The Good News

On Wednesday, July 3, the Biden Administration announced its 52nd slate of judicial nominees. This slate includes Fourth Circuit nominee Ryan Park, Eastern District of Wisconsin nominee Byron Conway, Eastern District of Pennsylvania nominee Judge Gail Weilheimer, and Central District of Illinois nominee Judge Jonathan Hawley.  

AFJ is particularly pleased to see Judge Hawley, an all-star magistrate judge with 15 years of public defense experience, nominated to the federal district court, and proudly supports him. Hawley will bring much-needed professional diversity to the bench.  

Need some even better news? On Monday of this week, the Senate confirmed Judge Nancy Maldonado to the Seventh Circuit. Maldonado was the first Latina to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and will be the first judge of Latin American descent on the appellate court, which makes law for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. 

Prior to joining the bench, Judge Maldonado worked at civil rights firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland. There, she tried labor, employment, civil rights, and fraud cases. As noted in AFJ’s report, “by the time she joined the bench, she had represented everyone from pipefitters to doctors to bricklayers.”   

The Supreme Court  

The Supreme Court ended its 2024 Term on Monday of last week with troubling, if predictable, panache. The uber-conservative six-justice majority took a sledgehammer to administrative law, drastically increased presidential power, and weakened protections against racial gerrymandering — evidence that the Roberts Court remains as intent on changing American society — and remaking the law — as ever.  

Brief summaries of key cases from the past term excerpted from AFJ’s Supreme Court Term Review follow: 

Trump v. United States. The Court heard oral arguments on April 25 and issued its decision on July 1. SCOTUS considered questions surrounding whether former president Donald Trump can claim immunity for crimes committed while in office and which of the 91 criminal charges he faces can proceed to trial.  

Below, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit held that Trump was not immune — noting that “it would be a striking paradox if the President, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity.” By taking Trump’s appeal, the justices had already effectively paused his myriad criminal trials.    

In its 6-3 opinion, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court ruled that the president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “core constitutional” actions and presumptive immunity for all “official acts” taken while in office. This decision establishes a broad new definition of presidential power contradictory to the Constitution’s principles and the rule of law. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that “the relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law." 

Read AFJ’s statement on this decision here.   

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The Court heard this case on January 17 and decided it on June 28. In 2020, several fishing companies sued the National Marine Fisheries Service over a rule that required the companies to pay for third-party observers on some boats to monitor ensure compliance with federal rules. The companies argued that the agency did not have the power to create this requirement, taking aim at the Chevron Doctrine, the 40-year-old precept of administrative law requiring courts to defer to agencies when interpreting ambiguous statutes.  

In a 6-3 opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court overruled Chevron, fundamentally changing the way agencies can — or can’t — implement regulations that fall under their ambit moving forward. This decision robs administrative agencies  of the power to determine how best to interpret and implement rules and gives it to courts — an overt power grab that grants judges, no matter how inexpert or removed from the topic before them, to override agencies and their experts.  

What types of regulations could be affected? Just about anything, from what medications and medical devices are approved and the process for approving them to whether and how the EPA can act on legislation passed to protect the public and the environment. 

The implications of the Court’s ruling cannot be overstated. Writing in dissent, Justice Kagan emphasized the problems with the Court’s precedent-shattering approach: “agencies are staffed with ‘experts in the field’ who bring their training to bear on open statutory questions. Consider, for example...When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a ‘protein’? I don’t know many judges who would feel confident resolving that issue...But the FDA likely has scores of scientists on staff who can think intelligently about it, maybe collaborate with each other on its finer points, and arrive at a sensible answer.”  Now, instead of deferring to agency experts, judges will get to step in and make these hyper-complex policy decisions.  

TLDR: There’s no need for campfire horror stories this summer. Just imagine what judges like Texas’s now-infamous Matthew Kacsmaryk will do with the latitude created by Loper Bright next they hear a case challenging agency efforts to implement a regulation. Whether their real objection is to the regulation — and/or to the Congress that created or administration that backed a rule — or just or agency’s approach to implementation, judges can wield the Supreme Court’s decision as justification for de facto blocking that regulation by narrowing, complicating, or barring agency action.  

 Read AFJ’s statement on this decision here. 

Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. The Court heard oral argument in this case on October 11 and decided the case on May 23.  In Alexander, the Court furthered weakened the Voting Rights Act by a 6-3 vote, making it nearly impossible for plaintiffs to challenge racial gerrymandering. Presented with a district court ruling that South Carolina legislators engaged in racial gerrymandering, the Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, found that the plaintiffs could not “disentangle race and politics” and therefore could not succeed on their racial gerrymandering claim. 

What’s disturbing is that the opinion went further than necessary, creating new hurdles for plaintiffs attempting to challenge racial gerrymandering.  

Per Alito, the inquiry into whether legislators engaged in racial gerrymandering must assume the legislature acted in good faith. State legislatures, with their longtime, ongoing habit of using policy — particularly at the map-drawing stage — to disenfranchise voters of color have not earned a presumption of good faith. The Court even created a new evidentiary requirement, forcing plaintiffs to produce an alternative legislative map. Forcing plaintiffs to find and pay map-drawing experts to do so, as Justice Elena Kagan noted of this and other burdens imposed to would-be challengers by the majority in her dissent, “stacks the deck against the challengers.”  

Read AFJ’s statement on this decision here. 

If you would like to learn more about the many key cases the Court decided this term, check out our 2023-2024 Supreme Court Term Review.

The Latest from Alliance for Justice 

On Tuesday of this week AFJ hosted Holding Court: Unpacking the Supreme Court Term, a virtual event featuring Ian Millhiser, Senior Correspondent at Vox. In conversation with AFJ President Rakim H.D. Brooks, Millhiser addressed key cases and their ramifications, offering a nuanced, invaluable perspective on the Court.  

The takeaway: Over the last term, the Supreme Court heard cases with the potential to fundamentally alter the structure and function of American democracy. The majority chose to use those cases as opportunities to curtail and even annul long-established precedent that protected vital civil liberties. Among its most devastating 2024 rulings were decisions affecting issues from barriers to racial gerrymandering and the rights of unhoused people to presidential immunity — as well as administrative law as a whole. 

Missed Holding Court? A recording of the event is available here. Additional details about this fabulous series of events, which feature journalists, academics, and advocates, and access to past conversations can be found at AFJ’s Holding Court page. 

What’s Next  

For those of you attending the Netroots Nation conference in Baltimore this week, please stop by our table!

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