The solidly conservative Supreme Court ruled on several important cases this June, the final month of the Court’s current term. These cases have the potential to upend decades of settled precedent and create environments that are starkly unequal from state to state. This term’s cases touch on gay rights and religious liberty, access to healthcare, criminal justice and voting access.

In many of these cases, the Court’s Justices have several options when writing their opinions: they can make a more liberal ruling and expand voting and civil rights. Given the current court’s heavily conservative leaning, this option is often the least likely. The Court could also make sweeping conservative judgements that could curtail more liberal states’ abilities to implement progressive policy. While this is a legitimate fear as the Supreme Court has become more conservative, the Court has recently steered away from this path.

Instead, based on their most recent rulings, the Court has chosen a third path; they have elected not to make sweeping or archly conservative decisions and instead issued narrow or technical decisions. From the recent Fulton v. City of Philadelphia decision to the California v. Texas ruling, the Court has opted not to make sweeping decisions, but to instead focus narrowly on the facts of specific cases.

In many cases, the Court’s decisions function to expand states’ power.

Gay Rights and Religious Liberty

During the Pride Month of June, the Court made a much-anticipated ruling in the Fulton v. City of Philadelphia case. The Justices unanimously ruled that a Philadelphia Catholic social services agency had the right to reject gay couples who apply to take in foster children, despite the fact that the city has rules against discrimination based on race, religion or sexual orientation.

This ruling fits with the consertative Court’s recent trend of undermining other civil liberties in favor of strengthening religious entities and individuals’ freedoms, even when those freedoms infringe upon the rights of others. We’ve seen religious, mostly Christian groups, increasingly use the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution to attempt to restrict progressive policies, such as protecting gay rights or increasing access to contraception. A 2021 study found that today’s Supreme Court rules in favor of religion in more than 80 percent of orally argued cases, which is 35 percentage points more than the Court did 70 years ago.

Yet, in Fulton, the Justices chose not to issue a sweeping protection of religious freedoms, but instead to issue a narrow and technical ruling. Rather than issue an exhaustive opinion that could have allowed many private agencies that receive taxpayer funds to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals, the Justices honed in on the fact that while the City of Philadelphia’s contract does not allow discrimination based on sexual orientation, the city’s rules do allow for exceptions.

According to the landmark 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision, widely considered the basis for evaluating religious liberties cases, religious exemptions to laws are not legally permissible, as long as those laws are neutral and apply generally to everyone.

The Justices stated that because the City of Philadelphia made exceptions to its anti-discrimination rules, such as taking race into account when placing children with families, the city’s anti-discrimination rule did not have general applicability, and thus allowed for religious exemption. This meant that the Catholic Charities had the right to refuse to work with LGBTQ+ families.

While this ruling is less than ideal, it upholds the Smith decision, and it did not give the most conservative members of the court everything they wanted. The ruling also provides Philadelphia with a path forward to protect LGBTQ+ families: the city can eliminate the exemption clause of their anti-discrimination rule to ensure that every organization that carries out adoption work for the city is required to work with all families, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation.

Affordable Care Act

In a ruling that surprised some commentators from this 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, the Justices rejected the latest Republican attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has expanded healthcare access to more than 20 million Americans over the past decade. The plaintiffs, which consisted of eighteen Republican states and two individuals, argued in California v. Texas that the ACA could not stand without the Individual Mandate, which had been struck down by a Federal appeals court in 2019.

While we should be celebrating more evidence that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, it’s important to note that like the above Fulton opinion, this ruling was not a sweeping defense of the ACA. Instead, the court issued a narrow and technical opinion by a 7-2 majority, based on the position that the states and individuals that brought forward the complaint had no right to be in court because the ACA had not caused them any harm.

The Court’s decision protects the ACA for now and ensures that the tens of millions of Americans who have access to healthcare today due to the ACA can continue receiving care. It also means that Republican state legislatures are free to continue finding ways to undermine the law, and to continue to deny over 2.2 million adults (more than a third of whom live in Texas) access to life-saving Medicaid.

Criminal Justice

The Jones v. Mississippi ruling, decided this April, is undoubtedly one of the darkest decisions the Supreme Court made this year. Here, in the only country in the world where children can be sentenced to die in prison, the Supreme Court voted by a 6-3 majority to make that unique statistic even more durable. The Court ruled that juvenile offenders can be given the sentence of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) without a requirement that the child be deemed incorrigible, or beyond any hope of rehabilitation.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has leaned toward limiting harsh sentencing for juvenile offenders. For example, Roper v. Simmons in 2004 determined that the death penalty for juveniles is unconstitutional because it violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.” Miller v. Alabama in 2012 bans mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles, and Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016 made the Miller decision retroactive. The Court’s latest ruling brings this more humane trend to a screeching halt.

The Jones v. Mississippi decision signals a disturbing step backwards. What’s worse, the impacts of this case will not be felt equally. Black juveniles are sentenced to die in prison at a rate that is twice that of white juveniles, and children of color make up 70% of children sentenced to life without parole.

As abhorrent as this decision was, the ruling is again relatively narrow. The court has weakened, but not overturned, the Miller v. Alabama ruling, which banned mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles. In making this narrow decision, the Court again guarantees unequal implementation. While some state governments will see this ruling as a license to sentence more children to spend the rest of their lives in prison, other states still have the power to prohibit life without parole sentences for anyone under the age of 18.

Additionally, even in states that choose not to prohibit LWOP sentences for juveniles, prosecutors can still choose not to seek such punishments in juvenile cases.

Voting Rights

Finally, the Supreme Court on July 1st ruled against democracy in one of the most important voting rights cases in a generation: Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. Their decision to uphold Arizona’s two voter suppression bills that have been clearly shown to disproportionately block Black, Latino and Native Americans’ access to the polls severely weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

One of these Arizona laws required officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct, which is particularly egregious in Arizona because the state is one of the most transient in the country and polling locations change often, particularly in Black and brown communities. The second law makes it a criminal offense for campaign workers to collect ballots for delivery, a practice called ballot collection. Both Arizona laws disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color because minority voters are about twice as likely as white voters to cast their ballots in the wrong precinct, and ballot collection was particularly popular among Latino and Native American communities.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in March of 2021 and this July, the 6-3 conservative majority decided to uphold the two clearly discriminatory laws. In his majority opinion, Justice Alito essentially stated that states could enact voter suppression laws that disproportionately impact minorities as long as there are other conceivable ways that a voter can cast their ballot through some other means. In other words, states can make voting as difficult as they want for voters of color, as long as the voter is not entirely barred from voting.

This ruling deals another heavy blow to the Voting Rights Act, which had already been systematically weakened by the Supreme Court over the past decade. Moreover, despite a Democratic trifecta at the federal level, the chances of passing new federal voting rights legislation seem vanishingly small. With more than 150 voter suppression bills moving through legislatures across the country in response to the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, the implications of this decision are staggering. We are increasingly headed towards an America where voting access, particularly for people of color, will vary widely from state to state, with no federal regulations to protect the right to the franchise.

A Through-Line: States Matter

Each of these cases demonstrates the importance of states and state legislatures — to the protection of our civil rights, to our access to healthcare, and to our access to the ballot box. During this session, the highest court in the United States has often made the decision to return power to state and local governments, rather than create or protect federal standards.

This means that the impacts of the Supreme Court’s decisions will be felt unevenly from state to state. Progressive state legislatures will implement laws that protect civil rights, expand voting access, and increase access to healthcare. Republican-led states, however, will likely continue to do the opposite. They may write laws that prize religious expression over civil rights, implement policies that suppress voters, or actively deny millions of their citizens access to healthcare. It all starts with states.

While the solidly conservative Supreme Court majority is a cause for alarm, they have not yet made rulings that constrain states’ abilities to protect their residents. That’s why the only path forward for progressives is to turn our attention to state legislatures, which have enormous power and are growing more powerful everyday. We must pay attention to what our state legislators are doing and make it a top priority to elect champions to state legislatures and build progressive power in every state.