The Supreme Court closed its 2025-2027 term on Tuesday, dispersing its justices for the summer after a stretch that produced seven major rulings and the customary waves of partisan fury. Constitutional law professor and Fox News contributor Hugh Hewitt argues, in a new column, that the seasonal outrage obscures a larger truth: as the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the Court remains the most enduring proof that American self-government still functions. The fury, he writes, will pass — the institution will not.
Seven Decisions, One Constant
The term's most contested rulings covered the tenure of governors of the Federal Reserve, the status of appointees heading federal administrative agencies, Temporary Protected Status for immigrants inside the country, asylum access for those at the border, First Amendment limits on political-party spending, state laws barring biological boys from girls' sports, and birthright citizenship. The birthright citizenship case alone generated six separate opinions — a volume Hewitt notes most citizens absorb through social media rather than by reading the text itself.
Hewitt, who has taught constitutional law at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law since 1996, says he approved of the majority position in all seven cases. He acknowledges that marks him as an outlier among commentators, attributing the view to three decades of teaching and what he describes as an institutionalist commitment to text, history, tradition, and common sense.
The Errors That Were Fixed
Hewitt names three decisions he calls the "anti-cannon" trio — Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States — as the Court's most lasting stains on American history. All three have since been reversed, and successive justices have expressed shame for their predecessors who authored or joined those rulings. The capacity for self-correction, in Hewitt's framing, is not a weakness of the institution but its defining strength.
The Frame Worth Toasting
Hewitt draws on Abraham Lincoln's pre-inaugural framing, itself borrowed from the Book of Proverbs: the Declaration of Independence as an "apple of gold" and the Constitution as a "frame of silver" built to protect it. The standard for any Supreme Court decision, by that logic, is not whether partisans applaud the outcome, but whether the ruling advances the polishing of that frame. The justices, Hewitt argues, meet a test no other branch of government faces: they must reduce every argument to writing and submit it to public scrutiny.
In the 53 years since Roe v. Wade and the 48 years since University of California v. Bakke, he writes, the Court has only rarely produced a decision that dramatically set back ordered liberty. As July 4 approaches, his recommendation is straightforward: toast the Declaration, then raise one more for the Court that guards it.