Legal commentators weigh in on Biden administration's long SCOTUS losing streak

With President Joe Biden poised to depart the presidency at noon on Monday, assessments of his administration's accomplishments -- and its failures -- are well underway.

As Reuters reports, many of those looking back on Biden's years in office have been struck by the frequent manner in which the U.S. Supreme Court rebuked his agenda and many of the policy pillars liberals have held dear, marking a legacy of which the outgoing president may not be terribly proud.

Defeats at the high court

Though it is certainly true that Biden's predecessor in office solidified a conservative majority at the Supreme Court, the sheer volume of losses sustained by the administration in the last four years has caught the attention of historians and legal commentators alike.

Perhaps most calamitous to Biden's legacy at the high court was the 2022 decision to overturn the abortion precedent set in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, a ruling that put the issue back in the hands of the states.

2022 was also the year in which the court issued a ruling that greatly broadened the Second Amendment rights of Americans, a move that has yielded the rollback of strict gun control regulations in a number of states.

It was in 2023 that race-conscious college admissions policies were struck down by the high court, viewed by many on the left as a devastating blow to the themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion that prevailed during the Biden years.

In another embarrassing defeat, Biden's campaign promise of large-scale student loan forgiveness went down to defeat more than once, despite his administration's continued attempts to sidestep the court's edicts on the matter.

Commentators weigh in

The poor record at the high court notched by the Biden administration did not escape the attention of a number of high-profile legal scholars who offered their takes to Reuters.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School weighed in, saying, of Biden's losing streak, “I think it is the toughest series of defeats since Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s had many New Deal programs declared unconstitutional.”

Another commentator, John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department lawyer during George W. Bush's tenure in office, had a similar assessment of Biden's record at the high court.

“It's hard to think of another president in our lifetimes who lost so many high-profile cases on issues so near and dear to his constitutional agenda,” Yoo said.

Damning verdict emerges

Biden has taken aim at what he feels are disturbing trends among the justices, calling the vaunted institution “not a normal court” and one he said was responsible for “extreme opinions that...have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections.”

However, given that a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll revealed that millions of Americans may either agree with the high court's frequent rebukes of Biden or at least are aware of his administration's inability to prevail before the justices, with 44% of respondents labeling him a “failed president,” and just 26% calling him either good or great -- a truly damning verdict any way you look at it.