Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The federal court system returned some landmark rulings for the American people in 2025, but many legal questions remain unanswered as judges absorb the flood of litigation challenging President Donald Trump’s policies.
In his second term, Trump has pursued an ambitious agenda on spending, diversity, gender, federal workforce reductions, and immigration, among other things.
With those moves towards change came major constitutional questions that have, or are likely to result in, landmark precedents.
Within months of Trump’s second term, hundreds of court cases led to a spike in roadblocks to executive action and a wave of emergency docket decisions that have led many to question the Supreme Court’s discretion.
So far, the justices have considered more than 20 emergency appeals and held three oral arguments over major challenges to Trump’s policies, including tariffs, firing employees, and nationwide injunctions.
Meanwhile, the ensuing court battles have prompted tense confrontations with federal judges and reinvigorated debate about how much the third branch of government can restrain the second.
Immigration
Perhaps Trump’s top policy priority, immigration, has been the focal point of these tensions—testing not only the parameters set up by Congress but how the judiciary can enforce those as well.
By June, Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions had led the Supreme Court to weaken judges’ longstanding but controversial practice of issuing sweeping blocks—otherwise known as nationwide injunctions—on presidents’ policies.
That decision and others involving Trump amplified tensions judges had with each other and the president; each side accusing the other of overstepping their authority and disrupting the nation’s separation of powers.
A particularly tense exchange saw Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accusing Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the other conservatives of undermining the rule of law.
In a biting response, the majority said Jackson was advancing a view of injunctions that was “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
Barrett, who released a book in September, maintained that she respected Jackson.
Charged rhetoric also emerged from cases challenging Trump’s attempt to deport Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.
After U.S. District Judge James Boasberg blocked those deportations in March, Trump called for his and other judges’ impeachment.
That appeared to prompt a rare response from Chief Justice John Roberts, who admonished impeachment over legal rulings.
The following months saw tense exchanges between federal judges and the Justice Department, which faced potential contempt from Boasberg and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis.
Xinis was the Maryland judge who ordered the return of a deportee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, despite the administration’s contention that she was intruding on its authority over foreign affairs.
Meanwhile, the administration has filed a formal complaint against Boasberg in the D.C. Circuit, which is also reviewing whether he overstepped his authority in the way he probed potential contempt.
Social Issues
In a February hearing, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes pressed the administration on its attempt to ban military troops with gender dysphoria.
That led the Justice Department to file a formal complaint, which was dismissed in September.
Regardless, Reyes’s conflicts with the administration appear far from over.
After she blocked the troop ban, the administration was able to win some temporary relief through a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Writing for the majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas indicated that Reyes’s block conflicted with at least two recent Supreme Court decisions.
Among Trump’s many wins on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket was a temporary stay on another judge’s decision to block his troop policy.
Although the court has been working out its approach to gender issues, that decision and another—in U.S. v. Skrmetti—cited by Katsas provided legal support for Republicans’ position.
In June, the Supreme Court delivered a win for social conservatives when it upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain gender-related medical interventions for minors.
Other decisions allowed states greater flexibility in regulating pornography and defunding Planned Parenthood.
The high court has yet to provide final rulings on Trump’s policies targeting “gender-affirming care,” Planned Parenthood funding, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
However, its decisions on the emergency docket have indicated Trump faces an advantage on at least some of those issues.
Executive Authority
One of the primary ways Trump has put forth socially conservative values is through attempts to defund organizations that engage in certain activities.
Those defunding efforts extended to other issues, such as National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, as well.
While lower courts questioned whether Trump is intruding on Congress’s power of the purse, the Supreme Court has indicated that many of the legal challenges weren’t even brought in the right court.
A majority of the court did allow a lower court’s order requiring the disbursal of billions in foreign assistance.
That prompted a fiery dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, who, with Justice Clarence Thomas, issued criticisms of their colleagues’ decisions to block some of Trump’s deportations.
More tension was revealed in dissents by the three liberal justices when the court halted blocks on some of Trump’s policies.
Justice Elena Kagan, for example, suggested the Supreme Court was abusing the emergency docket by disregarding precedent at a more preliminary stage of litigation.
One of those cases involved Trump’s decision to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, without following Congressional limits that a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent had upheld.
Slaughter’s case underwent oral argument in December when the justices appeared poised to overturn that landmark precedent, known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
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