The 2025-2026 Supreme Court term ended last week with three decisions that, read separately, look like three different power struggles. Read together, they are one. Congress can no longer insulate independent regulators from presidential removal, cannot compel disbursement of appropriated foreign aid, and cannot require race-conscious redistricting. The institutions, the mechanisms, and the doctrinal lines are different. The result is the same: three instruments Congress held are gone. [1]

When this paper reported on the June 29 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, the story was the 6-3 overruling of Humphrey's Executor and the Fed carve-out as the load-bearing exception. When the paper followed the doctrine's move to agency enforcement records, the story was what changed at the FTC and NLRB in the hours after the ruling. Today's story is neither personnel nor enforcement posture. It is the combined ledger of what Congress no longer controls.

The Axios synthesis, published July 2, put the three decisions in a single sentence: Congress can't insulate regulators from the president, limit political parties' spending, or require race-conscious voting districts. [1] That sentence is the news. Not because any individual decision is new — the paper covered each — but because the combination reveals a structural shift that no single coverage beat can hold.

Three domains, one direction

The Slaughter ruling is the most analyzed of the three, and rightly so. For 91 years, Humphrey's Executor stood as Congress's clearest tool for limiting presidential control of independent agencies: you could build an FTC, an NLRB, an FCC, and give their commissioners tenure unless removed for cause. [2] The 6-3 majority in Slaughter held that tool unconstitutional in its entirety. No carve-out for multi-member commissions. No grandfather clause for agencies already established. The president may now remove any principal officer of any executive agency for any reason or no reason. [2]

The appropriations withholding ruling, handed down three weeks earlier, addressed a different mechanism: Congress's power of the purse. Since the Nixon administration, courts have held that when Congress appropriates money for a specific program, the executive must spend it. The term's ruling narrowed that holding, finding that statutory withholding timelines — the mechanism Congress built to compel disbursement — do not rise to the level of a constitutional command. [1] The administration withheld roughly $4 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid; the ruling eliminates the cleanest legal path to forcing that money out.

The redistricting decision, the quietest of the three, ended the doctrine under which courts could require state legislatures to draw majority-minority districts to remedy documented histories of racial vote dilution. [1] Congress had built this requirement into the Voting Rights Act. The Court found that the legislative mandate, as applied to require race-conscious remediation, exceeds what Congress can constitutionally command.

What Congress can't do now

The American Progress full-term review, published this week, names the institutional consequence directly. [3] Congress can write statutes. It cannot enforce them through any of the three mechanisms that previously gave statutes teeth against a hostile executive. The independent agency was the instrument for regulatory enforcement without White House interference. Appropriations enforcement was the instrument for fiscal constraints. Redistricting requirements were the instrument for electoral accountability over time. All three are now subject to presidential override, either through removal, non-disbursement, or non-compliance with congressional mandate. [3]

What remains is the legislative process itself: Congress can still pass laws, confirm judges, and impeach officials. It cannot, with current doctrine, guarantee that any regulatory agency it creates will outlast an election, that any money it appropriates for foreign policy will leave the Treasury, or that any voting-rights remedy it writes will survive a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court that interprets it away.

The Fed carve-out — the one exception in Slaughter's reasoning — is now the sole surviving institutional protection of its kind. The June 29 majority held that the Federal Reserve's unique combination of monetary policy and financial stability functions creates a sufficient distinction. What the majority did not say is whether that distinction is constitutionally durable. No case currently in any circuit is testing it. [2]

The combined-receipt problem

The Axios framing that names all three decisions in one sentence is valuable not because it's alarming but because it's accurate. [1] The three rulings share a structural logic: they each constrain the institutional mechanisms Congress built to act independently of whoever holds the executive. That logic is consistent. Whether it reflects a coherent theory of constitutional law or three decisions that happen to point the same way is a question the Court has not yet answered.

What the coverage record reflects is the fragmentation of the beat. The foreign affairs desk covered the appropriations ruling. The legal desk covered Slaughter. The election law desk covered redistricting. No desk wrote the sentence Axios published on July 2: here is what Congress can no longer do.

The paper's obligation, now that the term is over and the three decisions are simultaneously available, is to hold the combined receipt. Three separate debates produced one institutional result. Congress exits this term without three instruments it had at the start. That is the year's news, stated plainly.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington