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The Supreme Court term came crashing to a close in June with a barrage of decisions that, with a few narrow exceptions, further stripped away Americans’ right to govern themselves. On this week’s episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern convened Slate’s annual Breakfast Table to discuss the major themes of a term dominated by 6–3 decisions empowering President Donald Trump—and the justices themselves—at the expense of Congress, lower courts, and democracy. They were joined by three of the court’s sharpest, wisest critics: Sherrilyn Ifill of Howard University School of Law, Nikolas Bowie of Harvard Law School, and Steve Vladeck of the Georgetown University Law Center. An excerpt of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: I’ve heard a lot of pundits say this is the worst term since the presidential immunity decision. Some say it’s the worst term since Dobbs. I’ve heard it called the worst term since Dred Scott. And I don’t even know how one measures worst-term-ness, but I’m pretty sure the announcement of the birthright citizenship decision on the very last day blunted some of the impacts of how serious this term was. So I want to put aside the case that upheld a core constitutional guarantee by—shockingly—a 5–4 vote, and ask each of you: How bad was this past term in the aggregate?

Sherrilyn Ifill: Plenty bad. Very bad. And I actually don’t leave out the birthright citizenship case, because to understand how bad this term was, you can’t just count up the decisions. You have to also look at how the court decided these cases. What was the split? What license did the court take to get to the decisions that it made? To me, that’s what takes this term off into the stratosphere. Some of the decisions are catastrophic and terrible, but even the decisions that seem to be OK, much of........

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