Supreme Court observers spend much of their time noting the sharp ideological divisions on the court, with six conservative justices and three liberals. But the decisions do not always line up along clear ideological lines.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ended Monday’s opinion saying president Donald Trump’s case would be returned to lower courts for further proceedings. But he did not say when that would happen, and Supreme Court rules could add another month-long delay before U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan can act in the case, legal experts said.

Despite facing nonstop calls to recuse themselves from all cases related to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. sat in judgment of former president Donald Trump’s immunity claim and the Jan. 6 obstruction charge.

When Donald Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential immunity was in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Judge Florence Y. Pan asked whether he could be prosecuted for ordering “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.”

Only if he was impeached and convicted first, a lawyer for Trump replied, a concession that appeared to hurt his case. Monday’s Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity actually goes further, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in dissent.

The “impeachment judgment” clause of Article I of the Constitution reads: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” Another clause says officials can be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

The Supreme Court ruled that it will now be up to U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to weigh the next steps in former president Donald Trump’s federal election obstruction case, including whether and when to hold public hearings on his actions leading up to and on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

The air was thick with suspense Monday morning.

It was the final day of the term, and the justices were set to rule on a blockbuster presidential immunity case that could upend former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s federal elections case.

The Supreme Court held Monday not only that Donald Trump could not be prosecuted for official acts but that those acts could not be used as evidence of a crime.

“That proposal threatens to eviscerate the immunity we have recognized,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. “It would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly — invite the jury to examine acts for which a President is immune from prosecution to nonetheless prove his liability on any charge.”

Mary L. Trump, an outspoken critic of her uncle Donald Trump, is now selling T-shirts inspired by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Sotomayor wrote in her conclusion. Mary Trump’s T-shirts paraphrase that: “With fear for our democracy, I VOTE.”

David Gelman — a lawyer who says he speaks on behalf of Trump on legal issues — celebrated the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. He said the ruling means there’s little chance that either of the federal cases against Trump will go to trial.

“The federal government’s cases against Trump just got blown up because of this,” he said in an interview. “President Trump and all presidents after Trump should celebrate this ruling. … If a president is handcuffed, they are not going to be able to do their jobs in an effective way.”

The Supreme Court’s decision Monday sends Donald Trump’s case back to a trial judge to decide which acts may be prosecutable as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election while he was president. The process is subject to further appeal, and probably delays a full trial in Washington, D.C., beyond this November’s election rematch with President Biden.

In the decision Monday on the case against Donald Trump, the conservative Supreme Court majority said the former president has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for using his “core constitutional powers” and “presumptive immunity” for all other official acts.

What’s the difference? The “absolute immunity” is for the actions delegated to the president in Article II of the Constitution, including commanding the military and appointing and overseeing officials in the executive branch.

Walking away from the Supreme Court, Noel Evans shook his head. Monday’s decision confirmed a feeling he said had been building for years: He could not trust the Supreme Court.

“I think it’s a shame how this court has conducted itself; it’s a tragedy,” Evans, 55, said. “The court has once again abdicated their responsibility.”

The Supreme Court said Monday that the president’s constitutional mandate to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” may well cover much of Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

In a blistering dissent in the immunity case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the “utterly indefensible” majority decision reshaped the American presidency and “makes a mockery of the principle … that no man is above the law.”

Sotomayor condemned what she called the majority’s “brute force” creation of an “absolute immunity” for a president exercising his core constitutional powers. “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote.

Democrats and progressive voices are raising the alarm over the Supreme Court’s decision that presidents have “absolute” immunity for official acts, which could affect a lower court’s decision on whether to try former president Donald Trump on charges of attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told her 13.1 million followers on X that the immunity ruling is “an assault on American democracy.”

Republicans critical of social media companies will live to fight another day after failing to secure victories in several high-profile cases this term.

The court last week rejected a GOP-led effort to bar White House officials from pressuring tech companies, but did so on technical grounds, and on Monday also declined to rule on the merits of the NetChoice cases.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wore a chunky white, beaded statement necklace for the final day of the term Monday, similar to the dissent collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore to show disagreement.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke for about 25 minutes while reading her scathing dissent from the bench in Trump v. U.S.

The group that gathered in front of the Supreme Court on Monday morning waited anxiously, terse muttering increasing with each minute past 10 a.m., when the court begins issuing opinions.

About a half-hour in, a man’s voice cut across the crowd: “No immunity,” he yelled — missing the nuance of the ruling.

Cheers erupted, and people embraced one another. Celeste McCall, an 80-year-old wearing a pink “Kittens Against Trump” T-shirt that her husband gave her, made a phone call.

The Supreme Court justices are allowed to invite guests to attend oral arguments and opinions. On the final day of opinions, Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley, and parents were in the audience, along with Jane Sullivan Roberts, wife of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Assistant special counsel Michael R. Dreeben, who argued on behalf of the government in the Trump immunity case, was also in the audience Monday morning.

Concurring in the NetChoice online speech ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised the question of whether a foreign-owned company — think TikTok — is eligible for First Amendment protections when it moderates content. She cited it as an example of a potential application of the Texas and Florida laws that the lower courts failed to consider.

President Biden’s campaign said the ruling on presidential immunity “doesn’t change the facts” of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

In telling the trial court to conduct a factual review of Trump’s public statements leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, the majority suggested the indictment may mischaracterize Trump’s designs on that day.

In a footnote to its immunity decision, the Supreme Court appeared to say that the federal cases against Donald Trump cannot continue if he returns to the White House.

“In the criminal context … the Justice Department ‘has long recognized’ that ‘the separation of powers precludes the criminal prosecution of a sitting President,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.

Part of the decision in the immunity case seems to open the door for future presidents to have a more hands-on role with criminal investigations by the Justice Department.

Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor, said the decision on presidential immunity “creates more heat than light. Rather than finding either clear immunity or no immunity for alleged criminal conduct, this new standard will unquestionably lead to protracted hearings and further appeals as the lower courts have to now grapple with the question of which allegations in the indictment constitute official acts.”

Before Monday’s session began, a crowd gathered in front of the Supreme Court. While some people carried banners and chanted, others observed quietly from the sidewalk. Among them were John Stiles, 43, and his 12-year-old daughter, Sadie.

Sadie excitedly snapped pictures of the Supreme Court building, standing on her tiptoes and reaching her arms up to try to get a picture of the building unobstructed by protesters. “Let me teach you something,” her dad said. “The people are part of the scene.”

While the court did not rule on the merits of the social media cases, the justices were particularly critical of the 5th Circuit’s rationale for upholding Texas’s law barring companies from removing posts based on users’ political leanings. The lower court’s conclusions “rest on a serious misunderstanding of First Amendment precedent and principle,” the majority wrote in the NetChoice cases.

While saying some of the election interference indictment against Donald Trump might survive Monday’s ruling on presidential immunity, the conservative Supreme Court was emphatic that the former president could not be prosecuted over any conversations with Justice Department leaders.

Reactions to the Supreme Court ruling that a president has “absolute” immunity for official acts fell along deeply divided partisan lines.

Some Democrats who strongly disagreed with the ruling said the Supreme Court, essentially, is not a legitimate arbiter of the law. Republicans — including those who voted against certifying the 2020 election results — celebrated the ruling as a legal and moral victory.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on X that it “is a sad day for America” and “our democracy,” after the Supreme Court decision that a president has “absolute” immunity for official acts.

He added: “Treason or incitement of an insurrection should not be considered a core constitutional power afforded to a president.”

In the NetChoice cases, a majority of the court wrote that the Constitution may treat social media regulations differently depending on what activities by companies they are targeting.

“Curating a feed and transmitting direct messages … involve different levels of editorial choice,” and so “could well fall on different sides of the constitutional line,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writes in the immunity case, “If the President claims authority to act but in fact exercises mere ‘individual will’ and ‘authority without law,’ the courts may say so.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissent in the immunity case that while the majority declared Donald Trump’s conduct involving the Justice Department and the vice president to be official conduct, “it refuses to designate any course of conduct alleged in the indictment as private, despite concessions from Trump’s counsel.” That seems critical to whether and when the former president will go to trial in D.C.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that “the court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing Donald Trump’s D.C. election obstruction case, now must parse which actions taken by the then-president were official actions or unofficial conduct, and the Supreme Court says she “may not inquire into the President’s motives.”

NetChoice, which represents Meta and Google and challenged the constitutionality of the Texas and Florida social media laws, celebrated the decision as “a victory for First Amendment rights online.”

“NetChoice will continue to vigorously defend Americans’ rights to free expression online,” Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said in a statement.

Much of the indictment in D.C. of four felony counts against Donald Trump focuses on his attempts to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the 2020 election results. As vice president, Pence was also president of the Senate and oversaw the counting of votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the debate over Texas and Florida laws that attempt to restrict online content moderation, much of the focus was on how the laws would apply to users’ public posts on major social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. But in vacating a pair of lower court rulings on the cases Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that they had failed to properly consider the broad range of other ways the laws could impact online speech.

The Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed a brief in the NetChoice litigation, called the Supreme Court’s decision in the social media cases “careful and considered.”

“It properly recognizes that platforms are ‘editors’ under the First Amendment, but it also dismisses, for good reasons, the argument that regulation in this sphere is categorically unconstitutional,” Jameel Jaffer, the institute’s executive director, said in a statement.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the majority for ruling that presidents have absolute immunity for all official acts. She said that absolute immunity would apply to “any purpose, even the most corrupt.”

“That is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless,” she wrote. “Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force.”

Donald Trump celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling on his immunity Monday, writing on Truth Social that it was a “BIG WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY. PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!”

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, one of the tech groups that challenged the Texas and Florida social media laws that the court ruled on Monday, said the decision “reaffirms” that the First Amendment prevents the government from tilting online speech.

“We look forward to continuing our fight for the First Amendment and against the Florida and Texas social media laws,” said Matthew Schruers, CCIA president and CEO.

The justices unanimously agreed to send the social media cases back to the lower courts, but the complex cases elicited five separate opinions.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Elena Kagan in the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined it in part.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is reading her dissent from the bench on behalf of Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayor writes that the majority’s grant of immunity “reshapes the institution of the presidency” and “makes a mockery of the principle” that “no man is above the law.”

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts, but that may not shield all his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. A judge will now decide what he can be prosecuted for, subject to further appeals, making a full trial unlikely before the November rematch with President Biden.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said a president “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” But, Roberts added, the president “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law.”

A key quote from the immunity ruling: “Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”

Read the Supreme Court’s opinion on Donald Trump’s immunity claim here.

Former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions taken while in the White House, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, but they do not have immunity for unofficial acts.

The 6-3 ruling along ideological lines probably means that Donald Trump’s federal trial could proceed in D.C., but only after an additional delay.

Justice Elena Kagan writes in the ruling on the social media cases that “there is much work to do” as the court remands the cases to the lower courts. “But that work must be done consistent with the First Amendment, which does not go on leave when social media are involved.”

The court has ruled on presidential immunity. “A former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” the ruling says. “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

The court has issued its ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody V. NetChoice, blocking both the Florida and Texas social media laws while litigation continues in lower courts. Here is the ruling.

Anti-Trump demonstrators rally outside the Supreme Court on Monday as justices are set to rule on former president Donald Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

People who came to watch the proceedings are escorted past a security gate at the Supreme Court.

ATLANTA — The Supreme Court’s decision on Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution could have a sweeping impact on the Georgia election interference case, where the former president and several allies are accused of criminally conspiring to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is reading from her dissent in the Corner Post case, which was decided 6-3, with justices split along ideological lines and the court’s conservatives in the majority.

The two big remaining decisions are still to come.

“Sorry, this is not the case you’re waiting to hear,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett jokes before announcing the first case.

The first of three final rulings to be released this morning is about the statute of limitations to challenge fees that retailers can be charged by banks for debit card transactions. The case is Corner Post v. Federal Reserve.

As expected, there are two boxes of opinions this morning holding the final three decisions of the term.

The sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court was largely quiet at 9 a.m. Eastern time on Monday. Only the swarming camera crews offered a clue that the court would be releasing its final decisions of the term, including one on Donald Trump’s immunity claims.

The court has grappled with how to apply the First Amendment to social media in a number of cases this term. Last week, it rejected a Republican-led effort to largely bar federal officials from pressuring social media companies to remove posts. In March, the court set ground rules for when public officials can block critical voices on social media.

When the justices chose to hear Donald Trump’s immunity case — rather than let stand a unanimous appeals court decision that would have greenlighted Trump’s trial in federal court in D.C. — they said they would look only at whether former presidents are shielded from prosecution for actions taken as part of their official duties.

The court on Monday is expected to decide a pair of cases that will shape whether state governments or the tech industry has the power to curate content on social media. The cases carry broad implications for how the First Amendment is applied in the digital age.

During oral arguments in April over Donald Trump’s immunity claims, one name came up over and over: Richard M. Nixon.

When Donald Trump was indicted on federal election interference charges in D.C. last summer — the case involved in today’s immunity ruling — prosecutors described six unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators who allegedly plotted with him to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Based on details in the indictment, The Washington Post was able to identify five of the six. You can read about them here.

Before oral argument in Donald Trump’s immunity case this spring at the Supreme Court, his legal team and federal prosecutors contemplated in their filings the possibility of additional legal wrangling once the justices ruled.

Federal prosecutors charged former president Donald Trump with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is accused of spreading claims about voter fraud that he knew to be false, then pressuring local, state and federal officials to block Joe Biden’s victory. The Supreme Court will rule on whether he is immune from prosecution on those charges.

At oral arguments, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made it clear that he did not appreciate the way the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit handled the question of presidential immunity.

The Supreme Court saved an unusually large number of high-profile cases for the final days of its term — about half of the cases The Washington Post has been tracking this term were still awaiting rulings a week ago.

In the span of three days, the court issued nine rulings, and many of them were blockbusters.

When it heard the case in late April, the Supreme Court appeared ready to reject Donald Trump’s sweeping claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election — but potentially in a way that would add significant further delays to his stalled federal trial in the nation’s capital.

Here is the 45-page, four-count indictment that was brought against Donald Trump in D.C. federal court last summer. This is the case at stake in Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

The Washington Post has been tracking almost 20 of the biggest cases to go before the Supreme Court this term. Here’s what you need to know about the more significant decisions so far, in cases dealing with abortion, gun rights, the power of federal agencies, Jan. 6 rioters and more.