The 7-2 decision by Justice Clarence Thomas rejected a broad case that sought to challenge the agency’s funding mechanism, reversing a lower-court ruling that would have undermined the watchdog agency created by Congress 12 years ago. Republican-appointed Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The CFPB, formed amid the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from predatory banks and lenders, is funded by drawing money from the Federal Reserve after the CFPB director makes a request for the money he or she deems “reasonably necessary to carry out” the bureau’s duties. 

The lawsuit, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, was brought by key players in the payday lending industry who say the CFPB is unconstitutionally funded by the Fed because most federal agencies receive appropriations from Congress.

Alito’s dissent, joined by Gorsuch, complained that “today’s decision turns the Appropriations Clause into a minor vestige.”

The case involved a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that said the funding mechanism Congress adopted to ensure the CFPB’s independence was unconstitutional. A panel of three judges, nominees of former President Donald Trump, ruled in 2022 that the mechanism violated the Constitution’s command requiring congressional appropriation of money. Their decision said the agency’s insulation from congressional committees compiled on that violation.

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But a Supreme Court majority led by Thomas, a Republican-appointed justice, rejected this argument, saying that “an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes.” 

“The statute that provides the Bureau’s funding meets these requirements,” the majority said.

The 6-3 order allows the use of a map with majority black populations in two of the state’s six congressional districts, which could increase Democrats’ odds of controlling the House of Representatives in the 2024 election.

The decision came in response to an emergency appeal by the state’s top GOP elected officials and black voters who said they needed the justices to intervene to avoid confusion as the 2024 election approaches.

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Justices on the high court did not delve into a lower court decision that found the map relied too heavily on race; rather, it only blocks another new map to be drawn for this year’s election.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

He appeared to point the remark at colleges’ response to recent campus protests that were in reaction to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. 

“Right now in the world outside this beautiful campus, troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles,” Alito said. “Support for freedom of speech is declining dangerously.”

“Very few colleges live up to that ideal. This place is one of them … but things are not that way out there in the broader world,” Alito said.

Alito also warned of attacks on freedom of religion to the religious college.

“Freedom of religion is also imperiled,” he told the graduating students. “When you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job, or community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe, or to abandon core beliefs. It will be up to you to stand firm.”

Alito is the second-longest tenured Supreme Court associate justice and was one of two justices appointed to the court along with Chief Justice John Roberts by former President George W. Bush. 

The conservative justice made major waves in 2022 when his draft opinion of the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the precedent set in Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press.

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While usually out of the public eye, Alito wasn’t the only Supreme Court justice who made an appearance outside of Washington, D.C., this weekend.

Clarence Thomas recently spoke out about criticism aimed at his family at a judicial conference on Friday night, saying that there were “nastiness and lies” directed toward him and his wife.

The longest-serving justice on the current Supreme Court has been under fire for reports about lavish gifts from his friend and conservative donor Harlan Crow. He has also refused to recuse himself from cases related to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, though his wife Virginia Thomas was involved in the fight to contest the results of the 2020 election.

Thomas made the comments at a judicial conference in Alabama, though he did not specifically address the controversies. 

“My wife and I, the last two or three years, just the nastiness and the lies,” Thomas said. “There’s certainly been a lot of negativity in our lives, my wife and I, over the last few years, but we choose not to focus on it.”

Supreme Court justices don’t generally speak with reporters or in public, so Thomas’s comments are rare. He repeated that he and his wife try to ignore their critics.

“You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things,” he said. “But one, you have to understand and accept the fact that they don’t, they can’t change you unless you permit that.”

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The conservative justice previously faced criticism for not disclosing years of gifts and trips from his friend Crow and other conservative donors. Virginia’s controversy stems from text messages she made to former President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, urging him to pursue overturning the 2020 election after Trump lost to President Joe Biden.

Thomas is both the oldest and longest-serving Supreme Court justice. Former president George H.W. Bush appointed him in 1991 to succeed Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice.

In a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court wrote that the due process clause requires timely forfeiture hearings but does not require a preliminary hearing, marking a blow to the plaintiffs in the case. The court was divided along ideological lines, with all six Republican-appointed justices in the majority.

Plaintiffs Halima Culley and Lena Sutton filed class actions against the state of Alabama and their local governments, claiming their due process rights were violated because they did not receive prompt hearings after their cars were seized.

Culley’s son was driving her 2015 Nissan Altima when police pulled him over and found marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and a loaded pistol in the car. In Sutton’s case, her friend was using her 2012 Chevrolet Sonic when police pulled him over for speeding and discovered methamphetamine in the car.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in the Culley and Sutton cases held that the “speedy trial” test, formed to resolve allegations of Sixth Amendment violations, applied and that due process is satisfied by the civil forfeiture process itself.

Alabama Attorney General Steven Marshall, a Republican, had called on the high court to uphold the 11th Circuit’s ruling, saying that the Supreme Court “for centuries” has held that civil forfeitures need not inquire into the guilt or innocence of the property’s owner, “only the use of the property itself in a prohibited act,” according to a brief.

Civil forfeiture laws, which are in place in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., allow law enforcement officers to seize property, such as a vehicle, if it is used in connection to a crime, even if the property is owned by an innocent party.

Between 2000 and 2019, states and the federal government pocketed a total of $68.8 billion through forfeiture, as police departments across the country rake in millions of dollars worth of property each year.

Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

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Sotomayor wrote that when a police officer has a “financial incentive” to hold on to a vehicle and an owner pleads innocence, the petitioners contend “a retention hearing at least ensures that the officer has probable cause to connect the owner and the car to a crime.”

“Today, the Court holds that the Due Process Clause never requires that minimal safeguard,” Sotomayor added. “In doing so, it sweeps far more broadly than the narrow question presented and hamstrings lower courts from addressing myriad abuses of the civil forfeiture system.”

“You try to avoid getting angry or that — you try in the job — you try to remain as calm, reasonable, and serious as possible. I think it was unfortunate,” he said of the leak of the draft decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.

Justice Clarence Thomas called the leak a type of “infidelity” that “changes the institution fundamentally.” Chief Justice John Roberts directed the court’s marshal to launch an investigation into the leak, which months later turned up inconclusive.

Even two years later, there are signs that the high court may still be reeling from the unprecedented leak decision, according to legal experts and court watchers interviewed by the Washington Examiner.

“The court’s been incredibly slow at deciding cases, it’s been slow at taking new cases, I mean it’s just been slow across the board,” Jonathan Adler, a constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s starting to look like a new normal, but I certainly hope it’s not the case. I’m someone who thinks the court should be taking more cases than it does.”

Experts who spoke to the Washington Examiner stressed that it is difficult to gauge whether the leak is still negatively affecting the high court today. After all, the Supreme Court has gone through other recent changes, such as altering its protocols during the 2020 pandemic — it now allows oral argument audio to be streamed for each case, for example — and in recent months, the high court has taken on more thorny political issues including lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, President Joe Biden’s sweeping student loan forgiveness plan, and cases involving former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

“I don’t know that we have the information that allows us to isolate one variable as opposed to the others,” Adler said.

So far, the high court has only agreed to hear eight cases for the fall 2024-25 term, though they will likely accept 60 to 70 total before their list for the next term is full. This time last year, the justices had only confirmed eight cases to be weighed in the current term as well. Additionally, the court last year had only released five opinions by April 28, while the court this year has already decided 18 cases by the same date.

“One symptom of the Dobbs leak last term was the slow pace early on in the term,” Adam Feldman, the founder of the Empirical SCOTUS blog, which follows statistics about high court cases, told the Washington Examiner.

Last term, it took the justices until Jan. 23, 2023, four months after justices returned to the bench in October 2022, to issue their first opinion. Typically, the justices deliver their first opinion of the term by late November or sometime in December, but the wait to release their first decision until the end of January prompted questions among court watchers and opinion trackers. Such a delay had not been observed in nearly 100 years.

“This slow start has continued this term, which might be related, but I think much has to do with the unexpected Trump cases taking up time that would otherwise be devoted to other cases,” Feldman said, referencing the current cases surrounding Trump and his broad claims of presidential immunity from prosecution, as well as the high court’s opinion earlier this term reversing the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to rule him ineligible for office.

The leak of the opinion via a Politico report sparked a long and tumultuous series of protests between May 2, 2022, and the end of June that year, when the draft 6-3 opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, a staunch conservative on the bench, reversed nearly 50 years of abortion access precedent under Roe v. Wade. Alito’s words were unchanged from the leaked draft when the finalized opinion was released nearly two months later, on June 24.

Nearly two months before that, the Supreme Court on May 5 had erected metal barricades around the building in response to continued protests and threats against Republican-appointed members of the court.

The leak created shockwaves across the nation by signaling the high court would hand the power to impose abortion laws to individual states, and more than a dozen states immediately enacted restrictions or bans on the procedure following that decision.

“I do think the biggest impact that is absolutely ongoing that we have seen is the level of personal threat to justices,” Carrie Severino, a former clerk to Thomas and founder of the conservative JCN, told the Washington Examiner. Likewise, there have been more than 400 attacks against Catholic churches in the United States since May 2020, with numbers skyrocketing after the leaked decision in Dobbs.

The nearly two months between the leak and the final decision gave protesters and agitators ample time to react in ways that put the justices’ lives in danger. Weeks before the final decision came out, a then-26-year-old man from California traveled to the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh on June 8, 2022, with plans to break in and kill him before he called the police on himself. That man, Nicholas Roske, is currently negotiating a plea deal with prosecutors, according to court records.

“The defense’s mitigation investigation is complete; and the parties have engaged in substantive plea negotiations,” Roske’s public defender wrote in a status report on April 29, which noted a trial is expected to take place from May 13 to June 7.

The murder attempt by Roske prompted the U.S. Marshals Service to send out officers to defend the private homes of several Republican-appointed justices. It wasn’t until an annual dinner at the American Law Institute last May that Roberts admitted the “hardest decision in 18 years” was the decision to place the metal barricades around the court.

“I had no choice but to go ahead and do it,” Roberts said at a dinner last May hosted by the American Law Institute.

But in hindsight, Severino suggested it may have been better overall if the Supreme Court had released the Dobbs decision early rather than wait until the end of the term to release the final ruling.

“I think they wanted to show that they weren’t being affected by it,” Severino said of the leak. “Of course, it can’t really be business as usual” when something like that occurs.

Another concern among the commentariat at the time of the leak was whether it would affect the collegiality among the justices, especially after murmurs and rumors that the source of the leak could have been a justice, an unproven claim that Breyer recently said would leave him “amazed” if it was true.

Feldman said he sees the “justices posturing to seem like they get along,” pointing to Democratic-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recent speaking engagements with each other in February this year.

“I’m sure the seeds of distrust exist between some of the different chambers, but I think the bottom line is that there isn’t a lot of evidence on the surface that shows things have changed in a negative direction since the Dobbs leak,” Feldman said. “We probably will not have anything that paints a substantially different picture until years later when a justice either releases post-mortem papers to the public or writes a tell-all book.”

Last January, Justice Brett Kavanaugh spoke out about the media’s speculation that the leak had caused any holdups of the Supreme Court’s work, saying it was merely a coincidence that the justices took longer than normal to release their first opinions. He and his colleagues have often raised the point that they eat lunch together and how the court’s relationship and closeness are similar in nature to a family.

Jessie Hill, a constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve, noted that the intensity of the initial reaction to the Dobbs leak led some people to believe it may “have a lasting impact on the court.”

“I think it had less than it was expected to,” Hill said. “On the other hand, I think the Dobbs decision itself has had more of an impact on our politics, maybe more than people foresaw at the time.”

What remains to be seen is whether the public will have a similar outcry once the justices issue decisions in two separate abortion-related cases this term or in forthcoming consequential decisions in cases involving the former president. A Marquette Law School poll from February found overall approval of the high court floating at around 40%, while 60% of respondents disapproved. That’s still slightly up in comparison to July 2022, which saw approval tank down to 38% in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

One recently argued abortion case involves the possibility of limiting access to the common abortion drug, mifepristone, while another surrounds a federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care in states with strict bans on such procedures. Both decisions are expected by the end of June.

The immediate aftermath of the leak prompted a flurry of outrage from all sides of the political spectrum, from the left-leaning commentariat upset over the sweeping shift of precedent in the Dobbs decision itself to the right-leaning observers who decried the leak as a form of infidelity and institutional sabotage.

In reality, nobody will likely understand the motive or who was behind the leak anytime soon after an internal investigation prompted by Roberts came back inconclusive.

“I suspect maybe one day we’ll find out in some memoir written 50 years from now,” Hill said, adding that for all intents and purposes “this inquiry itself is done.”

Alito, the author of Dobbs, is the only current member of the court who has suggested he has a “pretty good idea” as to who was behind the leak and what may have motivated the breach of the institution. However, the justice has indicated as recently as this spring that it would not be fair to divulge his suspicions publicly without proper evidence. He has, however, poured cold water on the theory that a conservative leaked the decision in some apparent effort to lock in the final vote of the court, arguing it “made us the targets of assassination.”

“Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible,” Alito said last April.

For Breyer, an 85-year-old Clinton appointee who retired in 2022, the leak was the end of a fleeting effort to convince his Republican-appointed colleagues to change their position from Alito’s majority opinion despite the only potential holdout being Roberts. Breyer admitted during an interview with NBC News that he was eyeing a “compromise” on a 15-week abortion ban.

The chief justice was the only Republican-appointed justice who did not agree with striking down Roe, but because he ultimately wouldn’t have ruled against Mississippi’s desire to craft its own abortion legislation, he could not bring himself to side with Breyer and the other two Democratic-appointed justices in the minority.

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“I always think it’s possible,” Breyer said of the court coming to a compromise. “I always think it’s possible, usually up until the last minute.”

The Washington Examiner contacted the Supreme Court for comment.

Navarro, 74, was found guilty last year on two counts of contempt of Congress stemming from his failure to produce documents related to the investigation and another for evading a deposition before the panel that was tasked with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Navarro’s bid marks the second time he has been denied by the justices on his quest to be set free while he challenges his conviction at an appeals court.

Navarro reported to federal prison in Miami in mid-March to begin serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena after Chief Justice John Roberts denied his first last-ditch attempt to remain free.

In early April, he renewed his request to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who referred his bid to the full court, which ultimately denied it. There were no noted dissents.

The former Trump administration adviser has argued he was bound by executive privilege when he defied the subpoena, but the district court judge overseeing the case found there was no evidence the privilege was ever invoked.

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Navarro’s effort to delay his sentence, finding him unlikely to win a new trial or reverse his conviction.

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Navarro made his second appeal to the Supreme Court, citing the schedule for his challenge against his conviction at the appeals court level. The last filing at the D.C. Circuit is due July 18, after Navarro will have served his full sentence.

Other former White House officials have been convicted of the same charge. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison. However, the district judge overseeing that case put his prison term on hold while he appeals.

Douglas Horn, who has been a truck driver for 14 years, alleges a CBD elixir advertised to contain no THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, caused him to fail a drug test that resulted in his termination in 2012. Horn contends that he has never used marijuana or a THC product other than the elixir he used to help alleviate his pain, known as “Dixie X.”

Horn initially filed suit in the Western District of New York in 2015, alleging in part that Medical Marijuana Inc. and other companies involved in the production and distribution of the elixir known as Dixie X violated the Controlled Substances Act and engaged in mail and wire fraud.

The Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Horn was allowed to file his lawsuit under the RICO Act, which allows plaintiffs in civil lawsuits to seek triple damages in some instances.

Some federal appeals courts have held that civil suits cannot be filed based on personal injury claims, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit allowed the suit to move forward.

“Because the term ‘business’ encompasses ’employment,’ Horn has suffered an injury ‘in his business,’ as contemplated by the RICO statute,” Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a three-judge panel, adding that the truck driver’s termination “cost him current and future wages and his insurance and pension benefits — all of which were tied to his employment.”

Medical Marijuana Inc. appealed to the Supreme Court in October, arguing that the RICO Act was never intended to be used in this way and that allowing the case to move forward would expand the number and type of “civil RICO” lawsuits.

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President Richard Nixon initially signed the RICO Act in 1970 to open up more avenues for the federal government to tackle heads of organized crime. Several states have enacted their own versions of the law, including Georgia, where a state version of the law is at the core of the Fulton County election subversion case against former President Donald Trump.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case sometime in the fall 2024-25 term.

On Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Eric Trump said presidents should receive full immunity from actions done while in office, or else a dangerous precedent of investigating former presidents, including former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, could be set in place. Eric Trump outlined his takeaways from last week’s oral arguments before the high court.

“God help us if they get it wrong, that’s what I take away. I know the system very, very well,” Eric Trump said. “The only people who are going to benefit are the big law firms in Washington, D.C., because they are going to go after every single president.” 

Eric Trump questioned where prosecution of a former president would stop, saying “They’ll start with Obama, fast and furious, right where he gives two thousand weapons to cartel members. Then, they’ll go to Obama where he weaponized the IRS against conservatives.”

He continued, “Where do you want us to stop? They could go after George Bush for lying about weapons of mass destruction,” Eric Trump said. “Where does this stop, Maria?”

During the Supreme Court’s oral arguments last week, justices generally seemed to agree that former President Donald Trump does not have blanket immunity from prosecution. The conservative justices were more so concerned about how the decision could affect future presidencies than as it pertained to Trump, while the liberal justices believed full immunity would create a “lawless King” out of Trump. 

Eric Trump said the only “winners’ from a Supreme Court decision that does not grant total immunity will be lawyers in Washington, D.C.

He also said he believed prosecutors would go after President Joe Biden after his presidency.

“The floodgates are going to open, and I guarantee you Joe Biden will not have one foot outside of the White House before they start going after him illegally, ruthlessly,” Eric Trump said. 

He reaffirmed that presidents need immunity post-Oval Office. 

“Presidents need immunity in this country. If they don’t, their entire tenure as president is literally going to be filled in depositions and subpoenas like they’ve tried to do to my father for the last eight years,” Eric Trump said. 

“We can’t have this legal lawfare in this country, we need a president to actually be able to function and run the United States of America,” Eric Trump said.

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When asked about a potential decision coming in June, he concluded that presidents need total immunity in order to govern successfully.

“I certainly hope that presidents have absolute immunity and if they don’t, they’re not going to be able to function as Presidents of the United States,” Eric Trump said.

During Thursday’s arguments over Trump’s bid to have total presidential immunity against special counsel Jack Smith‘s four-count election subversion indictment, Gorsuch suggested that former presidents like Trump must have immunity or else future presidents could be targeted for prosecution and could therefore seek to pardon themselves before leaving office.

“We’ve never answered whether a president can do that; happily, it’s never been presented to us,” Gorsuch said of whether a president can pardon himself. Gorsuch indicated that he dreads the idea of having to decide whether presidents can use such authority on themselves.

Gorsuch, Trump’s first of three appointees to the high court, underscored the historical significance of the former president’s case and the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling on the matter of presidential immunity.

“I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives,” Gorsuch said, adding, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.”

“What would happen if presidents were under fear that their successors would criminally prosecute them for their acts in office?” Gorsuch asked, citing hypotheticals other justices used, such as one hypothetical about whether former President Barack Obama could be prosecuted for authorizing a drone strike on civilians.

Gorsuch later became testy during an exchange with Michael Dreeben, a veteran Supreme Court litigant who represented the special counsel’s office in the nearly three-hour oral argument session.

“Did you agree that there are some core functions of the executive that … Congress cannot criminalize?” Gorsuch asked.

“Yes,” Dreeben replied. “We call it an ‘as applied Article II challenge.'”

The justice interrupted, asking Dreeben in a testy voice, “Can we call it immunity just for shorthand’s sake?”

“Well I don’t think I said ‘just,’ but I think it’s a very significant gap between any official act and the small core of exclusive official acts,” Dreeben said.

Gorsuch said he wanted to explore the question further.

“Let’s say a president leads a mostly peaceful protest sit-in in front of Congress because he objects to a piece of legislation that’s going through. And it, in fact, delays the proceedings in Congress. Now under 1512(c)(2), that might be corruptly impeding an official proceeding. Is that core and therefore immunized or whatever word euphemism you want to use for that? Or is that not core and therefore prosecutable?” Gorsuch asked.

Dreeben answered that in such a scenario, the president’s action would not be considered a “core” executive action, and he explained that the kinds of activities that the court has acknowledged exist are in a “pretty small set.” However, the government attorney admitted that a former president probably could not be prosecuted for the conduct Gorsuch described after that president leaves office.

The special counsel’s lawyer also came under heavy scrutiny from several of the court’s Republican-appointed members, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who asked whether the laws Trump is accused of violating can be applied to a former president and whether an appeals court decision that found Trump is not entitled to immunity would have devastating consequences for democracy.

Of all the nine justices, Gorsuch appeared to be steering his like-minded colleagues toward a decision that could result in sending the 2020 subversion case back to the district court in Washington for more hearings with instructions about what acts constitute official or private actions.

“After listening to arguments at the Supreme Court, it’s clear the justices will narrowly hold the President of the United States — any president — is immune from criminal prosecution for official (not personal) acts,” Mike Davis, a Trump ally and former clerk to Gorsuch, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.

The direct result of such a decision would further delay the Trump election subversion case from making it to a trial, though it’s not certain that delay would persist until after the November 2024 election.

A Supreme Court case heard earlier this month could also threaten half of Smith’s 2020 election subversion indictment. Trump is facing two obstruction of justice counts, and the nine justices are prepared to decide whether hundreds of Jan. 6 riot defendants and Trump were incorrectly charged under the 1512(c)(2) statute.

If Trump won the presidency again, it would also open up the high court to the possibility of having to weigh in on whether a former president can pardon himself, as Trump has signaled his intent to quash the election interference case and Smith’s other classified documents indictment.

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Gorsuch appeared adamant that it is more important now to determine the breadth of immunity former presidents may enjoy rather than risk a scenario where the high court must determine whether one can pardon himself.

Trump is facing 88 charges altogether in his two federal criminal cases, along with a criminal trial in New York over an alleged hush money scheme and a sweeping racketeering indictment in Fulton County, Georgia.