwriting, what they will protect: the president’s power and the central bank. Everything else is on us, the way it has always been on us. The Voting Rights Act did not come from the Court having a good morning. It came from people who marched across a bridge knowing what waited on the other side.
The Constitution survived this term. But it keeps asking the question it asked my great-great-grandparents: fine words, but who do they cover? In June, the Court answered for babies born in Houston. In April, it answered for Black voters in Louisiana. Read both answers. Then treat the second one like it is on the ballot in November.
Because it is.