Did the Supreme Court Strengthen Liberty?

With major rulings on birth right citizenship, tariffs, the administrative state and more, the Supreme Court just concluded a monumental term. But was individual liberty strengthened or weakened by the Court’s decisions? That’s the million-dollar question that the Goldwater Institute’s top legal minds explored in an hour-long webinar.

“It was another busy term and with some real blockbusters,” said Timothy Sandefur, the Goldwater Institute’s Vice President for Legal Affairs. He was joined in the discussion by Jon Riches, Goldwater’s Vice President for Litigation. You can watch it below.

Among the cases they broke down were the Supreme Court’s ruling reining in the administrative state and recognizing the president’s power to control administrative agencies. “The Court reasoned that the president is elected by the people; executive officers exercise the president’s executive power. Therefore, those officers have to remain accountable to the president and accountability requires that the president have the authority to remove them,” Riches said, calling the administrative state “a huge, huge threat to individual liberty.”

Sandefur said the Court was right to strike down the current administration’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. That statute was written for times of crisis to allow the president to regulate imports and restrict the movement of certain items in commerce, but the Court ruled that IEEPA doesn’t grant the president the power to impose tariffs. “Personally, I think the case would have been better decided if the Court had said there was no emergency,” Sandefur said, calling the ruling a win for individual liberty in theory. “In practice,” he said, “it’s often like playing a game of whack-a-mole.”

The birthright citizenship case, in which the Court rejected the administration’s argument for a narrower interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, was harder than many prognosticators let on, Sandefur said. That’s because, “at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was written, there were no laws prohibiting people from coming to the country,” he said.

Sandefur and Riches also analyzed the rulings involving the First Amendment rights of therapists engaged in so-called “professional speech,” Hawaii’s effort to limit Second Amendment rights, and the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans whose personal data is maintained by tech companies.

While on balance, the Supreme Court’s term moved in the direction of individual liberty, “you can’t just rely on nine justices to do this work,” Sandefur said. “Defending the Constitution is a job for every citizen.”

The Goldwater Institute will always be there to help Americans do just that.