2026-07-02T09:00:25.628Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/02/politics/supreme-court-controversial-heated-term-takeaways
在全年多数时间痛批最高法院——同时又邀请部分大法官前往白宫共进晚餐——之后，唐纳德·特朗普总统本周对最高法院这一意义重大的任期作出的最终评价，听起来像是一场停火。
“共和党，”总统在社交媒体上发帖称，“得到了美国最高法院非常公平的对待。”
这番语气平和的评价与仅四个月前的态度形成了显著转变。当时特朗普曾宣称，那些投票否决他的紧急全球关税政策的大法官是“家族的耻辱”。倘若这份突如其来的友好能够维持，实则反映出本届任期的特点：由6名保守派与3名自由派大法官组成的最高法院，首次直面特朗普的多项政策，既让白宫遭遇了重大失利，也取得了一系列实质性胜利。
总体而言，最高法院对58起实质性案件作出了判决，涉及美国生活的方方面面，包括谁可以参加高中足球队、全国选区重划之争的结果将花落谁家，以及谁能获得美国公民身份。
以下是最高法院本届意义重大的任期的几大核心议题。
由于最高法院日程安排的特殊性，去年仅有少数特朗普相关争议得到大法官们的全面审理。2025年最受关注的多项政府政策，比如对移民的打击行动和行政权力扩张，直到去年秋季才正式提交至最高法院。
特朗普最终在其中几起案件中失利，最典型的当属出生公民权和关税案，但他在其他诸多优先议题上取得了重大胜利。
由6名保守派大法官组成的多数派极大扩张了总统解雇独立机构负责人的权力，并允许政府终止对超过100万合法居住在美国、旨在躲避本国冲突和自然灾害的临时人道主义救济 recipients。
尽管特朗普并未直接参与最高法院6票对3票支持各州禁止跨性别学生参加女子运动队的判决，但该结果显然与他的议程和言论立场一致。今年4月最高法院另一项极具争议的6票对3票判决——削弱1965年《投票权法案》，以及取消政党与候选人协调竞选时的支出上限的判决，同样符合这一情况。
总统过去从不避讳批评最高法院。今年3月，特朗普在一篇长帖中指责由他任命了9名大法官中3人的最高法院“不过是一个被武器化且不公的政治组织”。
与此同时，总统似乎在展开魅力攻势：4月邀请最高法院的保守派大法官出席英国国王查尔斯三世相关的宴会；5月又公开表扬了几位前往白宫出席美联储主席凯文·沃什就职仪式的保守派大法官。
当本届任期尘埃落定，特朗普似乎颇为满意。他将大量注意力放在了最高法院6票对3票的特朗普诉斯劳特案判决上，该判决允许他解雇国会试图免受总统政治干预的联邦机构官员。
“最高法院迄今为止作出的最重大、最具影响力的判决，无疑是斯劳特案，它推翻了著名的‘汉弗莱遗嘱执行人案’先例。”特朗普在社交媒体上写道，此处他指的是最高法院在该案中推翻的1935年先例。“这一判决将原本就应属于总统的巨大额外权力还给了白宫。”
谈及一些涉及政治权力和文化战争的重大案件，本届任期几乎没有打消“这是一个在意识形态路线上严重分裂的最高法院”的看法。
大法官们在本届任期内作出了13起6票对3票的意识形态分裂判决，数量是去年的两倍多。其中包括支持跨性别体育禁令、扩张总统解雇权力以及认可特朗普多项移民议程的案件。
意识形态分裂的频率是检验最高法院自我标榜的“在特朗普时代超脱党派纷争”形象的标准之一。首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨曾多次敦促公众不要将最高法院视为沿党派路线投票的党派机构。
“人们认为我们在制定政策，”他在5月的一次会议上说道。
“我认为他们将我们视为真正的政治行动者，”他说，“但我认为这并非对我们工作的准确理解。”
本届任期内的6票对3票判决包括一项削弱《投票权法案》的裁决，该结果允许路易斯安那州、阿拉巴马州等南方州的州议员以有利于共和党的方式重新划分选区。最高法院还允许总统终止针对海地人和叙利亚人的一项人道主义救济，并取消了政党与候选人协调竞选时的支出上限。
“对于那些宁愿看到更多资金以更轻松的方式涌入政坛、哪怕会加剧腐败风险的人来说，这项推翻先例的判决正是为你们准备的，”大法官埃琳娜·卡根在本届任期最后一天就竞选资金判决发表异议时打趣道。
诚然，最高法院也作出了跨越意识形态的出人意料的联合判决，包括在重大案件中。最高法院维持自动出生公民权的判决中，三名保守派大法官——罗伯茨、艾米·科尼·巴雷特和布雷特·卡瓦诺——与三名自由派大法官组成了多数派。罗伯茨和巴雷特在另一项判决中再次达成一致，该判决维持了对选举日当天盖戳、但在数天后送达的邮寄选票的计数规则。
最高法院一致裁决了一起第二修正案相关案件，限制政府解除常规吸毒者武装的权力。罗伯茨、巴雷特和尼尔·戈萨奇大法官与自由派大法官一同投票，否决了特朗普的紧急关税政策。
从另一项衡量标准——一致判决数量来看，最高法院与往届任期大致持平。大法官们今年以一致意见判决了25起案件，约占其审理上诉案件的44%——接近SCOTUSblog统计的过去20年45%的平均水平。
与往届任期一样，卡瓦诺和罗伯茨在多数判决中都站在了多数方，这凸显了他们对最高法院意识形态中间立场的牢固掌控。
“卡瓦诺大法官成为了关键投票者，一名务实的法学家，一位彻底独立的思考者，”哈佛大学法学院教授、前卡瓦诺助理理查德·雷说道。特朗普于2018年提名卡瓦诺进入最高法院。
但卡瓦诺在本届任期内也更倾向于支持特朗普，在两起重大判决中至少部分站在了总统一边，最终导致他与首席大法官产生分歧。正是卡瓦诺在关税案中撰写了主要异议意见。而在本届任期最后一天，卡瓦诺并未加入多数方维持自动出生公民权判决的推理。
尽管针对特朗普的判决以6票对3票作出，但仅有五名大法官认为特朗普的出生公民权行政命令违反了第14修正案。卡瓦诺并不在其中。
“在我看来，这项行政命令并未违反第14修正案，”卡瓦诺在一份未获任何同僚支持的部分异议意见中写道。“国会可以——符合第14修正案的规定……制定新法律，为非法入境或临时入境的外国公民所生子女设立出生公民权例外条款。”
巴雷特因与罗伯茨一同支持出生公民权判决而遭到右翼的尖锐批评。副总统JD·万斯本周称巴雷特的投票对特朗普而言是一个“错误”。
其他人的措辞则更为直接。
“弹劾渎职、激进的法官，”南卡罗来纳州共和党众议员南希·梅斯发帖称。“艾米·科尼·巴雷特，我们盯着你呢。”
每当巴雷特作出不利于特朗普的判决时，对她的攻击已成为近期任期内的一种常态。相比之下，卡瓦诺并未遭到此类反击。
雷将卡瓦诺在出生公民权案中的立场描述为一种“折中方案”，具有“取悦不了任何选民群体”的特点。
“他既因判定行政命令无效而令政府失望，又因驳回原告的宪法主张而令自由派不满，”他说道。
早在本届任期结束前，就有迹象显示大法官之间存在分歧：部分大法官公开就一系列涉及特朗普政策的紧急议程判决的意义展开争论——其中多数判决都对总统有利。
就在这种紧张局势缓和之际，最高法院于4月作出了关于投票权的重磅判决。这似乎进一步拉大了最高法院保守派与自由派大法官之间的鸿沟。
“法院本应是非政治的，”最高法院资历最浅的大法官、自由派的凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊在5月的一场活动中说道，并补充称她的同僚们未能避免政治表象的嫌疑。“我们必须严格恪守在每起案件中适用的原则和规则，不能让人看起来在这类案件中采取双重标准。”
大法官索尼娅·索托马约尔今年4月就曾因在另一起案件中就卡瓦诺的判决发表“伤人”言论而道歉。而在一场不寻常的庭上交锋后，最高法院不得不出面澄清：大法官塞缪尔·阿利托表示，他对索托马约尔在其审理的某起案件中宣读异议意见一事毫不知情。
最高法院后来告诉CNN，索托马约尔确实提前向阿利托的办公室打过招呼，但显然该通知并未送达大法官本人。“这是阿利托大法官一方的误解，”最高法院发言人说道。
本届任期内，最高法院通过简单排除司法介入的方式解决了多起重要案件。
在支持特朗普终止针对海地和叙利亚公民的临时人道主义保护的判决中，6票多数派裁定联邦法院无权审查总统在该项目上的决定。
在一名虔诚的拉斯塔法里教徒因监狱修剪其 dreadlocks 而提起的诉讼中，最高法院保守派得出结论：人们不能依据旨在保护囚犯宗教权利的联邦法律提起诉讼。
大法官们驳回了民众以协助和教唆海外酷刑为由起诉公司的诉求。并以7票对2票裁定，一项联邦法律禁止以除草剂草甘膦致癌为由起诉生产该产品的公司。
这些判决延续了过去几年的趋势：最高法院认定只有国会才能授权诉讼，而非法院。
批评人士称，这种做法实际上让受伤的民众无处申诉。
下一任期，最高法院已同意审理一起涉及囚犯的案件：该囚犯起诉联邦监狱官员，称在一场帮派斗殴导致其重伤后，监狱未能将其送往医院。尽管该囚犯尾骨骨折，但仅被给予了非处方止痛药。
最高法院可能会利用该案大幅限制美国人起诉联邦官员的能力。
“最高法院近期判决的一个可悲模式是，让那些严重受伤、权利遭到侵犯的个体完全得不到救济，”加州大学伯克利分校法学院院长欧文·切梅林斯基告诉CNN。“如果权利遭到侵犯时没有法院提供救济途径，那么权利就毫无意义。”
Takeaways from a divisive Supreme Court term that expanded Trump’s power
2026-07-02T09:00:25.628Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/02/politics/supreme-court-controversial-heated-term-takeaways
After berating the Supreme Court for much of the year — while simultaneously inviting some of the justices over to the White House for dinner — President Donald Trump’s final assessment of the court’s momentous term this week felt something like a ceasefire.
“The Republican Party,” the president posted on social media, “was treated very fairly by the United States Supreme Court.”
The muted appraisal was a remarkable shift from just four months ago, when Trump declared that the justices who voted to shut down his emergency global tariffs were an “embarrassment to their families.” The sudden bonhomie, if it holds, reflects a term in which the 6-3 conservative court, grappling with many of Trump’s policies for the first time, handed the White House big losses, but also a series of substantial wins.
In all, the Supreme Court issued opinions in 58 merits cases, touching on a wide spectrum of American life and deciding who can play on high school soccer fields, who would win the national battle over redistricting and who gets to be a US citizen.
Here are some of the major themes from the Supreme Court’s momentous term.
Because of the way the court’s calendar works, only a few Trump controversies received a full airing from the justices last year. Many of the administration’s policies that drew the most attention in 2025 — such as its crackdown on immigration and expansion of executive power — didn’t reach the Supreme Court in earnest until last fall.
Trump ultimately lost several of those cases, most notably birthright citizenship and tariffs, but he scored enormous wins on many of his other priorities.
The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court vastly expanded the president’s power to fire the leaders of independent agencies and allowed the administration to end temporary humanitarian relief for potentially more than 1 million people who have been living in the US legally to escape conflict and natural disaster in their home countries.
And while Trump didn’t have a direct stake in the court’s 6-3 decision to allow states to ban transgender students from competing on girls sprots teams, the outcome was clearly aligned with his agenda and rhetoric. Same goes for the court’s divisive 6-3 decision in April to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 6-3 decision to erase limits on how much political parties can spend on campaigns in coordination with candidates.
The president hasn’t been shy about criticizing the court in the past. In a lengthy post in March, Trump accused the court to which he appointed three of nine justices of being “little more than a weaponized and unjust political organization.”
At the same time, the president seemed to be engaged in a charm offensive, inviting the court’s conservatives to a banquet featuring Britain’s King Charles in April. He also publicly praised several of the conservative justices who showed at the White House in May for the swearing in of Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh.
When the dust settled on the term, Trump seemed pleased. He focused much of his attention on the court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, allowing him to fire officials at federal agencies that Congress attempted to protect from presidential politics.
“The biggest and most consequential decision issued by the court, by far, is the Slaughter case, which overturned the very famous Humphrey’s Executor Rule.” Trump wrote on social media, referring to a 1935 precedent the court toppled in that case. “This decision gives tremendous additional power back to the presidency, where it belongs.”
When it comes to some of the biggest cases dealing with political power and the culture wars, the term did little to dispel the notion that this is a Supreme Court deeply divided on ideological lines.
The justices handed down 6-3, ideologically split decisions in 13 cases this term, more than double the count last year. Those included cases upholding transgender sports bans, expanding the president’s power to fire and endorsing much of his immigration agenda.
The frequency of ideological splits is one way to test the court’s self-styled image of being above the partisan fray in an era of Trumpian politics. Chief Justice John Roberts has often urged the public to not view the court as a partisan institution voting along party lines.
“People think we’re making policy decisions,” he said to a conference in May.
“I think they view us as truly political actors,” he said, “which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”
Among the 6-3 rulings this term was a decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, an outcome that allowed state lawmakers in Southern states like Louisiana and Alabama to redraw their maps in a way that benefited the GOP. The court also allowed the president to end a form of humanitarian relief for Haitians and Syrians, and it erased the caps on how much political parties could spend in coordination with candidates.
“For those who would prefer even more money to be pumped even more easily into politics despite the danger of corruption — this overruling is for you,” Justice Elena Kagan quipped as she dissented in the campaign finance decision handed down on the last day of the term.
To be sure, the court also issued decisions with surprising coalitions that crossed ideology, including in major cases. The court’s decision on upholding automatic birthright citizenship put three conservatives — Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — in the majority along with the court’s three liberals. Roberts and Barrett were together again in a decision that upheld the counting of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving days later.
The court unanimously settled a Second Amendment case that limited the government’s ability to disarm regular drug users. Roberts, Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined with the court’s liberals to shut down Trump’s emergency tariffs.
By another measure, unanimous decisions, the court was roughly in line with past terms. The justices decided 25 cases this year unanimously, just under 44% of its docket of argued appeals — close to the 45% average calculated by SCOTUSblog for the past 20 years.
As in past terms, Kavanaugh and Roberts were in the majority more than any of their colleagues, underscoring their firm grip on the ideological center of the Supreme Court.
“Justice Kavanaugh emerged as a key vote, a pragmatic jurist, and a thoroughly independent thinker,” said Richard Re, a Harvard Law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk. Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the bench in 2018.
But Kavanaugh also moved closer to Trump this term, siding at least partly with the president in two massive decisions that wound up putting him at odds with the chief. It was Kavanaugh who wrote the lead dissent in the tariffs case. And, on the final day of the term, Kavanaugh declined to join the majority’s reasoning for upholding automatic birthright citizenship.
While the court’s decision against Trump was 6-3, only five justices thought Trump’s birthright order had violated the 14th Amendment. Kavanaugh wasn’t one of them.
“In my view, the executive order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote in a partial dissent that none of his colleagues joined.“Congress could — consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment … enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”
Barrett has received sharp criticism from the right after she joined Roberts’ birthright citizenship opinion. Vice President JD Vance this week called Barrett’s vote against Trump a “mistake.”
Others were less diplomatic.
“Impeach rogue, activist judges,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, posted. “We’re looking at you Amy Coney Barrett.”
Attacks aimed at Barrett any time she rules against Trump have become something of a ritual in recent terms. Kavanaugh, by contrast, has received no such blowback.
Re framed Kavanaugh’s position in the birthright case as a “hybrid” that had “the virtue of pleasing no constituency.”
“He both frustrated the administration by invalidating the executive order and disappointed liberals by rejecting the plaintiffs’ constitutional claim,” he said.
Long before the end of the term there were signs of strife as some of the justices wrestled publicly with the significance of a series of emergency docket rulings on Trump’s policies — most of which landed in the president’s favor.
Just as that tension eased, the court handed down its blockbuster decision on voting rights in April. And that seemed to widen the gulf between the court’s conservative and liberal wings.
“Courts are apolitical,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior justice, said at an event in May, adding that her colleagues missed the mark in avoiding the appearance of politics. “We have to be scrupulous about sticking to the principles and the rules that we apply in every case and not look as though we’re doing something different in this kind of context.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor had to apologize in April after directing “hurtful” comments at Kavanaugh about his opinion in another case. And the court had to clean up after an unusual exchange on the bench in which Justice Samuel Alito signaled he had been blindsided by Sotomayor’s decision to read a dissent in one of his cases.
The court later told CNN that Sotomayor had indeed given Alito’s chambers a heads up, which apparently never reached the justice. “It was a misunderstanding on Justice Alito’s part,” a court spokesperson said.
The court resolved several important cases this term by simply removing the judiciary from the equation.
In the decision upholding Trump’s ability to end temporary humanitarian protections for people from Haiti and Syria, a 6-3 majority ruled that federal courts couldn’t review the president’s decisions on the program.
In a case involving a devout Rastafarian whose dreadlocks were cut in prison, the court’s conservatives concluded that people could not sue under a federal law intended to protect the religious rights of prisoners.
The justices barred people from suing companies on claims that they aided and abetted torture overseas. And it ruled 7-2 that a federal law blocks people who say the herbicide Roundup caused their cancer from suing the company that makes that product.
Those decisions continue a trend over the past several years of the court finding that only Congress can authorize lawsuits, not courts.
Critics say that approach has effectively left people who have been injured with no recourse.
Next term, the court has agreed to hear a case involving a prisoner who sued federal prison officials for failing to transport him to a hospital after a gang-related fight left him severely injured. Though the prisoner’s tailbone was fractured, he was treated only with over-the-counter pain medication.
The court could use the case to severely limit the ability of Americans to sue federal officials.
“A tragic pattern of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions is leaving individuals who have been seriously injured and whose rights have been violated with no remedy whatsoever,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school, told CNN. “Rights are meaningless without courts to provide remedies when they are violated.”