In perhaps the most significant check on agency power in recent history, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 opinion today in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, holding that Congress did not implicitly grant the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to devise stringent emissions caps under the Clean Air Act.

We have won our West Virginia v. EPA case at the Supreme Court. Huge victory against federal overreach and the excesses of the administrative state. This is a HUGE win for West Virginia, our energy jobs and those who care about maintaining separation of powers in our nation.

— Patrick Morrisey (@MorriseyWV) June 30, 2022

The past week has been a good week for both Republicans and open, fair, and honest elections.  It has also been a downright bad and ugly week for the Democrat Party’s consigliere, Marc Elias.  

First, the good: Yesterday, a New York Supreme Court Judge ruled that (like virtually everywhere else in the world) you have to be a citizen to vote in New York City:

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio also issued a permanent injunction that bars the city Board of Elections from letting around 800,000 non-citizen residents register to vote.

In a 13-page ruling, Porzio said city officials can’t “obviate” restrictions in the state constitution, which “expressly states that only citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections.”

“There is no statutory ability for the City of New York to issue inconsistent laws permitting non-citizens to vote and exceed the authority granted to it by the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court held today in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that when life gives you Lemon [v. Kurtzman], you strike it down for good.  This notoriously troublesome Establishment Clause test, which Justice Scalia likened to “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie” that somehow keeps coming back to life, is conclusively and finally dead.   

Religious liberty wins again at the Supreme Court this term, and today’s opinion ensures it will continue to do so in the future.

As the liberal justices grow older and as the conservative majority decides an increased number of controversial cases, the Supreme Court is feeling more pressure from the Left. The Justice feeling it the most is Justice Stephen Breyer. Despite Justice Breyer generally championing the viewpoints of the Left, many are pressuring him to retire so the President can nominate a younger justice to replace him.

If you listened to the most recent meeting of President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court and knew nothing prior, the liberal “scholars” would have you convinced that the Supreme Court is hated by all Americans.  The reality is that the Judicial Branch is the most popular branch of the United State Government.  The real purpose of Biden's Judicial Commission is to undermine the judiciary's popularity and to further intimidate the current Supreme Court.  As Dan McLaughlin writes in National Review Online:

The Court-packing debate has cooled off for a while since prominent Democrats introduced legislation in April to pack the Court with new justices for nakedly partisan and ideological purposes. Democrats are happy to move the question offstage. Court-packing is a massively unpopular and dangerous proposal, just as it was in 1937. At the moment, Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, and they do not appear to have 50 votes for passage, either. But they have not abandoned the implied threat that they might bring it back if they get a bigger Senate majority or if the Supreme Court does something they dislike enough.

On this day in 1937, the Senate put an end to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's court packing plan. Commentary from The Heritage Foundation explains:

Many Americans may have heard about how President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed court-packing scheme failed in the 1930s. During Roosevelt’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down several laws enacted to address the Great Depression because they exceeded Congress’ power.

On Tuesday, the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States held its third meeting and 2nd round of hearings since being formed by President Joe Biden earlier this year. The meeting consisted of 6 panels of experts that commissioners questioned about various proposals for changes to the Court.  This one was much more partisan then the first two with progressive panelists making outrageous claims.  However, Harvard Professor Stephen Sachs summed up the commission well:

The public will see through efforts to recast court-packing as “court expansion,” jurisdiction-stripping as “jurisdiction channeling,” and so on. It will see through efforts to pursue short-term partisan payback under the guise of long-term reform. And because legitimacy is a two-way street, reforms that are not perceived by both sides as enhancing the courts’ legitimacy will never succeed in doing so.

Thursday's decisions by the Supreme Court were a major defeat for certain Democrat politicians and liberal activists. Yes, Obamacare was preserved in a 7-2 decision, and in another 9-0 decision, religious liberty was preserved. But liberal court packing activists lost yesterday. As the Committee for Justice wrote:

Consider the contrast between reality and Democrats' exaggerated predictions and fear mongering. Last fall, during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, Democratic senator after Democratic senator told stories of constituents who would suffer, if not die, were Barrett confirmed. She would provide the fifth "far right" vote for striking down the Affordable Care Act, they said, some of them implying that Barrett had promised President Trump to strike down the ACA in return for her nomination. . . .

Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, but so much for closely divided far right decisions and constituents robbed of health insurance by a nefarious deal between Barrett and Trump. Instead, what we got today was a 7-2 rejection of the challenge to the ACA with Barrett in the majority, a unanimous and narrow decision protecting religious objections to same-sex marriage, and an overall picture of a moderate Court which will sometimes disappoint liberals, sometimes disappoint conservatives, and often the split the baby.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Terry v. United States. The holding is not particularly novel. The Court upheld Terry's sentence for a drug offense because recent changes to mandatory minimum sentencing did not apply to the offense he was convicted of. As Ed Whelan explained in the National Review, this decision is an embarrassment for the Biden Solicitor General because the DOJ decided not to defend the lower court's decision at the last minute.

The true colors of President Biden, who refused to say where he stood on court-packing during campaign season, are beginning to shine through with the rollout of the administration's new Commission of Supreme Court Reform. What exactly will the commission do? While the answer isn't entirely clear, it's another signal that Democrats are setting the stage to expand the Supreme Court by all means necessary.