The Supreme Court closed out its term Tuesday with three major rulings, rejecting Trump’s executive order ending citizenship at birth for those born on U.S. soil, upholding state laws banning transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, and striking down longstanding campaign finance rules that capped coordinated spending between political parties and their candidates.
The birthright citizenship decision was the term’s most closely watched. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, declaring that the Framers of the 14th Amendment “extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land'” and that the court would “keep that promise today.”
The ruling was closer than many had predicted; three of the court’s six conservative justices dissented, with Roberts securing his majority only with the votes of the three liberal justices and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump’s executive order, which sought to bar citizenship for children born to parents in the country illegally or on temporary visas, had never gone into effect after every lower court judge who reviewed it struck it down.
Trump responded by signaling a legislative push. “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. John Eastman, the now-disbarred former Trump lawyer who was the primary architect of the legal challenge to birthright citizenship, said the ruling was closer than expected but cast doubt on a congressional fix. “I don’t think Congress can fix this, unless the court revisits the question on a petition for a rehearing or in a future case,” Eastman said.
On transgender athletes, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s majority opinion upholding state bans on transgender girls competing in sports at publicly funded schools. The ruling combined two cases brought by student athletes in West Virginia and Idaho who had sued to overturn the bans.
The court also lifted a Watergate-era cap on how much money political parties may spend in coordination with their candidates, a case brought by Vice President JD Vance. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a sharp dissent. Democratic House and Senate campaign committees warned the ruling would allow billionaire backers to flood elections with money ahead of the November midterms.
Tuesday’s decisions followed a flurry of rulings handed down Monday, June 29. In a 6-3 vote, the court gave Trump sweeping new authority over roughly two dozen multi-member independent agencies, striking down the for-cause removal protections that had shielded FTC commissioners and overturning a 91-year-old precedent.
In a separate 5-4 ruling, the court allowed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in her position while her legal challenge to Trump’s attempted firing moves forward. The court also upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day and received within five days, a result carrying weight four months before the midterms. And the court declined to hear Trump’s appeal of the $5 million judgment against him in the E. Jean Carroll case, leaving that verdict intact.
The court now enters its summer recess, with six new cases added to the 2026-27 argument docket.
