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In an unsigned order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court denied the Trump administration’s request for permission to implement what is, even by the Trump administration’s standards, a remarkably barbaric element of its anti-trans agenda: a blanket denial of gender-affirming healthcare to transgender people in federal prison for the first time in three decades. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted their dissent, because for them, nothing is more important than their solemn duty to give their favorite president whatever he wants.
Shortly after taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping anti-trans executive order aimed at purging the government of “gender ideology.” This case, Trump v. Kingdom, is a legal challenge to guidance issued by the Bureau of Prisons that would effectuate the part of Trump’s order forbidding the use of federal funds for “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Needless to say, losing access to care was devastating for incarcerated transgender people, who in court filings described experiencing anxiety, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation as a result of their suddenly untreated gender dysphoria. The policy of providing these inmates with the medical care they need has been in place since the first Bush administration.
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Fortunately for anyone who believes that the state should not have the power to torture people in its custody, lower-court judges have repeatedly blocked the new guidance from taking effect. By electing to leave these orders in place, the Supreme Court indicated that, although it has been willing to sympathize with the anti-trans movement in many other contexts, sanctioning the denial of lifesaving care to incarcerated people is, at least for now, a proverbial bridge too far. By putting their disagreement on the record, Thomas and Alito are making clear that they are as eager as ever to drag the court across it.
The justices do not always make their votes public in shadow docket cases, which means it is possible that one or two more justices sided with Trump here and simply chose not to say so. But through their conduct in Kingdom and other cases like it, Thomas and Alito continue to distinguish themselves as the court’s two most strident reactionaries, reflexively endorsing whatever harebrained legal theories conservative lawyers offer in service of their shared policy agenda. Whenever the other conservative justices decide that a given argument is too extreme or too ambitious, these two are right there to explain why the argument is actually correct, and to encourage activists to try again soon.
Thomas and Alito have long been on the right flank of the court’s right flank: consistent opponents of abortion rights, voting rights, gun safety, and so on, and outspoken proponents of incarceration, punishment, religious supremacy, and the like. During the court’s most recent term, they voted together in 94 percent of cases on the merits docket. In their occasional speeches and public appearances, they come off as pretty generic Republican men of a certain age, airing all the usual grievances about the perils of cancel culture, the evils of progressivism, and anyone who would have the temerity to question their integrity in public.
What distinguishes Thomas and Alito from the other conservatives, though, is how frequently they end up castigating their more junior colleagues for their timidity. In April 2025, for example, when the court blocked the Trump administration from deporting hundreds of people without notice to a torture prison in a country that wasn’t even home, Alito, joined by Thomas, wrote a dissent blasting the court for “hastily and prematurely” granting “legally questionable” relief “literally in the middle of the night.” In May 2026, they were the only justices who dissented from the court’s stay of a lower-court order that would have severely limited the availability of abortion medication. In his opinion, Alito described this result as a “remarkable” enabling of a “scheme to undermine” the court’s decision in Dobbs—essentially scolding the conservatives for allowing states to restrict abortion but then being too chickenshit to give those restrictions teeth.
The emerging Alito-and-Thomas jurisprudence reflects not just a substantive alignment with Trump and the Republican Party, but a worldview shaped by themes, tropes, and conspiracy theories that dominate the conservative media ecosystem. The pair has written dissents downplaying police violence against Black people, for example, and emphasizing the lurid details of crimes to suggest that people convicted of them should have fewer legal rights. In May, when Florida Republicans tried to file a stunt lawsuit challenging California’s policies for issuing commercial driver’s licenses to people without legal status, Thomas and Alito argued that the court needed to hear the case because if Florida were a sovereign nation (heaven help us all), it might try to resolve the dispute with armed force. Dissenting in a criminal law case earlier this year, they mourned the court’s willingness to “intervene at the request of a convicted murderer” while “routinely” withholding relief from “law-abiding Americans” in other, unrelated cases that, in Thomas and Alito’s view, the court should have agreed to hear.
Finally, Thomas and Alito have been outspoken dissenters whenever the court chooses not to join the culture-war fray with the zeal that the two of them would prefer. When the court passed on the case of a student disciplined for wearing a transphobic T-shirt to school, for example, they warned that the court was enabling “censorship.” When it passed on a legal challenge to a race-neutral school admissions policy, they described the court’s “willingness to swallow” the lower-court decision as “hard to understand.” When it declined to rule on school policies that protect transgender students, they criticized the court for ducking a question of “great and growing national importance.” And when it declined to decide whether parents have a “fundamental” legal right to be involved in a child’s decision to seek abortion care, Thomas and Alito wrote separately to make clear that the result was not a “rejection of the argument.”
Perhaps the cleanest illustration of Thomas and Alito’s loyalties came just last month, when the court issued an unsigned order preventing Trump from imposing onerous restrictions on mail voting before the 2026 midterm elections. In dissent, Thomas and Alito asserted that the proposed rules were necessary to ferret out “election fraud,” a conspiracy theory of which Alito is alarmingly fond. They also argued that the decision would cause Trump “irreparable harm” because it dealt a “serious setback to the Executive’s goals.” For Thomas and Alito, the legal interests of millions of people who want to participate in democracy next month were apparently not a factor worth meaningfully considering.
For all that this court’s six-justice conservative supermajority has accomplished in recent years, it is still not enough for Alito and Thomas. At 76 and 78, respectively, neither man retired before the midterms, a choice that would have preserved the power of Trump and this Republican-controlled Senate to nominate and confirm their successor(s). What this suggests is that these justices do not view cases like Dobbs as the capstone to their careers. They view themselves as stewards of the movement that led to Dobbs, and are eager to lay the groundwork for the next generation of ideologues working to use the legal system to implement their policy preferences.
Even when they lose, what Thomas and Alito are doing in cases like Kingdom is applying constant rightward pressure to the law, encouraging activists to keep filing new cases, workshopping new legal theories, and offering new arguments. As the old saying goes, five votes can do anything at the Supreme Court. When the conservative legal movement knows it has two in the bag, three more never feels like too much of an ask.