These Four Supreme Court Cases Could Upend U.S. Democracy and Human Rights (Opinion)

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Conservatives on the Supreme Court seem intent on sending a clear message to the American public this 2025-2026 term: A new age of American authoritarianism is here.

Four cases in particular underscore how the Court’s six conservative justices are an integral piece in the Republican project to upend the democratic norms that underpin U.S. society.

The outcome of these cases in 2026 will determine how successful the GOP and their Supreme Court enablers are in their project to deconstruct basic civil rights and liberties.

Texas redistricting and looming national abortion bans

On Dec. 4, 2025, the Supreme Court handed Republicans a significant victory, ruling Texas’ brand-new congressional map can take effect while a case challenging the legality of its partisan redistricting advances in the lower courts.

Texas Republicans redrew their congressional map over the summer after President Donald Trump urged them to try and increase Republican electoral margins in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026. The new map creates up to five new likely Republican House seats while moving several Democratically-held incumbent seats, like the one currently occupied by vocal Trump critic Rep. Jasmine Crockett. This forces Democrats to either run against each other in newly drawn districts or to retire.

Crockett, who recently announced a run for the U.S. Senate in 2026, has joined a challenge, which now has multiple intervenors, to the new map which argues it’s an illegal racial gerrymander. On Nov. 18, two federal judges agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling there was evidence state lawmakers had racially gerrymandered in redrawing district lines. They barred Texas from using the new map for the 2026 midterm elections.

The Supreme Court’s Dec. 4 order pauses that lower court ruling and allows Texas’ new, more Republican-friendly map to take effect. Resolution of that challenge could take months, if not years, meaning Texas is likely to use its newly drawn congressional districts in the 2026 midterms.

In the meantime, California Democrats have responded with their own revamped congressional map. California’s Proposition 50, which voters passed handily at the polls in November, was a direct effort to neutralize any gains Republicans may see from the new Texas map.

California’s redistricting also faces legal challenges. Both the Trump administration and the conservative legal advocacy organization the Public Interest Legal Foundation have sued to block Prop 50, arguing the new map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Those lawsuits are ongoing and, unless blocked by the courts, will be used in 2026, when Californians will vote in both national and state-level races.

The fight over congressional maps and the 2026 midterm elections may feel several steps removed from the fight for bodily autonomy that’s underway right now. That fight includes efforts by attorneys general in states like Texas and Missouri to resurrect the Comstock Act and bar the mailing of abortion pills and Republican efforts to undermine insurance coverage of IVF for military families.

Yet these struggles are very much connected.

Take the current fight over extending tax subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Congressional Republicans are trying to add a poison pill to negotiations to ban any federal ACA dollars from being used to subsidize insurance plans that cover abortion. This would effectively extend the Hyde Amendment, which bars almost all federal dollars from being directly spent on abortion care, to any ACA marketplace plan that covers abortion at all. Many private insurance plans could soon follow.

Polls show the vast majority of Americans support access to abortion. But if congressional Republicans are comfortable pushing that kind of abortion restriction with only the slimmest of majorities, then it’s reasonable to think they’d barrel forward supporting a broader national abortion ban in 2026 should the GOP retain control of both the House and Senate.

Birthright citizenship and the push to rewrite the 14th Amendment

The Supreme Court announced on Dec. 5, 2025 that it will hear a challenge to President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in a case called Trump v. Barbara.

Birthright citizenship is the straightforward legal principle, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, that grants every person born in the United States full U.S. citizenship. President Trump, via executive order, wants to deny that citizenship to babies born in the U.S. unless one of their parents is either a U.S. citizen or has permanent legal status.

The order also seeks to exclude citizenship to children born to parents on temporary work, student, or other visas.

So far, lower courts have repeatedly blocked the administration’s order. That could all change when the Supreme Court fully steps into this case in 2026.

I’m going to put this bluntly: The push to end birthright citizenship is a manufactured fight by conservative legal advocates and detailed in this sharp July 2025 takedown written by immigration and constitutional law scholars and published in the Cornell Law Review.

I won’t get into all the legal weeds on their arguments, but one point made by one of the authors, Evan Bernick, is worth underscoring here. He argues, in effect, that the “scholarship” supporting Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship—whether presented in the form of law review articles, opinion pieces, or social media discourse—is manufactured to reverse-engineer a Supreme Court ruling in conservatives’ favor.

This is hardly a new tactic. It’s part-and-parcel part of the anti-choice playbook, as Imani Gandy and I discussed with Lourdes Rivera of Pregnancy Justice on our Boom! Lawyered podcast’s Summer Sessions. In it, we explain how we’ve seen conservatives use this tactic of manufacturing scholarship to craft policy outcomes through the courts—like the possible erasure of birthright citizenship—that they cannot enact via traditional democratic means.

Republicans have launched a project to redefine who the law considers to be a person and who it excludes by rewriting the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. This right-wing project in one breath declares that unborn fetuses should have full rights under the 14th Amendment, while babies born to parents on a student visa should not.

Of course, as the administration’s devastating ICE raids across the country have demonstrated time and again, U.S. citizenship is no guarantee that this government will recognize a person’s rights or autonomy if they happen to be Black, brown, or Indigenous.

Transgender athletes and who gets access to sports

On Jan. 13, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases challenging laws in West Virginia and Idaho that categorically ban transgender women and girls from athletic programs based on their gender identity.

First is Little v. Hecox, a case brought by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender athlete who was banned under a 2020 Idaho law from trying out for and competing on the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University. The law categorically bars transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports—at all ages and levels of competition. It also requires invasive testing—for example, a health-care provider examining a student’s reproductive anatomy—if an athlete’s sex is questioned.

Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have blocked the Idaho law. Despite winning in the lower courts, Hecox asked the Supreme Court in September to dismiss her case as moot, meaning there is no longer a live legal controversy.

She said she was moving to voluntarily dismiss her case in the lower court, expressed concerns over the intense public scrutiny surrounding the litigation, and pledged to not participate in women’s sports while in Idaho.

The justices declined to decide Hecox’s request until arguments on Jan. 13. compelling Hecox to stay in litigation. Despite her request to the contrary, the Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Idaho ban.

That same day, the justices will also hear arguments in West Virginia v. B.P.J., a case that challenges West Virginia’s categorical ban on allowing transgender girls to participate in girls and women’s sports from middle school through college.

Imani Gandy and I covered the case on Boom! Lawyered, but here’s a quick overview. Becky Pepper-Jackson is a transgender student who wanted to be a part of her middle school’s track team but was prohibited. Pepper-Jackson, who is now in high school, challenged West Virginia’s 2021 anti-trans athletes Save Women’s Sports Act, arguing it violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (that’s the federal law that bans sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding), as well as the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

West Virginia’s law was blocked in 2024, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that it does violate Title IX. West Virginia’s Republican Attorney General is appealing Pepper-Jackson’s win with the Supreme Court.

Though the justices will hear arguments in both of these cases in January, I do not expect a ruling on them until June, when the Court typically releases its highest-profile opinions.

And I’m not optimistic that the rulings, whenever they are released, will support the trans students who brought them. The Court’s conservative majority made its hostility to transgender minors apparent last June when it upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care in United States v. Skrmetti.

Similar to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy the anti-choice movement applied to undermining abortion rights before reversing them all together in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the anti-trans movement is targeting minors’ rights first then applying those restrictions to adults as well.

That familiar playbook will be transparently evident should the Court rule against Hecox and Pepper-Jackson later this summer.

These cases are by no means the only threats to democracy Republicans have teed up for the conservative justices at the Court. But they are among the most dire. If the Supreme Court hands the Trump administration and its Republican allies wins in each of them, the damage to democracy and human rights will take lifetimes to repair.

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