Another landmark term at the U.S. Supreme Court neared its end Friday with a trio of decisions expected to transform the lives of millions of Americans.
In rulings described as “profound” and “sweeping,” the high court weighed in on homelessness, government regulatory power, and Jan. 6 prosecutions.
In one decision, the court held that local laws effectively criminalizing homelessness don’t violate the U.S. Constitution. In another, the court overturned a 40-year-old precedent governing how federal agencies can issue regulations. And in its final decision, the justices vacated an obstruction charge the federal government has filed against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants – including former President Donald Trump.
Why We Wrote This
The three Supreme Court decisions issued Friday alone would qualify as a history-making term. And the court is not yet done, with arguably the biggest case coming Monday.
The already blockbuster term is not yet over. Arguably the biggest case of them all, concerning whether Mr. Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution, is expected to be decided on Monday. But today’s rulings are momentous on their own terms.
Can cities criminalize sleeping outside? The justices weigh in on homelessness.
The first decision on Friday came in a complex and emotional case concerning homelessness in a small Oregon town.
The town, Grants Pass, had enacted an ordinance that made it criminal to sleep in public – including in your car. In a 6-3 ruling that broke along ideological lines, the Supreme Court said that the ordinance doesn’t constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment.
The case posed hard questions, and it pitted a variety of different interest groups against each other.
The homeless plaintiffs argued that Grants Pass – a town with just one 138-bed overnight shelter – criminalized them for behavior they couldn’t avoid: sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, municipalities across the western United States argued that court rulings hampered their ability to quickly respond to public health and safety issues related to homeless encampments.
The ruling is expected to have broad and immediate consequences for cities, particularly in the West. Hanging over it all, experts say, is the feeling that it brings the U.S. no closer to truly addressing the causes of its homelessness crisis.
“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority opinion.
The Eighth Amendment, he added, “serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this nation’s homelessness policy.”
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the majority for permitting localities to criminalize sleep, which she described as “a biological necessity.”
“It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles,” she added. But the majority instead “focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”
Some see the decision as removing an unnecessary restriction on the multifaceted approaches cities can take to addressing homelessness. In a statement, Timothy Sandefur, vice president for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute, called it “the first step toward a sensible approach to the many problems of homelessness.”
Because of their complexity, “cities can only address these problems on a case-by-case basis,” he added. The Supreme Court decision “enables local communities to find actual solutions for the people who are suffering.”
But legal experts and advocates for the homeless worry that the decision will encourage a more punitive approach to managing homelessness at the expense of other solutions – which could exacerbate the crisis.
“It sets a really dangerous precedent,” says Jennifer Hanlon Wigon, executive director of Women’s Lunch Place, a shelter in Boston.
“It’s shifting the focus to law enforcement from human services,” she adds.
Experts worry that cities will now implement camping bans even when they don’t have to, creating more barriers to getting out of homelessness. Accumulated, unpaid fines and a criminal record make it hard, for instance, to get a driver’s license and can be used by landlords to deny housing.
“There needs to be [a] wider reflection on the causes of homelessness and how we should be addressing this,” says Claire Herbert, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
Another consequence may be that homeless populations will move to communities that do not enforce camping bans, or have more resources, overloading them, she says. Police, too, will have to enforce the bans at the expense of other issues.
“The solutions to homelessness have always been clear, and this is not it,” says Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. The Supreme Court ruling “is sweeping. It is extreme. It is cruel.”
In the guise of saying that judges aren’t the right people to engage in homelessness, “the court is entirely ducking the hard questions about the law,” says Clare Pastore, a law professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
And, she adds, “this is not going to end litigation over homelessness, if that’s what the court thinks it’s doing.”
What is the Chevron doctrine, and why should you care that it’s been overturned?
The Supreme Court’s second decision was decades in the making. Its consequences, which will become clearer in the coming months, have the potential to shape almost every aspect of American life for decades to come.
In 1984, the high court issued a landmark decision holding that federal courts must defer to a government agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute. That ruling, known as the Chevron doctrine, became a cornerstone for how all federal agencies issue regulations.
In recent decades, groups seeking to curb the regulatory power of federal agencies have repeatedly challenged Chevron in court. On Friday, in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, they succeeded.
In another 6-3 ruling divided along ideological lines, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine, writing that the doctrine usurped the foundational role of the courts to decide if an agency is acting within its legal authority.
While appreciating that laws may not always be clear, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, the Framers envisioned “that the final ‘interpretation of the laws’ would be ‘the proper and peculiar province of the courts.”
“The only way to ‘ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,’ is for the Court to leave Chevron behind,” he added.
Importantly, Chief Justice Roberts noted that the decision does not affect past cases, and that courts would need to provide a “special justification” for overturning them.
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan blasted her colleagues for “destroy[ing] one doctrine of judicial humility” and “making a laughing-stock of a second.” She was referring to settled law, or stare decisis, a doctrine holding that the Supreme Court should respect prior decisions unless they are fundamentally wrong.
With its decision in Loper, “a rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” wrote Justice Kagan. “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”
In a separate concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch disputed the notion that the high court is accruing more power for itself, writing that the court “has refused to apply Chevron deference since 2016.”
But critics see the ruling as part of a broader effort by conservative activists – aided by a sympathetic Supreme Court – to transfer regulatory power from federal agencies to the courts. On Thursday, for example, it rolled back the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to impose civil penalties for fraud. Instead, federal regulators would need to seek a jury trial.
The high court has sided with federal agencies on occasion, including earlier this term when it upheld the funding mechanism of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But the prevailing trend has seen the court chip away at the powers of the so-called “administrative state.”
With the overturning of Chevron, “the primary impact would be to make the powerful more powerful and make the powerless more powerless,” says David Doniger, the Natural Resources Defense Fund attorney who argued the original Chevron case 40 years ago.
Two years ago, the court issued a decision that fleshed out what it calls the major questions doctrine. The doctrine holds that federal agencies can’t take major actions without clear direction in law from Congress, with courts deciding which actions are “major.”
Critics of the administrative state argue that it puts too much power in the hands of unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucrats.
“Today’s decision is a decisive victory for the separation of powers, ending a doctrine that impermissibly granted the Executive Branch the power to judge the scope of its own authority,” said Thomas Berry, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, in a statement.
Supporters of the administrative state claim that power is now being put in the hands of unelected and unaccountable federal judges.
Overturning Chevron is a “convulsive shock to the legal system,” says Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.
“The implications of the Supreme Court’s decision here would mean it is far more difficult for our country to protect the millions of people who want to ensure that our food is safe to eat, that we have clean air for our children, safe water, that aircraft and automobiles are safe. It is a really serious pivot from having the ability to ensure basic protections for people’s lives.”
The Loper decision represents the heaviest blow yet to the regulatory power of federal agencies. It has the potential to have sweeping effects on American life – evidenced by groups as varied as the AFL-CIO and Washington lobbying firms expressing concerns about it.
The ruling “is profound,” says Rachel Weintraub, executive director of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards.
“It impacts all regulations from our federal government,” she adds. “It means toy safety, it means those things impacting our financial markets … every agency that promulgates rules could be impacted by this decision.”
A Jan. 6 defendant gets a bipartisan win
In its final decision Friday, the Supreme Court weighed in on the second of three cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
This term represents the first time the justices have had to grapple with the fallout from that day, when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the results of the 2020 election.
Earlier this term, the court ruled unanimously that Mr. Trump could remain on the 2024 presidential ballot despite his alleged involvement. On Friday, the court vacated an obstruction charge that the Justice Department had filed against hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, including Mr. Trump himself.
The provision of the law at issue, enacted as part of a 2002 financial reform law responding to the Enron scandal, imposes criminal charges on anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” A conviction carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
In another 6-3 ruling – though one that didn’t fall along ideological lines – the Supreme Court said that the government “must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.”
While the case stemmed from Jan. 6, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that the government’s interpretation of the law would criminalize not only serious conduct but also “a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists alike to decades in prison.”
In a concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson – a member of the court’s liberal wing and a former public defender – wrote that the mob “inflicted a deep wound on this nation,” but that the case “is not about the immorality of those acts.”
“Our commitment to equal justice and the rule of law requires the courts to faithfully apply criminal laws as written, even in periods of national crisis,” she added.
In a dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett – a member of the court’s conservative supermajority – countered that the obstruction law is intentionally “a very broad provision.”
“Events like January 6th were not its target. (Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?) But statutes often go further than the problem that inspired them,” she wrote.
The majority, she added, “does textual backflips to find some way – any way – to narrow the reach of” the law.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Fischer v. U.S. may have a limited impact, however.
About a quarter of the roughly 1,400 Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with breaking the obstruction law, according to a Just Security analysis of NPR data. Only 26 defendants have been convicted solely of breaking that statute, and 71 charged under the statute are awaiting trial, according to Just Security.
Furthermore, federal judges and prosecutors have already been planning for this development, The New York Times reported. The Justice Department says there are no defendants currently facing solely the obstruction charge. Some judges have signaled that they would increase sentences for other charges if the obstruction charge weren’t available.
“On the whole, I think it’s a fairly muted impact on the Jan. 6 cases,” says Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law.
“There will be a handful of Jan. 6 defendants who all possibly have new trials or will [have their cases] resettled,” he adds, “but it is a very small sliver.”