- The justices end their nine-month term with three major decisions.
- Court allows state ban on transgender student athletes.
- He supports the Republican challenge to reduce election spending.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a crushing defeat Tuesday by rejecting his decision to restrict birthrights on the final day of his momentous term in office, while allowing states to ban transgender student athletes from women’s sports teams and removing more campaign finance limits.
The annual term of America’s highest court – lasting nine months – has been filled with major decisions, including big victories for Trump in areas such as presidential powers and immigration, as well as losses for him on tariffs, the firing of a Federal Reserve official and, on Tuesday, citizenship rights.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three Trump appointees.
Limiting birthrights was a top priority of the Republican president’s immigration crackdown — so much so that he signed an executive order on the issue on his first day in office last year.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, author of Tuesday’s 6-3 ruling, said Trump’s directive violated the text of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, with few exceptions.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to participate freely in our political community,” Roberts wrote, adding that the framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to everyone born free in the country.
“We keep that promise today,” Roberts wrote.
Trump’s directive directed federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, also known as a “green card” holder. Critics have accused Trump of racial and religious discrimination in his approach to immigration.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States, grants citizenship to those born in the United States and “subject to its jurisdiction.” There were rare exceptions, such as children of foreign diplomats or members of an enemy occupying force.
Before the ruling, some experts had estimated that Trump’s directive could affect the legal status of 250,000 babies born each year and could force the families of millions more to prove the citizenship status of their newborns.
Transgender sports
The controversy over transgender athletes has become embroiled in America’s culture wars.
Laws in West Virginia and Idaho designate sports teams in public schools, including universities, based on “biological sex” and exclude “male students” from women’s teams. States said the laws preserved fair and safe competition for women and girls. Twenty-five other states have similar laws.
Critics saw the measures as part of a broader attack on the rights of transgender Americans by Trump and various states.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned lower court rulings that sided with transgender students who challenged the bans in the two states, calling them a violation of the Constitution and a federal anti-discrimination law.
The court ruled 9-0 that the state laws did not violate Title IX of the civil rights statute, which prohibits discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.”
The justices split along ideological lines — with the six conservative justices in the majority — to rule that the measures also did not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
“Pursuant to Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, we hold that States may maintain women’s and women’s sports for biological females. They may determine eligibility for women’s and women’s sports based on biological sex. The Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women’s and women’s sports throughout America,” conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the decision.
This is the court’s second major ruling against transgender plaintiffs in the space of a year. In a case in Tennessee in June 2025, it allowed states to ban gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors.
Campaign financing
The court has ruled against various campaign finance restrictions since 2010. On Tuesday, it sided with Republican opponents, including Vice President JD Vance, of federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates, as key Republican committees head into the November midterm elections with a significant financial advantage over their Democratic counterparts.
The decision was 6-3, handed down by the conservative justices. The court found that the current cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with candidate contributions violated the Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government restriction of free speech.
A consistent term
The court has made many important decisions during its tenure.
In February, he rejected drastic global tariffs imposed by Trump under a law intended for national emergencies.
On Monday, he backed Trump’s firing of a member of the Federal Trade Commission, expanding his powers over the government while overturning a 1935 precedent that had long limited the ability of presidents to fire heads of independent agencies. But she also refused, in another case, to let him immediately fire Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook.
In April, the court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, a victory for Republicans. This month, he allowed the Trump administration to rescind a humanitarian statute protecting hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants from deportation, and sided with him for asylum seekers.
The court further expanded gun rights this month. He overturned a Hawaiian law restricting the carrying of handguns on private property open to the public, as in most businesses, without the owner’s permission. He also limited the application of a US law that prohibits the possession of firearms by certain drug users.
