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The Supreme Court closed out its term today with three consequential rulings.
The justices upheld birthright citizenship, striking down Trump’s attempt to end it by executive order — though, as you’ll hear, the ruling is narrower than the headlines suggests. They tore down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates, further expanding the role of money in elections. And they upheld state bans barring transgender girls and women from competing on female sports teams.
To unpack what these decisions actually mean, I called Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor who writes One First, an excellent read on the court.
How close did the Court come to revisiting the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, long considered settled? What does the campaign-finance ruling mean for candidates, parties and the donors writing the checks? And could the transgender-athletes ruling lead to new restrictions in schools and other sex-segregated spaces?
Vladek addresses those questions and the larger story of this term: whose power the Court expanded, whose it limited and what that tells us about the direction of the institution. He also gives us a look ahead to next term, when the justices will take up more major fights over transgender rights, guns, elections and the limits of presidential power.
Watch the full conversation in the video at the top of this newsletter. And be sure to check out Steve’s substack, One First.
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