The Investigative Journal’s Court Watch tracks the week’s most consequential rulings, filings, and orders across the federal and state judiciary. The week of June 29 was dominated by a single institution: the Supreme Court, which cleared the last of its argued cases and closed October Term 2025 with a run of decisions touching presidential power, citizenship, elections, campaign finance, civil rights, and digital privacy.
In the span of two days, the justices reshaped the law governing who controls the federal bureaucracy, reaffirmed a bedrock reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, rewrote the rules for how political parties spend money, and told police that a now-common digital dragnet counts as a search. The outcomes did not run in one direction. The administration secured a landmark expansion of presidential removal power and a win on transgender sports eligibility, but lost its bids to end birthright citizenship and to remove a Federal Reserve governor. Below, the week’s notable court actions, grouped by court level and subject, with links to the opinions and to independent analysis.
Supreme Court: Presidential Power and the Administrative State
The term’s most structurally significant pair of decisions arrived together on June 29. In Trump v. Slaughter (No. 25-332), the Court ruled that President Trump lawfully removed Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause, holding that the FTC’s modern powers are “executive through and through” and that Congress may not insulate the commissioners from at-will removal. According to the majority opinion attributed to Chief Justice John Roberts, the FTC’s authority to write binding rules, enforce them through in-house adjudication, and file civil suits on behalf of the United States places it within the President’s constitutional control. The ruling sharply curtails Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had for 91 years permitted “independent” multimember commissions.
Yet the Court declined to extend that logic to the central bank. In Trump v. Cook (No. 25A312), the justices ruled 5-4 that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook may remain in her post while she litigates her challenge to the President’s attempt to fire her. Writing for the majority, Roberts reasoned that accepting the administration’s position “would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” according to the opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, calling the ruling “incorrect” and noting the Court was upholding an injunction against a presidential removal “for the first time in the Constitution’s 237-year history.”
The administration had alleged that Cook committed mortgage fraud in 2021, before her Senate confirmation; Cook has denied those allegations, which remain unproven and untested in court. As SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe reported, the dispute reached the justices only after U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of the District of Columbia issued a September 2025 order keeping Cook in office, and a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit left that order in place. In a closely watched footnote, the analysis suggests, Roberts signaled that future litigants might still challenge discrete regulatory powers of the Fed—an issue legal observers expect to surface in the terms ahead, per commentary by Adam White.
Supreme Court: Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment
On June 30, the final day of the term, the Court delivered its most anticipated ruling. In Trump v. Barbara (No. 25-365), the justices held 6-3 that the Constitution guarantees citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States, striking down Executive Order 14160, which the administration issued on January 20, 2025 in an effort to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country unlawfully or on temporary visas. The opinion concluded that such children “satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause” because they are born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The Chief Justice grounded the decision in the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment, invoking the abolitionist understanding of citizenship by birth. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,'” the opinion states, according to NPR. “We keep that promise today.” The order had never taken effect, having been blocked by multiple lower courts. The merits ruling follows the Court’s separate 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limited the availability of nationwide injunctions and pushed challengers toward class-action vehicles; records indicate the birthright question ultimately reached the justices on the merits rather than on the scope of injunctive relief.
Supreme Court: Elections and Campaign Finance
Two decisions reshaped election law heading into the 2026 midterms. In Watson v. Republican National Committee (No. 24-1260), decided June 29, the Court ruled 5-4 that federal law does not require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day, upholding a Mississippi statute that counts ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by the Chief Justice and the Court’s three Democratic-appointed justices; the opinion reasons that the federal Election Day statutes fix when voters must cast their ballots, not a deadline for receipt. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, arguing that a receipt-by-Election-Day rule would provide an additional safeguard against fraud. Filings indicate the ruling preserves late-arrival policies in a number of states that count ballots postmarked on time.
The following day, in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (No. 24-621), the Court struck down federal limits on how much political parties may spend in coordination with their candidates, ruling 6-3 that the caps violate the First Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that “constitutional text, history, and precedent establish that the political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violate the First Amendment,” according to the opinion, reasoning that only the prevention of quid pro quo corruption can justify such restrictions. The decision overrides a 2001 precedent that had upheld the limits. Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warning that the ruling opens a channel for donors to route larger sums to candidates through party committees.
Supreme Court: Civil Rights and Equal Protection
Also on June 30, the Court resolved a pair of consolidated cases on transgender athletes. In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (No. 24-43) and Little v. Hecox, the justices ruled 6-3 that states may bar transgender girls and women from participating on female school sports teams, upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho. Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the majority that schools may base eligibility for girls’ and women’s teams on biological sex consistent with the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX, according to CBS News. The decision leaves related questions about transgender rights in other contexts unresolved. Attorneys for the student-athletes, including the American Civil Liberties Union, responded that the fight over the broader legal status of transgender Americans would continue in the lower courts. The cases involved Idaho’s 2020 “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” and a West Virginia law challenged by a student who first sued as an 11-year-old.
Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age
In a decision with sweeping implications for digital privacy, the Court held in Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112) that law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant”—a demand that Google turn over data on every device near a location during a set time—constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. By a 6-3 vote, the justices sent the case of Okello Chatrie, convicted in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery, back to the lower courts to determine whether the search was reasonable. Justice Kagan wrote for the majority that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location,” even when the data is held briefly by a third-party company, according to the opinion. Justice Alito, in a dissent joined in part by Justices Thomas and Barrett, warned the ruling “will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine.” Independent legal analysts at Just Security noted the decision leaves the reasonableness question, and the future of geofence investigations, for the lower courts to work out.
In the Lower Courts: Remands, Implementation, and Recent Term Rulings
Several of the week’s Supreme Court rulings now return to the lower courts. Chatrie heads back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which must apply the new search framework to determine whether the geofence warrant was reasonable. The underlying dispute in Trump v. Cook continues before Judge Cobb in the District of Columbia and, on appeal, the D.C. Circuit, where Cook’s challenge to her attempted removal will proceed on the merits. And the birthright citizenship ruling in Barbara effectively forecloses enforcement of Executive Order 14160 nationwide, though implementation questions—how federal agencies conform their guidance—will play out in the coming weeks.
The end-of-term flurry also included decisions issued days earlier that continue to reverberate. On June 25, in Wolford v. Lopez (No. 24-1046), the Court struck down 6-3 a Hawaii law that had barred carrying firearms on private property open to the public absent the owner’s express consent, a rule gun-rights advocates dubbed the “vampire rule,” while preserving narrowly defined sensitive places such as courthouses. The same day, in Monsanto v. Durnell (No. 24-1068), the Court ruled 7-2 that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state failure-to-warn claims over the weedkiller Roundup, a decision expected to curtail much of the remaining Roundup litigation. And the redistricting landscape continues to shift after the Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais (No. 24-109), which reworked the framework for Voting Rights Act Section 2 claims; several Southern states have since moved to redraw congressional maps, litigation that lower courts will manage ahead of the midterms.
Cases to Watch in the Coming Week
With the term concluded, attention now turns to the summer’s cert activity and the docket for October Term 2026, which formally opens the first Monday in October. Legal observers will be watching for the first fallout from Slaughter: with for-cause protections weakened across multimember agencies, commentators have flagged looming disputes over agency quorums, bipartisan-balance appointment requirements, and the prospect of end-of-administration removals at bodies like the Federal Communications Commission, as Adam White outlined. The Court’s reasoning in Cook also invites a future challenge to the Federal Reserve’s bank-regulatory authority, a question the majority expressly left open.
Meanwhile, the redistricting suits spawned by Callais are expected to accelerate through the summer as states finalize maps for 2026, and challengers digest the birthright citizenship win in Barbara to determine whether any residual class litigation remains. Court Watch will track new filings, emergency-docket applications, and circuit splits as they develop. Readers should note that several of the rulings above resolve the immediate questions presented while expressly leaving related issues—reasonableness in Chatrie, the merits of Cook’s removal, the scope of Fed regulatory power—for continued litigation. As always, this digest distinguishes holdings from pending questions and sources every claim to the public record.
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