By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – During his four years as president, Democrat Joe Biden has experienced a steady string of defeats at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose growing conservative majority has pushed his agenda and dismantled precedents long cherished by American liberals.

Despite efforts by the Biden administration to preserve it, the court — with six conservative justices and three liberals — in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion.

The court in 2023 struck down race-conscious admissions policies his administration has defended that have long been used by colleges and universities to increase their numbers of Black, Hispanic and other minority students. In 2022, it expanded gun rights, repudiating his administration’s position, and similarly in 2024 it ignored a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly. such as machine guns.

The justices blocked Biden’s $430 billion student loan relief plan through 2023. They also limited the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a series of rulings that curbed the power of federal regulatory agencies.

“I think this is the toughest series of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s had many New Deal programs declared unconstitutional,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, which refers to another conservative court that has thwarted a Democratic president.

John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department attorney under Republican former President George W. Bush, said Biden has experienced “an extraordinary number of losses” in his biggest cases as president.

“It’s hard to think of another president in our lifetime who has lost so many high-profile cases on issues so near and dear to his constitutional agenda,” said Yoo, now a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. .

Biden began his presidency three months after the US Senate confirmed his Republican predecessor Donald Trump’s third appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. Trump also appointed in his first term Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to lifetime posts on the court along with fellow conservatives John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Biden appointed only one justice. Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the court. Because Jackson replaced a retiring fellow liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, his confirmation did not change the ideological breakdown of the court.

Biden’s presidency ended Monday with Trump’s inauguration for a second term.

Trump could get a chance to change the court’s conservative majority by replacing some or all of the three top conservatives with younger jurors — and perhaps even expand it if a liberal justice leaves his term.

Biden’s painful record in major cases is expected, Chemerinsky, thanks to the “ideological difference between the Supreme Court’s majority and the Biden administration.”

Biden expressed frustration after some of his worst losses, at one point describing the US’s highest judicial body as “not a normal court.” In his last year in office, Biden proposed major changes including 18-year term limits and ethics rules and implemented them.

In making the proposal, Biden said that “the extreme opinions passed by the Supreme Court undermine long-established principles and protections of civil rights.”

His proposal never materialized, due to the opposition of Republicans in Congress.

‘RECIPE FOR LOSS’

According to Yoo, the Biden administration failed to adapt when the court made it clear that 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 amendment, the administration has “made itself irrelevant to the most important constitutional questions of the day,” said Yoo, a former law clerk to Thomas. “That’s a recipe for defeat.”

Conservatives have launched what is sometimes called “war on the administrative state” – aimed at curbing federal agencies that regulate many aspects of American business and life – and have found a receptive audience in this court, as Biden knows many high-profile. cases.

Presidents, especially Democrats, in recent decades have increasingly relied on federal regulatory agencies to advance their policy goals because of the declining productivity of a US Congress that has often -deadlock along partisan lines.

During Biden’s term, the court formalized a conservative legal principle, called the fundamental question doctrine, that gives judges broad discretion to invalidate executive agency actions that are “substantial of economic and political importance” unless deemed expressly authorized by Congress.

The court invoked this doctrine to block the student loan waiver plan that Biden promised as a 2020 candidate and restore the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants.

“The environmental law and student loan cases show how unfriendly the court is to Democratic executive action, because the lack of congressional activity means that executive action remains the only avenue for any kind of -progress in US policy,” Cornell Law School professor Gautam Hans said.

In another blow to federal regulatory power, the court in 2024 overturned a landmark 1984 precedent that gave US agencies deference in interpreting the laws they administer, which also ruled against the Biden administration. This doctrine, known as “ Chevron (NYSE:) deference,” 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 parent company in China or will be banned by the United States for national security.

The court in 2024 upheld a federal law defended by the Biden administration that made it a felony for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns. It also preserves the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created under the 2010 Democratic-backed Wall Street reform.

But other victories were based on court findings that challengers to policies backed by the Biden administration lacked the necessary legal standing to sue, meaning the underlying legal issues were not resolved and things may return in the future. These cases involved: access to the abortion pill mifepristone; Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities; and the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare.

These cases “do not really resonate to vindicate the political goals of the Biden administration,” Hans said.

These gains may prove to be “forestalling even greater losses” if the court addresses these issues again in a more thorough manner and reaches different results, added Hans.

TRUMP IMMUNITY

Although Biden has often experienced disappointment in court, Trump while out of office has scored victories — notably in three cases decided last year.

In its biggest move, the court accepted Trump’s request for immunity after he was indicted on federal criminal charges related to his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss to Biden – the first time it has acknowledged any level of presidential immunity from prosecution. The ruling said former presidents have broad immunity for official actions taken in office.

Biden called the decision “a dangerous precedent.”

University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Steve Schwinn said the Biden administration finds itself in the middle of longer-term trends in which the court curbs the power of federal agencies and expands the power of leadership.

These shifts “will have significant effects on federal law enforcement across the board,” Schwinn said. “We will see this immediately in the second Trump administration, with a president who has promised to take full advantage of these trends.”