July 3, 2026, 3:01 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON – An increasingly polarized Supreme Court decided more than twice as many cases along ideological lines during the term that ended June 30 compared with the previous term, reflecting a 6-3 divide that one expert said meant the justices were behaving “even more politically.”
Among the conservative justices, some of the major decisions split their bloc, particularly on cases that were a top priority for President Donald Trump.
While two of the court’s most conservative justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – always ruled for the president, the other four conservatives, including three nominated to the court by Trump in his first term, sided both for and against him.
“The six Republican appointees on the court are not monolithic,” said Kannon Shanmugam, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell who has argued 40 cases before the court. “And I don’t think that you can understand the current court until you understand some of these nuances of difference among those justices.”
Barrett attacked for ruling against Trump
Although Justice Amy Coney Barrett wasn’t the only Trump-appointed justice to sometimes rule against him, she drew the attacks from his supporters.
Vice President JD Vance, when asked about the backlash against Barrett in ruling against the Trump administration on the question of birthright citizenship, told CNN that he believed she had made a “mistake.”
Legal analyst David French said on the Advisory Opinions podcast that his first thought after hearing the high court’s birthright decision was that “Justice Barrett is going to catch hell from MAGA.”
Trump, himself, did not go after the conservative justices − including Trump appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh − who were also part of the the majority ruling against the president’s attempt to change through an executive order the longstanding definition of birthright citizenship.
But he did unload in February when Chief Justice Roberts, Barrett and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined with the liberal justices to strike down the sweeping tariffs that were a centerpiece of his economic agenda.
Trump called the ruling an “embarrassment” to Barrett’s and Gorsuch’s families.
“Two of the people that voted for that I appointed, and they sicken me,” Trump said in a speech before the National Republican Congressional Committee in March.
The president also complained in a Truth Social post that the liberal justices, unlike the conservatives, “always ‘stick together.’”
Liberal justices united against Trump
All three justices appointed by Democratic presidents ruled against Trump on tariffs, birthright citizenship, a trio of other immigration cases and on his moves to fire leaders of independent agencies. They also ruled against his administration’s position on several election-related cases, including one that allowed Republicans to draw more favorable congressional maps for the midterm elections.
Some of those decisions contributed to a rise in the share of cases that split the court ideologically, increasing from 9% last term to 23% this term, according to statistics compiled by SCOTUSBlog.
Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, said this term’s decisions showed that the court is behaving “even more politically.”
“The occasional cross-ideological alignment, or the case where the Chief Justice and/or one of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett peels off, becomes the exception that proves the rule rather than evidence of genuine independence,” Vladeck wrote on Substack.
Right-of-center justices formed coalitions
Roman Martinez, a partner at Latham & Watkins who has argued 16 cases before the justices, said there’s no question the court is highly polarized, especially on the far right and left sides.
But it’s more interesting, he said, to look at the “right-of-center” middle of the court where “you saw a lot of different coalitions come out different ways.”
“In decision after decision,” he said, “if you can get a majority of the three justices in the middle, you’re just going to win.”
Roberts in the driver’s seat
In three of the cases that were a priority for Trump, Roberts ruled against the president, joining the three liberal justices and at least one other conservative to scrap tariffs, uphold birthright citizenship and stop Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
“He has a tremendous amount of power,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame Law School professor. “It feels like every big case, it’s constantly Chief Justice Roberts.”
When Roberts is in the majority, he gets to assign who writes the opinion. And he kept the pen for himself in the three big cases Trump lost, as well as a big one the president won that let him fire leaders of independent agencies that are not the Federal Reserve.
That decision, a long-time goal of the conservative legal movement that was not tied to Trump, united all six conservatives against the three liberals.
Although the court could have ruled against Trump more narrowly on birthright citizenship, focusing only on whether the president’s order violated a federal law, Roberts’ opinion said the order was unconstitutional.
Eric Wessan, who had argued in a brief for 25 Republican attorneys general that Trump’s executive order should be allowed, said he was disappointed that the chief justice answered the constitutional question when he didn’t have to.
“Chief Justice Roberts is known, typically, for being a minimalist,” Wessan said. “He likes to issue rulings that address the question needed to resolve the case and typically does not reach as far to touch on other issues.”
Kavanaugh narrowed Trump’s loss on birthright citizenship
While Roberts may have been attempting to definitively end the debate over birthright citizenship, Kavanaugh’s partial dissent gave Trump something to grasp onto.
Kavanaugh could have limited his separate opinion to asserting that Trump’s order couldn’t override a federal law, which was all that was needed to decide the case. Instead, he said the order does not violate the Constitution. That left open the possibility that the law could be changed, if one more conservative justice can be convinced that there’s a way to do that without running afoul of the 14th Amendment.
“Kavanaugh seemed to go out of his way, almost gratuitously, to not just concur in part but also to dissent,” Vladeck said.
Does Trump expect loyalty?
Even though Kavanaugh, Roberts and Barrett had all voted to strike down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, it was Barrett who got criticized – both for that ruling and for writing a decision upholding grace periods for mailed ballots.
“Impeach rogue, activist judges,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-North Carolina, said on social media after the birthright citizenship ruling. “We’re looking at you Amy Coney Barrett.”
Barrett was likewise attacked last year for being a “DEI hire” when she and Roberts sided with the court’s three liberal justices in backing an order that the Trump administration had to pay foreign aid organizations for work they already did for the government.
French said on his podcast that the only other reason he can think of that Barrett, a woman, gets unfairly criticized for ruling against Trump when male conservative justices do not is that she benefited from a major effort to get her confirmed during a very short window at the end of Trump’s first term.
“And I think there might be a feeling of like, `We went to the wall for you; you need to deliver for us,’” he said. “And that’s just fundamentally misunderstanding what is a judge.”
As he anticipated losing the birthright case, Trump said he wanted and expected “loyalty,” not for himself but “for our Country.”
A conservative, but not always pro-Trump, term
Jonathan Adler, a William & Mary Law School professor, said that despite some cases in which the Republican-appointed justices diverted from conservative orthodoxy, the record for all six “is still one of being quite conservative in terms of their overall approach to the law. “
“I would characterize this term at least as certainly being a conservative term, but not a pro-Trump term,” he said. “And I think that distinction is significant.”
But Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s law school dean, said Trump still won most of the cases the court decided either after oral arguments or through emergency appeals the administration brought.
“Keep in mind here that Justices Thomas and Alito did not once vote against the Trump administration,” he said.
Thomas and Alito were Trump’s top defenders
Thomas wrote a whopping 91 pages in dissenting with the majority’s 26-page opinion in the birthright citizenship case.
Alito’s dissent was shorter but no less aggressive. “This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court,” he wrote, “and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake.”
The next day, Vance was asked if he thought Alito – the subject of recent retirement speculation – was going to step down.
Vance said he didn’t know, adding that Alito “is such an amazing guy.”
“He would,” Vance told reporters, “be irreplaceable.”
