SCOTUS Unleashed: The Three Decisions Pushing America Toward Fascism

The Term Ends, The Assault on Democracy Accelerates

The final days of the Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 term did not mark the quiet conclusion of a legal calendar. They were the thunderous opening salvo in a new, more perilous phase of the right-wing’s judicial project. The 6-3 conservative supermajority, a direct and lasting legacy of Donald Trump's presidency, has delivered a fusillade of rulings that systematically dismantle the checks on executive power, eviscerate the social safety net, and twist the First Amendment into a weapon for a reactionary, theocratic agenda.¹ This is not a court of law in the traditional sense; it is a political instrument, and in the last two weeks of June, it was played with devastating precision.

These decisions, though seemingly disparate, are united by a dark, coherent logic. They are threads in a tapestry of democratic erosion, woven together by three core themes. First, the unleashing of the executive: the Court is actively demolishing the guardrails that prevent a president from acting like a monarch, most chillingly in its decision to kneecap the judiciary's ability to block illegal federal policies. Second, procedural cruelty as a political tool: the conservative majority has perfected the art of using arcane procedural rulings and contrived legal "tests" to achieve substantive, vicious outcomes against the nation’s most vulnerable—immigrants, women, and the poor. Third, the theocratic takeover: the concept of "religious freedom," once a shield to protect minorities, has been fully transformed into a sword for the Christian nationalist movement to impose its will on public life, particularly in our schools.

This report will dissect these catastrophic rulings, exposing the legal fictions used to justify them and detailing their real-world consequences. It will demonstrate how each decision empowers Donald Trump, chips away at the foundations of the republic, and pushes the United States further down a path toward fascism. But this is not a eulogy for American democracy. While the damage is profound, the Court’s very extremism has revealed the strategic battlegrounds for resistance. Hope is not found in hollow platitudes but in a clear-eyed understanding of the legal and political workarounds the Court, perhaps unintentionally, has left open. The fight is not over; the battlefield has simply changed.

Table 1: The Supreme Court's Late-Term Blitz: A Scorecard for Democracy

Case Name	Vote	The Gist of the Ruling	Impact on Trump's Power / Fascist Creep	Hope / Resistance
Trump v. CASA, Inc.	6-3	Guts the power of federal judges to issue "universal injunctions" that block illegal executive orders nationwide.2	Massive win for Trump. Allows him to implement unconstitutional policies in most of the country while legal challenges proceed slowly. A key step in enabling a lawless executive.3	Opponents are already filing class-action lawsuits and exploring challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to achieve broad relief.4
Medina v. Planned Parenthood	6-3	Denies Medicaid patients the right to sue in federal court to enforce their "free choice of provider," allowing states to defund clinics like Planned Parenthood for political reasons.6	Weakens the social safety net and empowers partisan state attacks on healthcare, a common tactic in authoritarian-leaning regimes to control the populace.8	The dissent provides a clear legal and moral framework for opposition. The fight shifts to state courts and federal enforcement by a non-hostile HHS.8
Mahmoud v. Taylor	6-3	Rules that religious parents can opt their children out of public school lessons with LGBTQ+ themes, weaponizing the First Amendment for conservative social goals.10	Emboldens the "Christian Nationalist" wing of the far-right. Uses the state to validate the erasure of minority groups, a classic feature of illiberalism.11	The ruling is fact-specific, focusing on the combination of young children and the lack of an opt-out. It is not a blanket license to censor, creating grounds for future fights.12
Kennedy v. Braidwood Mgmt.	6-3	Upholds the constitutionality of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, preserving the ACA's requirement for insurers to cover preventive care like cancer screenings and PrEP.4	A significant loss for the far-right's war on federal agencies and public health infrastructure.	A major, unambiguous victory that protects access to critical healthcare for millions and demonstrates that the conservative legal movement does not win every battle.14
Hewitt v. United States	5-4	A narrow victory for criminal justice reform, applying the First Step Act's sentencing reductions to certain individuals being resentenced.13	N/A	A rare win on the criminal justice front, showing that cross-ideological coalitions on the Court are still possible in specific, limited contexts.15

Section I: The President as King: How Trump v. CASA Kneecapped the Judiciary

In the most consequential and dangerous ruling of the term, the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a weapon of immense power. The 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. effectively stripped the federal judiciary of its most potent tool for reining in a lawless executive, clearing the path for the implementation of flagrantly unconstitutional policies on a massive scale.⁴

The Ruling Explained

The case arose from three separate lawsuits challenging Trump’s Executive Order 14160, a directive he signed on his first day back in office that sought to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of many immigrants.² This order is a brazen violation of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and over a century of unambiguous Supreme Court precedent.³ Lower courts, recognizing the clear illegality of the order, issued "universal injunctions"—orders that blocked the administration from enforcing the policy against anyone in the country while the lawsuits proceeded.²

The Supreme Court, however, deliberately dodged the central question of the executive order's constitutionality. Instead, in an opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative majority focused exclusively on the procedural remedy. It held that universal injunctions "likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts".² The practical effect is that a single federal judge can no longer halt a nationwide policy. Now, an injunction can typically only protect the specific individuals or groups who filed the lawsuit, leaving millions of others vulnerable.³ Trump immediately hailed the decision as a "monumental victory for the Constitution," and for once, his assessment of a legal victory's significance was not an exaggeration.³

Deconstructing the "Originalist" Farce

To justify this radical curtailment of judicial power, the majority opinion embarks on a dubious historical excursion. Justice Barrett argues that the Judiciary Act of 1789, which grants federal courts power over "all suits...in equity," only encompasses remedies that were "traditionally accorded by courts of equity" in England at the nation's founding.² Because, the majority claims, universal injunctions were "conspicuously nonexistent" in 18th and 19th-century practice, they fall outside the statutory authority of federal courts.²

This is not a good-faith legal interpretation; it is an originalist farce. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor meticulously detailed in her dissent, this historical account is a gross distortion, ignoring the long history of flexible equitable remedies designed to provide complete relief, which often benefited nonparties.¹⁶ Legal scholars have likewise disputed the majority's narrow historical reading, pointing out that the Court has taken a moderate tool and, instead of providing guidelines for its use, has chosen to "throw the baby out with the bathwater".¹⁹ The invocation of 18th-century English chancery courts is a smokescreen, a convenient and esoteric pretext to achieve a purely political goal in 2025: unshackling the modern executive branch from judicial review.

The Devastating Impact

The consequences of this decision are immediate and catastrophic. By eliminating the primary check on illegal executive actions, the Court has created a framework where an administration can knowingly violate the Constitution and get away with it, at least for a time. An illegal policy can now be enforced against millions of people in the 28 states that did not happen to be plaintiffs in the original lawsuits.²⁰ As Justice Sotomayor powerfully warned from the bench, reading her dissent aloud in a rare display of profound disagreement, the ruling is "nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution".³ She condemned the majority for creating a "zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes".¹⁶

This is not a theoretical danger. Trump has already promised to "promptly file" to move forward with his unconstitutional birthright citizenship plan.¹⁶ And this is just one of over two dozen universal injunctions blocking his extremist agenda on issues ranging from election rules to funding for legal aid for migrant children.¹⁶ The

CASA decision gives him a green light to try to revive them all.

The Court’s decision is not a principled stand on judicial procedure but a calculated, partisan power play. The timing of the ruling exposes its bad faith. For four years under the Biden administration, conservative legal groups and Republican attorneys general made a sport of "forum shopping"—finding a single, friendly federal judge in Texas or Florida to issue a universal injunction against policies on student debt, immigration, or public health.¹⁶ The Supreme Court's conservative majority largely sat back and allowed this to happen, intervening only sporadically. Yet, just months into Trump's second term, the Court suddenly discovered that this long-standing judicial tool is an intolerable abuse of power.¹⁶ This is an egregious double standard. It reveals that in the eyes of this Court, judicial checks are a legitimate tool when used against a Democratic president but constitute "judicial overreach" when applied to a Republican one. The

CASA ruling is not about restoring a historical norm; it is about rigging the game in favor of a specific political party and its authoritarian leader, an act that fundamentally undermines the Court's claim to legitimacy as a neutral arbiter of the law.

Furthermore, the Court's proposed alternative—forcing every single person harmed by an illegal policy to file their own individual lawsuit—is a cruel fiction designed to entrench the power of the state. The majority opinion suggests the proper remedy is for individuals to sue for relief that applies only to them.² This presents a vision of justice that is completely detached from reality. It assumes that every person affected—an immigrant mother whose child is denied citizenship, a low-income family losing benefits, a voter disenfranchised by a new rule—has the resources, time, awareness, and legal sophistication to hire a lawyer and endure years of litigation.²³ This is a fantasy, and the justices know it. The practical effect of eliminating broad, systemic remedies is to ensure that unconstitutional government action goes largely unchecked. It establishes a system where rights exist only on paper for those who cannot afford to enforce them in court. This is the architecture of an elitist legal system that protects the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, a hallmark of an autocracy, not a democracy.²³

Section II: The "Magic Words" Charade: Gutting Healthcare for the Vulnerable in Medina

In another devastating blow delivered under the guise of procedural purity, the Supreme Court's conservative majority took aim at the nation's healthcare safety net. The 6-3 ruling in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic effectively allows states to deny millions of low-income Americans their choice of healthcare provider for purely political reasons, threatening access to essential services for the most vulnerable populations.⁷

The Ruling Explained

The case centered on a foundational principle of the Medicaid program: the "free choice of provider" provision, which ensures that beneficiaries can seek care from any qualified and willing provider.⁶ In 2018, South Carolina, as part of the right's long-running crusade against reproductive healthcare, barred Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program, not because of any issue with the quality of its care, but solely because the organization also provides abortion services (which are not funded by Medicaid except in rare cases).⁸

Planned Parenthood and a patient sued, arguing this violated their rights under the Medicaid statute. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that they had no right to sue in federal court. The reason? The section of the Medicaid law, written in 1967, guarantees a "free choice of provider" but does not contain the specific "magic word" 'right'.⁶ Without this magic word, Gorsuch reasoned, Congress did not "clearly and unambiguously" intend for individuals to be able to enforce this protection in court.⁷ Enforcement is left to the discretion of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—a department currently controlled by the very administration hostile to the provider in question.²⁵

Judicial Activism as Textualism

The intellectual dishonesty of this "magic words" test is breathtaking. As legal analysts at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families have pointed out, this is a contorted game.⁶ The Court is inventing a new, impossibly high standard for statutory interpretation in 2025 and anachronistically applying it to a law passed decades earlier, when no one could have known such a "magic word" would be required. The majority pretends it is divining the original intent of the 1967 Congress, but it is transparently imposing its own 21st-century political agenda. This is not textualism; it is bad-faith judicial activism masquerading as textualism to achieve a desired ideological outcome. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent, this decision will strip countless Medicaid recipients of the deeply personal freedom to decide who treats them when they are most vulnerable.⁹

The Real-World Carnage

This is not an abstract debate over statutory language. The human cost of this decision will be immense and measurable.

• An Attack on Women and People of Color: Planned Parenthood is a critical provider of essential non-abortion services, including contraception, STI testing and treatment, and life-saving cancer screenings.²⁶ These services are disproportionately relied upon by low-income women and women of color, who make up the majority of Medicaid recipients. In South Carolina, 63% of Medicaid recipients are women, and 58% identify as non-White.²⁶
• Creating Healthcare Deserts: The loss of Medicaid revenue, a major source of funding for these clinics, could force many to scale back services or close their doors entirely.⁸ This will create healthcare deserts, particularly in rural and medically underserved communities where Planned Parenthood is often one of the few accessible options for care.⁸
• A Political Assault on the Safety Net: The ruling gives a green light to every red state in the country to follow South Carolina's lead and defund Planned Parenthood or any other provider that falls out of political favor.⁸ It is a direct judicial assault on the social safety net, using the courts to accomplish a policy goal—the complete defunding of Planned Parenthood—that the right-wing has repeatedly failed to achieve through the democratic legislative process.⁸

The Medina decision is a masterful example of a sinister trend: the conservative majority's use of seemingly neutral procedural rulings to achieve deeply ideological and substantive ends. On its face, the ruling is about a technical legal question: who has the right to bring a lawsuit under a specific civil rights statute. But the effect of the ruling is not procedural at all. It is the substantive evisceration of a key provision of the Medicaid Act and the defunding of a major healthcare provider for political reasons. This pattern of procedural cruelty is visible across the Court's docket. In cases like Riley v. Bondi, the Court erects byzantine procedural hurdles to deny relief to immigrants, ensuring the government wins by default.¹⁵ The Court is engaging in a form of judicial jujitsu, avoiding a direct and unpopular ruling on the merits (e.g., "states have the right to deny healthcare to the poor") while achieving the exact same result by slamming the courthouse doors shut on those seeking to vindicate their rights. It is a more insidious, and therefore more dangerous, form of judicial activism that corrodes the rule of law from within.

Section III: The Theocratic Veto: Weaponizing "Religious Freedom" in Mahmoud

The Supreme Court’s right-wing bloc continued its crusade to remake America in the image of its preferred faith in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The 6-3 decision carves out a new, expansive power for religious objectors to dictate public school curricula, dealing a severe blow to inclusive education and furthering the court's transformation of the First Amendment into a tool of conservative Christian grievance.¹⁰

The Ruling Explained

The case was brought by a group of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who objected to the inclusion of several "LGBTQ+-inclusive" storybooks in the elementary school English curriculum.¹⁰ The school board, after initially allowing an opt-out, rescinded the policy, citing classroom disruptions.¹⁰ The parents sued, claiming the mandatory inclusion of these books violated their First Amendment right to direct the religious upbringing of their children.¹⁰

In a majority opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court sided with the parents, granting them a preliminary injunction.¹⁰ Alito argued that the books were "unmistakably normative," presenting viewpoints on same-sex marriage and gender identity that were "hostile" to the parents' religious beliefs.¹⁰ This "normative" messaging, combined with the young age of the students and the lack of an opt-out, was found to impose a "substantial burden" on the parents' religious exercise, a burden the school district's interest in administrative efficiency could not justify.¹⁰

From Shield to Sword

This ruling represents a perilous escalation in the Court's weaponization of the Free Exercise Clause. Historically, religious freedom was understood as a shield to protect religious minorities (like the Amish in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case Alito heavily relied on) from state coercion.¹⁰ In

Mahmoud, that shield has been fully reforged into a sword. It is now being wielded by a specific coalition of socially conservative religious groups to impose their values on public institutions and, in effect, erase the existence of marginalized communities from the classroom.¹¹ The decision gives a constitutional imprimatur to the argument that the mere acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ people in a positive light constitutes an attack on religion.

The "Parental Rights" Trojan Horse

The right has celebrated this decision as a victory for "parental rights".¹¹ This framing is a Trojan horse. The ruling does not protect the rights of

all parents. It privileges one specific set of conservative religious beliefs over the public good of an inclusive, pluralistic education that prepares students to live in a diverse society.¹¹ As Justice Sotomayor warned in her scathing dissent, the majority's reasoning has no logical endpoint and "ushers in...chaos for this Nation's public schools".¹⁰ Can parents now demand an opt-out from biology classes that teach evolution? From history lessons about the Civil Rights Movement that conflict with their family's views on race? From books that depict women working outside the home? By inventing a "constitutional right to avoid exposure to 'subtle' themes 'contrary to the religious principles,'" the Court has handed a veto to the most demanding and reactionary parents, striking "at the core premise of public schools".¹⁰

The Mahmoud decision cannot be viewed in isolation. It is a crucial legal victory for a much broader right-wing political project aimed at dismantling and delegitimizing public education. The case itself arose from the "culture war" battles that are raging in school districts across the country. The Court's ruling now provides a powerful constitutional weapon for conservative activists to challenge any curriculum they deem ideologically impure. This legal threat will inevitably have a chilling effect on educators and school boards, who will be incentivized to self-censor and avoid potentially "controversial" topics—particularly those related to LGBTQ+ people, race, and American history—simply to avoid the cost and risk of a lawsuit.¹¹ This judicial pressure acts as a legal accelerant for the political movement to "take back" schools, hollowing them out from within, making them hostile environments for minority students, and ultimately driving public support toward private and religious school voucher programs. It is a pincer movement, with the judiciary and political activists working in tandem to undermine the very concept of secular, public education in America.

Section IV: The Fine Print of Tyranny: Other Rulings in the Right-Wing Blitz

While CASA, Medina, and Mahmoud were the term’s most destructive blockbusters, the Court’s final days included other decisions that reinforce the conservative majority’s ideological project. These rulings, though less sweeping, reveal the same patterns of procedural cruelty and partisan jurisprudence.

A Malleable First Amendment in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton

In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Court upheld a Texas law requiring websites with substantial sexually explicit content to implement invasive age-verification systems.¹³ In a 6-3 decision, the majority found that the law survived constitutional challenge.³³ To reach this conclusion, the Court performed a feat of jurisprudential gymnastics that exposes its hypocrisy on the First Amendment.

For decades, laws that regulate speech based on its content have been subject to the highest level of judicial review, known as "strict scrutiny," a standard that is almost impossible for the government to meet.³¹ The Fifth Circuit court below had applied an even weaker "rational basis" test.³⁵ The Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, split the difference, creating a new, lower bar. It ruled that because the law was aimed at protecting minors from content "obscene from their perspective," it only "incidentally burdens" the speech of adults and therefore need only survive "intermediate scrutiny".³⁶

The intellectual dishonesty is glaring when this case is placed alongside Mahmoud. In Mahmoud, the Court effectively raised the level of protection for religious expression it favors, finding a "substantial burden" from mere exposure to books. In Paxton, it lowered the level of protection for sexually explicit speech it disfavors, dismissing the burden on adults' privacy and anonymity as merely "incidental".³⁴ This demonstrates that the conservative majority’s First Amendment jurisprudence is not principled; it is a malleable tool used to protect favored speech (conservative religion) while allowing the suppression of disfavored speech (sexual content).

Death by a Thousand Procedural Cuts in Riley v. Bondi

The 5-4 decision in Riley v. Bondi serves as a textbook example of the Court's use of procedural mazes to achieve cruel outcomes. The case involved a Jamaican citizen, Pierre Riley, facing deportation.¹⁵ The immigration system involves multiple, often confusing, orders and deadlines. Riley missed a 30-day deadline to appeal his final removal order because he was waiting for a decision on a separate but related request for "withholding of removal," a form of protection from being sent to a country where he could be persecuted.¹⁵

The majority, in a hyper-technical opinion by Justice Alito, concluded that Riley had missed his chance to appeal, creating what Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, called an "incoherent" and "incomprehensible" procedural trap.¹⁵ The ruling essentially held that Riley should have challenged an order on his withholding request before that order even existed.¹⁵ This case perfectly illustrates the theme seen in

Medina. The Court uses the complexity of legal procedure not to ensure fairness, but as a weapon to deny substantive rights to vulnerable people. By creating impossible administrative hurdles, the Court ensures that the government wins by default, and individuals like Pierre Riley are left without recourse. It is death by a thousand procedural cuts.

Section V: A Battle Plan for Hope: Victories, Workarounds, and the Path Forward

To read the Supreme Court’s end-of-term decisions is to stare into a legal and political abyss. The temptation to despair is strong, but it must be resisted. The right-wing legal movement is not invincible, and its very extremism has exposed new avenues for resistance. This is not a time for false optimism, but for concrete, actionable hope grounded in the legal and political realities of the fight ahead.

Sub-Section A: The Wins That Matter—The Right is Not Invincible

First, it is critical to recognize and amplify the significant victories that prove the conservative juggernaut can be stopped. These are not minor concessions; they are major defeats for the far-right agenda that protect the lives and health of millions.

The most important victory came in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc. In a 6-3 decision that saw Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh side with the liberals, the Court rejected a challenge to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.⁴ This ruling upheld the Affordable Care Act's requirement that most insurers cover a wide range of preventive services at no cost to the patient. This preserves access to everything from cancer screenings and blood pressure tests to HIV-prevention medication (PrEP) and contraception.¹⁴ The lawsuit was a spear-tip in the right's broader war on the administrative state and public health infrastructure. The Court’s decision to uphold the Task Force's structure is a massive, unambiguous win that demonstrates the conservative legal movement does not win every battle.¹⁴

A smaller but still meaningful victory came in Hewitt v. United States. In a narrow 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that sentencing reductions from the bipartisan First Step Act apply to certain individuals being resentenced after the law was passed.¹³ While the conservative bloc largely dissented, the case shows that on specific issues like criminal justice reform, cross-ideological coalitions on the Court are still possible, and progress can be achieved.¹⁵ These wins must be the foundation of our narrative—a constant reminder that the fight is worth having because it can be won.

Sub-Section B: The Resistance Roadmap—Fighting Back After CASA

The CASA decision gutting universal injunctions is a disaster, but it is not a checkmate. The majority opinion, in its haste to empower the executive, left open several critical pathways for achieving broad, systemic relief from unconstitutional policies. Understanding and exploiting these workarounds is now the central task for the legal resistance.

Path 1: The Class Action Lawsuit.

The most obvious path forward is the one the majority opinion itself pointed to. Justice Barrett noted that a traditional class action lawsuit, governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, is an appropriate vehicle for securing group-wide relief.2 This process is more cumbersome and expensive than seeking a universal injunction, but it is a viable strategy. Opponents of Trump's birthright citizenship order, anticipating this outcome, were already moving to convert their cases into class actions within hours of the decision.3 This will become the default first step in challenging any broad, illegal executive action.

Path 2: The APA Vacatur—The Silver Bullet.

The most powerful and promising tool, however, may be one the Court did not explicitly foreclose. As detailed by legal experts at Just Security and hinted at in a concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) offers a potent alternative to the universal injunction.5 Section 706(2) of the APA gives federal courts the explicit power to "hold unlawful and set aside agency action" that is found to be illegal or unconstitutional.⁵

This is the key. The legal term "set aside," also known as vacatur, has historically been understood to mean the complete nullification of a rule. When a court vacates an agency action, it is rendered void for everyone, not just the plaintiffs in the case.⁵ This provides the practical equivalent of a universal injunction. The majority opinion in

CASA explicitly stated, "Nothing we say today resolves the distinct question whether the Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action".⁵ This is a door left wide open. The legal fight will now shift to convincing lower courts to use this established statutory power to "set aside" the illegal agency rules that will inevitably flow from Trump's executive orders. This is the silver bullet that can fill the void left by CASA.

Path 3: State-Led Challenges.

Finally, the fight can be waged by states themselves. The CASA case involved 22 states as plaintiffs, and their argument for needing a universal injunction remains powerful.16 States can argue that they require universal relief to avoid the "unworkable" chaos of having fundamental federal laws, like citizenship, apply differently to people the moment they cross state lines.16 A patchwork of citizenship would create an administrative nightmare for states, giving them a strong claim that only a nationwide remedy can provide them with the "complete relief" the Court still permits.

Conclusion: The Fight Has Moved, But It Is Not Over

The rulings of June 2025 are a brutal confirmation of what we have long known: the Supreme Court, under its current 6-3 conservative supermajority, has become a willing accomplice to authoritarianism. It is no longer a neutral arbiter but an active participant in a political project to concentrate power in the executive, erode civil rights, and impose a reactionary social vision on the entire country. Acknowledging this grim reality is not surrender; it is the first, necessary step toward effective resistance.

The fight for American democracy is not lost; it has shifted. The Court has closed some doors but opened others. The battle will now be waged with renewed intensity in state courts, through creative federal litigation using tools like the APA vacatur, in the corridors of federal agencies where a non-hostile administration can exercise its enforcement powers, and ultimately, in the political arena. The long-term project of organizing, winning elections, and reshaping the judiciary remains the only permanent solution. The Court’s late-term blitz was a vicious blow, but in its extremism, it has clarified the stakes and illuminated the path forward for all who are willing to continue the fight. The work is harder now. The path is steeper. But it is there.

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