SCOTUS Nerve Center: The term may be over, but the fight is far from finished
As the gavel drops on another term, it’s clearer than ever that this MAGA Supreme Court is extreme, dangerous, fully captured by President Trump, and badly in need of reform.
In just the past week, the MAGA Supreme Court wrapped up another devastating term by greenlighting book bans in schools, stripping Medicaid patients of access to trusted providers, undermining birthright citizenship, paving the way for Trump to act without legal restraint, and more.
In this issue of SCOTUS Nerve Center, we provide tools and analysis to respond to the Court’s latest rulings and support all of you in continuing the fight for reform. You’ll find:
Suggested talking points for engagement;
Ready-to-use social media content;
New opinion research and message guidance;
Fresh analysis on how the MAGA Supreme Court has has further empowered President Trump;
Summaries and analysis of the Court’s last day of rulings.
We want to thank so many of you who stood by our side this term to shine a spotlight on what this MAGA Supreme Court is doing to our workers, families, economy, communities, and democracy. Your work has been invaluable – and it has truly made a difference.
But this moment is not just about looking back, it’s also about what comes next. Because while the Court may have adjourned, the movement to hold it accountable is just getting started. So we’ll keep in touch as the Supreme Court takes any additional action over the coming weeks as well as with thoughts on how we can continue this drumbeat for reform over the coming months.
We want these materials to be as useful as possible, so please don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s anything more—or different—that would better support you or your organization. You’re welcome to reply to email us, or we can set up a time to connect by phone if that’s easier.
Sincerely,
Stasha Rhodes, Campaign Director, United for Democracy
P.S. If you know anyone who might find this newsletter useful, please feel free to pass it along and encourage them to subscribe.
Suggested talking points
To help shape the public conversation as oral arguments in this Supreme Court term come to a close, we’ve pulled together key talking points that frame what’s at stake and how to talk about the Court’s role in advancing a dangerous, partisan agenda.
This is meant to be a resource you can use across platforms—in interviews, on social media, in op-eds, or internal messaging. The goal: keep our narrative consistent, clear, and bold.
See talking points here. Use it, share it, adapt it—and help make sure we’re not just reacting to the Court’s decisions—we’re defining them.
Additionally, here are talking points on the abortion access crisis from PlannedParenthood Action Fund. You can also read the Action Fund’s recent memo detailing how the GOP budget reconciliation plan is a backdoor abortion ban here.
Three years ago, President Trump’s Supreme Court ended the federal constitutional right to abortion under the guise of “states' rights.”
Now, 20 states ban all or some abortion, robbing millions of people of the freedom to control their bodies, lives, and futures. But overturning Roe was never the end goal for abortion opponents, who have only ramped up attacks on our basic freedoms. Their end goal is clear: They want to take away abortion access everywhere for everyone.
Abortion opponents in Congress have now launched a sneaky attack on abortion in the budget reconciliation bill. The effort to “defund” Planned Parenthood is part of their years-long goal to shut down Planned Parenthood and ban abortion nationwide. It was never about “states’ rights.” It is about power and control.
Make no mistake: If they pass this bill and President Trump signs it into law, it will worsen the already dire abortion access crisis created nearly three years ago by the Dobbs decision and restrictive state abortion bans.
If Planned Parenthood is “defunded,” nearly 200 Planned Parenthood health centers in 24 states across the country are at risk of closure, making it harder to get an abortion everywhere:
These closures could eliminate one in four abortion providers nationwide, and threaten to shut down half of abortion-providing Planned Parenthood health centers.
More than 90% of health center closures would occur in states where abortion is protected and legal.
In 12 states, approximately 75% of abortion-providing Planned Parenthood health centers could close. Many of these states provide essential care to patients traveling from states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.
This is their long game. Despite the will of the American people, it has always been the intention of anti-abortion rights lawmakers and their backers — to make abortion harder, if not impossible, to get for everyone, everywhere.
The American people do not want Congress to ban abortion or “defund” Planned Parenthood. We can fight back and win.
This week, as we mark the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Planned Parenthood Action Fund storytellers and supporters will be on Capitol Hill speaking out against these attacks. Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations across the country will also host events where supporters can make calls to lawmakers, share stories, and show support for Planned Parenthood.
Together, we can stop this attack and protect Planned Parenthood.
Social media toolkit
Check it out here! We’ll send fresh unbranded content each issue – feel free to use and share however you like!
New public opinion research and messaging toolkit
From Research Collaborative and ASO
When the MAGA Justices on the Supreme Court gutted Roe three years ago, they didn’t just attack abortion rights – they escalated to a full-scale assault on our fundamental freedom to make decisions about what happens to our own bodies. Recent data demonstrate that not only does the Dobbs decision remain unpopular, but a majority of Americans see it as evidence that MAGA Justices will continue to attack our core freedoms. By uplifting messages that reference Dobbs in the ongoing fight against the MAGA Justices' efforts to control us, we can shore up public support to refuse and resist future attacks from a hijacked Court.
Three years after its issuance, Americans continue to disapprove of Dobbs, and most agree the decision is evidence that MAGA Justices will continue to capitulate to Trump and pave the way for future assaults.
Dobbs remains very unpopular among Democrats and independents. In March, six in ten Americans (62%) opposed the decision, including 86% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 35% of Republicans. Opposition has remained high since polling on the decision began three years ago.
Beyond just disapproving of Dobbs, voters connect the dots between that decision and broader threats to their freedoms. Another six in ten voters (61%) agree that “MAGA Justices on the Supreme Court helped take away some of our core freedoms, like our freedom to decide what happens to our bodies when they got rid of national access to abortion three years ago,” and because of this, “we cannot count on them to protect us from Trump’s continued attacks on our freedoms.” This includes 80% of Democrats, 63% of independents, and even 43% of Republicans.
As we help Americans understand the Roberts Court’s continued assaults on our freedoms, highlighting the effects of Dobbs in communications may help voters see other decisions as part of the broader agenda to control us, take away our freedoms, and decide our futures for us.
Messaging: For the most recent messaging on the ways in which the Supreme Court is complicit in the greater MAGA agenda, see our Freedom Over Fascism toolkit.
The MAGA Supreme Court has further empowered President Trump
From Court Accountability
On Friday, the six Republican-appointed justices on the Roberts Court cleared the way for President Trump to deny birthright citizenship to babies born in the United States to foreign-born parents. Rather than rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship—which is very clearly set forth under the Fourteenth Amendment—the justices simply removed the impediment to Trump’s unlawful actions by prohibiting lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions to protect all affected Americans.
The decision strips access to justice for countless people across the country—and not just those whose citizenship is now in question because of the Trump order. This ruling means that lower courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions to protect Americans from any unlawful abuse of power by the executive branch. In effect, the Supreme Court has gutted the power of any other federal court to serve as a check on presidential power, while sowing confusion, chaos, and uncertainty for the public.
The majority opinion effectively declares that universal injunctions are illegal—essentially banning their use—but does not clarify whether district courts’ judgments apply throughout their entire jurisdiction, as typically understood, or only to the parties before them. In other words, the Roberts Court has told district courts they cannot issue nationwide injunctions—but has not made clear how much “narrower” their injunctions must be. This leaves families affected by Trump’s predatory executive order in the dark: will their children’s rights depend on which state they live in? Does each family need to sue individually for their children’s rights to be protected? These families will not get the answers they need until the issue moves up through the lower courts—again.
Even then, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent, the majority’s decision “would require creating a two-tiered scheme in which the Government’s recognition of some children’s citizenship status or eligibility for federally funded benefits would change based on whether a child resides in one of respondent States at any given moment…discarding the nationwide status quo of birthright citizenship would result in chaos.”
The majority says babies and their representatives—organizations, states—can file a class action lawsuit to get nationwide relief now that universal injunctions are effectively banned. But the Roberts Court has also long been antagonistic to class actions and has recently grown skeptical of organizations’ and states’ standing to sue as third parties. Justice Samuel Alito used his concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, to make explicit the majority’s potential bait-and-switch: “Lax enforcement of the requirements for third-party standing and class certification would create a potentially significant loophole to today’s decision. Federal courts should thus be vigilant against such potential abuses of these tools.”
Put it all together and, as Justice Jackson concluded, “[t]he Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.” This is an exceptionally strong warning from inside the Court itself that the Roberts Court is not a guardrail for the rule of law, but a direct threat to it.
Summaries and analysis of final cases of the term
From Take Back the Court
United States v. Skrmetti
What’s at stake: The immediate impact of this case is that the Tennessee law banning gender affirming care for people under 18 will remain in effect, preventing trans teens from accessing essential, life-saving care. It is devastating for the 3,000 trans adolescents and their families living in Tennessee, and ominous for many more across the country, with 24 other states having already enacted similar bans.
Court watchers are saying:
It’s incoherent. “To carry Skrmetti over the finish line, Roberts abandoned coherence and candor in favor of a crude exercise in outcome-oriented reasoning. His decision is not the work of a careful judicial minimalist, but of a justice willing to distort basic equal protection doctrine to upend the lives of transgender children without offering a good reason why. It’s hard to imagine that this opinion will survive contact with progressive lower courts eager to take advantage of its many gaps and loopholes. Skrmetti’s brittle logic may be just enough for red states desperate for permission to persecute transgender children. But its evasions, misdirections, and sheer intellectual dishonesty are unlikely to stand the test of time.” (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, 6/18/25)
Our take: The MAGA opinion and concurrences in Skrmetti bring back the greatest hits of ludicrous, bigoted, results-oriented thinking.
The opinion draws heavily on Geduldig v. Aiello, a case that had pretty much been considered abandoned for the last 50 years, in which the Court came up with “reasons” why discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t really discrimination on the basis of sex. The Court held in Geduldig that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not sex discrimination because – wait for it – not all women are pregnant all the time. “The program divides potential recipients into two groups-pregnant women and nonpregnant persons. While the first group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes.” Therefore, no discrimination. Boom, lawyered.
Enter the Court’s anti-abortion jurisprudence. In a tortured opinion in 2007, the Roberts Court showed in Gonzales v. Carhart (Carhart II) that it is happy to render medical consensus and evidence “uncertain” if rightwing ideologues simply contest it, and to attribute “regret” to women who choose abortion – despite actual studies showing 95% of women receiving an abortion feel it was the right decision if rightwing ideologues simply assert it. In Skrmetti, both Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion and Justice Thomas’s concurrence invoke Carhart II to defer to Tennessee’s reliance on anti-trans [made up claims] instead of actual medical science and evidence.
And although the Roberts majority tries to pretend it away, as Justice Sotomayor points out in her dissent, the majority revives the “separate but equal” “logic” that underlay Jim Crow.
“In a passage that sounds hauntingly familiar to readers of Tennessee’s brief [in Skrmetti], Virginia argued in Loving [v. Virginia] that, should this Court intervene, it would find itself in a “bog of conflicting scientific opinion upon the effects of interracial marriage, and the desirability of preventing such alliances, from the physical, biological, genetic, anthropo- logical, cultural, psychological, and sociological point of view.” Brief for Appellee in Loving v. Virginia, O. T. 1966, No. 395, p. 7. “In such a situation,” Virginia continued, “it is the exclusive province of the Legislature of each State to make the determination for its citizens as to the desirability of a policy of permitting or preventing such [interracial] alliances—a province which the judiciary may not constitutionally invade.” Id., at 7–8. This Court, famously, rejected the States’ invitation in Loving to “defer to the wisdom of the state legislature” based on assertions that “the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt.” But “[w]hat the Court once recognized as an imperative check against discrimination, it today abandons.”
In harkening back to our dark past, the Roberts Court in Skrmetti casts a dark shadow over our future.
Media v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic
What’s at stake: In this case, the Roberts Court allowed state politicians to purge qualified health care providers like Planned Parenthood from Medicaid programs, denying Medicaid recipients access to the providers they trust for essential health care like birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more. The ruling will decimate access to essential health services for millions of Medicaid recipients in states hostile to reproductive health care, and is devastating for Planned Parenthood’s ability to provide care for those who need it the most.
Court watchers are saying:
“Thursday’s decision radically reorders all of federal Medicaid law, rendering much of it unenforceable. Medina could prove to be one of the most consequential health care decisions of the last several years, and one of the deadliest, as it raises a cloud of doubt over countless laws requiring that certain people receive health coverage, as well as laws ensuring that they will receive a certain quality of care.” (Ian Milhiser, Vox, 6/26/25)
Our take: Just two years ago, in Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Ind. v. Talevski, this same Supreme Court affirmed individuals’ right to sue the government for violating their rights under similar provisions. Once again, the MAGA justices show that they’ll contort any law if it means women won’t be able to access reproductive health care. And trashing one of our nation’s most effective civil rights laws in the process? It’s Christmas in June.
Trump v. CASA
What’s at stake: In a disingenuous and dangerous opinion, the MAGA justices severely limited courts’ ability to stop the Trump administration from taking illegal actions. In a scathing dissent, Justice Jackson wrote “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” while Justice Sotomayor added “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”
Court watchers are saying:
Under the headline “Trump unleashed,” Bloomberg’s Evening Briefing newsletter noted “The court’s six-member GOP-appointed supermajority curtailed one of the few powers federal judges have to restrain Trump’s effort to consolidate power in a fashion unseen in the nation’s 249-year history.”
Robert Hubbell wrote that the ruling “continue[s] the Roberts Court's willingness to set aside the rules of logic, legal doctrine, and judicial precedent to award Trump whatever outlandish relief he is seeking. … the Supreme Court’s reactionary majority is applying a not-so-secret judicial doctrine: Presume a Trump victory and then reason backward to support the outcome that favors Trump.” Philip Rotner: “As it closes out its term, the Supreme Court is continuing to find ways to let Donald Trump do whatever he wants without addressing the legality of the conduct in question.”
Our take:
Writing for the Court’s MAGA majority, Amy Coney Barrett claimed “the law prohibits the judiciary from” enforcing the president’s “duty to follow the law.”
Mahmoud v. Taylor
What’s at stake: Justice Alito’s opinion in Mahmoud v. Taylor opens the door to public schools effectively banning books with LGBT characters. “Casting aside longstanding precedent, the Court invents a constitutional right to avoid exposure to “subtle” themes “contrary to the religious principles” that parents wish to instill in their children. Exposing students to the “message” that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scru- tiny. That novel rule is squarely foreclosed by our precedent and offers no limiting principle.” (Sotomayor)
Court watchers are saying:
“Conservatives have increasingly used parental rights to advance a wide range of policies, from laws that criminalize helping minors get out-of-state abortions to allowing parents to waive weekly work limits for older teenagers. In no area, however, has parental rights rhetoric been more prominently deployed than in education. In addition to a flurry of state proposals to restrict teaching about gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and ban school-authorized LGBTQ clubs, under President Donald Trump, the federal government has used parental rights to justify eliminating DEI programs in K–12 schools and launching investigations into policies that protect queer students from being outed to their parents.” (Sarah Szilgay, Mother Jones, 6/27/25)
Our take: This case isn’t about religious freedom – it is yet another attempt to use the state to establish religion. Nobody even pretends to believe the Court would take seriously a religion-based objection to books that acknowledge the existence of heterosexual people. The MAGA justices are not trying to ensure religious freedom; they are trying to impose specific religious beliefs on public schools.
Louisiana v. Callais
In what may be only a momentary reprieve, the court pushed the resolution of this Louisiana voting rights case to next term, signaling that it will ask for additional briefing and argument. Although the court has not yet announced the topic, it is likely that the MAGA justices will threaten the constitutionality of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, one of the few parts of the VRA that the Roberts Court hasn’t already destroyed.