What to Expect from the Supreme Court in 2026

Three areas of law where the right-wing majority could remake our democracy.

(Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)

WHILE DONALD TRUMP AND HIS TEAM reshape American democracy to consolidate power in himself, his pals in the Supreme Court majority are busy reconfiguring the actual Constitution. Both are likely to continue into 2026.

So far in his second term, Trump has signed more executive orders (225 as of this writing) than the sum total issued during his first. Many of these were patently illegal. Meanwhile, Trump separately invaded a panoply of rights guaranteed under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments in other ways, through abject power grabs and sheer bullying, leaving the lower courts inundated with lawsuits aimed at shoring up baseline legislative and constitutional limits that no prior president had dared challenge. The Supreme Court mostly helped Trump last year, which will undoubtedly leave legal historians aghast and appalled.

But the rule of law’s demolition under Trump 2.0 is far from over. Here are three categories of major legal questions at stake in 2026, with an eye on cases pending in the Supreme Court. (It doesn’t include pesky things like kidnapping a foreign leader and his wife from their bed without congressional authorization or failing to comply with a statutory mandate to release the Epstein files.)

1. The Supreme Court will decide (again) whether to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment.

Everybody knows that ambiguous language in the Constitution or in laws invites lawyers to make creative, even tortured, arguments about what it means. Sometimes, though, lawyers do the same thing with language that is clear, in an attempt to distort its meaning. That’s exactly what Trump and his lawyers have been doing with the Fourteenth Amendment. The first time he did it, the Supreme Court backed him. In 2026, the Court will decide whether to let him do it again.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment states that “No person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military, under the United States . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.” In Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court in March 2024 completely ignored the obvious—that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021 and is disqualified from being president—and rejected Colorado voters’ attempt to keep him off the ballot on the dubious theory that states cannot enforce this provision, only Congress can, even though that caveat is not express in Section 3.

Then there’s Section 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Instead of upholding the plain language of the Constitution when first given the chance, the Court issued a temporary injunction for Trump in May. It has since fully taken up Trump’s bid to end the Fourteenth Amendment’s recognition of birthright citizenship in a case called Trump v. Barbara. The question should not even be before the Court; it’s already settled by the Constitution and the Court’s 1898 ruling that the language applies to children of foreign-born parents, rejecting the precise argument Trump is pushing now. If the Court sides with Trump again, it will set a precedent that the Constitution can be suspended by the president and the Supreme Court as they see fit, including—possibly—if Trump tries to run for a third term in violation of the Twenty-second Amendment.

2. The Court will continue to decide whether presidents can override Congress’s constitutional powers.

In 2025, Trump usurped and grabbed Congress’s constitutional authority too many times to list. The blame here lies in large part with the supine Congress, which keeps letting him get away with it, but also with the Supreme Court majority, which in a range of “emergency docket” or “shadow docket” rulings allowed Trump to do things like ignore statutory mandates protecting federal workers from arbitrary firings, ensuring personal information held in the Social Security Administration is kept private, and establishing the Department of Education. There are a bunch of cases pending this year that, if Trump gets his way with his friendly justices, will further erode the power of Congress and amass more king-like power in the presidency.

A biggie is Trump v. V.O.S. Selections (Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump), which concerns whether President Trump can wrest the constitutional tariff power from Congress under a vague statute that says no such thing. A majority of the justices at oral argument seemed skeptical of Trump’s case, so whether a coalition forms to push back—even hesitatingly—on this signature Trumpian maneuver could be meaningful for the rule of law moving forward.

The Court also agreed to officially take up whether Congress, once it creates federal agencies, has power to restrain presidential control over them. The Court has already said no to this question in a series of shadow docket rulings, stumbling only when it came to the Federal Reserve Board (which is likely for policy reasons, because there’s no coherent legal distinction for doing so). The issue involves overturning a ninety-year-old precedent allowing Congress to limit presidents’ ability to fire certain officials without cause when it creates agencies and outlines their powers. When the Court (inevitably) overrules that line of cases, unforeseen problems could reverberate across a range of federal agencies and related issues because Congress legislated for nearly a century on the understanding that it was not handing over unfettered power to presidents when it creates agencies but can instead impose reasonable limits on how presidents use the power Congress gave them. Yet a majority of the current justices seem sympathetic to the so-called “unitary executive theory” of presidential power that essentially holds that once a president gets power, the other two branches cannot in any way interfere with how he uses it.

The Court will also officially decide whether Congress’s exclusive “power of the purse” under the Appropriations Clause still holds, or whether presidents, like Trump, can ignore it by spending or withholding money to force their own personal and policy objectives. On its emergency docket, the Court has already issued a series of temporary injunctions allowing Trump to terminate grants by the National Institutes of Health and to withhold billions in foreign aid, for example. The latter issue is on the docket for full briefing and oral argument in Trump v. Global Health Council. If the Trump majority sides with Trump, it will mean that congressional spending mandates will be pretty much optional moving into the last three years of the second Trump administration.

3. The Court will decide whether to allow more big money in politics and whether to make voting harder.

The First Amendment is in rough shape these days, given Trump’s battering of law firms, student protesters, media organizations, universities, and other critics for speech he didn’t like in 2025. That will undoubtedly continue. Whether Trump’s conduct will make its way to the Supreme Court this year is a critical question, because if it doesn’t, free speech in this country will continue to be suppressed.

From the standpoint of democracy writ large, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission could be critically important. The justices will decide whether Congress can limit the amount of money political parties can spend on campaigns or whether federal statutory limits on campaign expenditures that are coordinated with a candidate violate the First Amendment rights of the National Republican Senatorial Commission, former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), and then-Senator JD Vance, who joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs. This is another in a long line of cases dating back to Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which struck down restrictions on corporate and union spending in campaigns, in which the Supreme Court has effectively taken over for Congress in “legislating” in this area—with no reciprocal accountability at the ballot box. The Supreme Court will also decide whether to ban consideration of race in drawing legislative maps to ensure fair legislative representation, and in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, it will determine whether federal candidates can sue to challenge states’ counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

The question of whether America will continue to hold free and fair elections is an increasingly serious one moving into the November 2026 midterms, as fascism strengthens its grip on this side of the Atlantic. Nobody should count on the Supreme Court to help the cause.