Your Handy Guide To The Biggest Supreme Court Cases Left In The Term
The Supreme Court has just two weeks to release more than 20 decisions, many of which will have major national consequences.
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We’re more than halfway through June, and the Supreme Court has hardly made a dent in the release of major opinions from this blockbuster term.
Each year, the Supreme Court’s term begins on the first Monday in October and ends with a recess starting at the end of June or beginning of July. With this self-imposed deadline fast approaching, the Court has just 2 weeks left to release decisions in the remaining 23 cases out of the 61 total cases they heard this term.
We should expect a firehose of decisions coming this week and next, with the most newsworthy cases of the term among them. And perhaps that’s by design from a court with a distinct PR problem.
As law professor and author Steve Vladek told Slate back in May:
“We’re going to get slammed the last couple of weeks of June with major, controversial decisions. And that’s going to pose an especially difficult challenge to the Supreme Court press corps, who has to try to explain all of this to everybody in a way that’s going to keep their attention.”
In today’s piece I’ll highlight several of the major cases yet to be decided to help ensure these extremely consequential decisions don’t fall through the cracks.
In the coming weeks, as the remainder of SCOTUS decisions roll in, we should have the answers to some big questions: Can domestic abusers be banned from purchasing and owning guns? Can red states refuse emergency medical care in contravention of federal law if that care involves performing an abortion? And does Donald Trump have total immunity for any actions he took as president?
January 6th
By far the most eagerly anticipated Supreme Court decision of the term is the one the Justices heard last: Trump v U.S., which is described by ScotusBlog as:
Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.
This case relates to Donald Trump’s appeal of a February 6 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which thoroughly rejected Donald Trump’s claims to immunity in the four-count criminal indictment brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the January 6 case.
The AP describes the charges against Trump as
working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.
Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity” is so objectively absurd—even the conservative pro-Trump Court seemed skeptical of the former president’s arguments—that Trump’s lawsuit was widely viewed as nothing more than a delay tactic.
And, sure enough, by even accepting the case at all, by staying the lower court’s ruling and thus pausing Trump’s trial, by pushing the case to the very last day of oral arguments on April 25, and now by pushing the decision to the very end of the term, the conservative majority, which, lest we forget, is largely of Trump’s own making, has granted Trump a sort of de facto immunity, ensuring there will be no trial prior to the election.
So, from Trump’s perspective, it’s “mission accomplished” even before a ruling is announced. But assuming the Court finds against Trump on the immunity claim, questions remain as to whether the trial will be able to resume immediately or whether the Court will order Judge Chutkan to hold hearings to decide which presidential duties are immune from criminal prosecution and which are not. Judge Chutkan’s trial, while delayed, is still hugely consequential. After all, if and when Donald Trump loses the November election, there is no reason to think the trial wouldn’t continue apace.
There is one complicating factor, however, in the form of another outstanding case the Court has yet to rule on this term: Fischer v. U.S. in which Joseph Fischer, a former Pennsylvania police officer who was charged along with Trump and over 300 other defendants in the January 6 case, is challenging the validity of the charge of “obstructing a federal proceeding” that Jack Smith brought against them.
In its write-up of the case’s oral arguments, SCOTUSblog concluded that the Justices were “divided over Jan. 6 participant’s call to throw out obstruction charge” and that the case “could affect charges against more than 300 other Jan. 6 defendants” as well as “the proceedings in the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump.”
Abortion
In its unanimous decision last week to reject the challenge by a group of doctors to the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone, a safe and effective drug used in most medical abortions in the U.S., the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case but rather threw out the challenge based on the plaintiffs’ lack of standing (finding that the plaintiffs in the case were unable to demonstrate any harm brought to them by the FDA’s Mifepristone approval.)
Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in FDA v. Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine was widely seen as leaving the door open to overturning the FDA’s approval of the drug if the right case—i.e., the right group of plaintiffs—were brought in front of this virulently anti-choice SCOTUS majority.
But the case was not the only abortion case the Court heard this term, with Moyle v. U.S. still yet to be decided.
At issue there is whether Idaho’s near total abortion ban can override the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal statute on the books since 1986 designed to “ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.”
The ACLU starkly laid out the stakes of this upcoming decision:
Every administration from President Reagan to President Biden has recognized that EMTALA requires emergency abortion care. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade did not diminish these longstanding federal protections, which override state laws that would prohibit such care, but now, extreme politicians are doing everything in their power to prevent someone experiencing emergency pregnancy complications from getting care in emergency rooms.
If the Supreme Court were to side with Idaho in this case, as SCOTUSblog put it:
The court’s ruling could affect health care in emergency rooms in the 22 states that have imposed restrictions on abortions, particularly in the six states that – like Idaho – lack exemptions to the general ban to protect the health of the mother.
Guns
Last week, in a remarkably radical decision, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to overturn a Trump era ban on bump stocks, devices that gun safety advocates argue convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns.
In the wake of the horrific 2017 Las Vegas shooting, during which a gunman utilized a bump stock to murder 58 people and injure over 400 more at the Rte. 91 Music Festival, then-President Trump was widely praised for calling for a ban on the devices. The following year, his Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) banned the devices, a decision that has now been overturned by Trump’s own packed Court and that his campaign is now defending.
While one might assume the Justices’ opposition to the ban was on Second Amendment grounds, it actually found that the ATF, as a federal agency within the Department of Justice, overstepped its authority in instituting the ban. By this logic, a Congressional ban could potentially even withstand this Supreme Court’s scrutiny, which is why Senator Chuck Schumer is introducing a new bump stock ban in the U.S. Senate this week.
There is, however, one Second Amendment case still to be decided this term: U.S. v. Rahimi, which SCOTUSblog describes as a dispute over
Whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violates the Second Amendment on its face.
After SCOTUS expanded gun rights in its 2022 Bruen case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that federal law keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers was unconstitutional, violating the Second Amendment’s right to “keep and bear arms.”
That decision has now been appealed to the Supreme Court, where according to Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog, justices appear ready to overturn the lower court finding and “uphold a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun.”
If this Court does rule in favor of the current restrictions on gun ownership by domestic abusers, that would be a rare instance of this majority actually siding with the majority of Americans, particularly when it comes to firearm regulation.
As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explains in this video laying out the Rahimi case, 95% of Americans believe such violent abusers should be prohibited from owning guns.
Let’s hope the Court does the right thing.
The Administrative State
As we saw with the bump stock case, this Supreme Court is fond of imposing its own will over the expertise of federal agencies, what Trump and the right derisively refer to as the “deep state” or the “administrative state.”
Now the Court may be poised to hugely undercut the power of all federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes when it finally rules on Relentless v. Department of Commerce in the coming weeks.
In a 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court established the Chevron Doctrine, which basically said that “courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute.”
Now, as Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog put it after oral arguments back in January, “a majority of the justices seemed ready to jettison the doctrine or at the very least significantly limit it.”
The stakes of this case could be quite wide-reaching.
The court’s ruling could have ripple effects across the federal government, where agencies frequently use highly trained experts to interpret and implement federal laws. Although the doctrine was relatively noncontroversial when it was first introduced in 1984, in recent years conservatives – including some members of the Supreme Court – have called for it to be overruled.
In the coming weeks, in Ohio v. EPA, the Court could very well follow its own advice and overturn the EPA’s “good neighbor plan” and strip the agency’s power to regulate power plant emissions.
And in Securities And Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, it could very well “strip the SEC of a major tool in fighting securities fraud.”
Check out more about what’s at stake if the Court overturns Chevron from
on Instagram:While the glut of major cases left to the end of the term would seem to indicate that the Court is taking on more cases, in fact, the opposite is true. While they are taking more major cases, they are granting fewer overall.
As Steve Vladek, author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, told Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on Slate’s Amicus podcast last month, there are at least two reasons for this.
One is that the Court has an agenda to completely remake the administrative state in this country. That involves hearing complicated cases that take up a lot of time, not to mention sparking a back-and-forth of concurring and dissenting opinions among the justices.
There is something else going on, though. The Supreme Court is having its hand forced by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is issuing radical garbage rulings that the Supreme Court keeps having to overturn. Such was the case when the Court recently upheld the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding, upheld the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone, and, one suspects it will soon uphold the statute that prevents domestic abusers from getting their hands on firearms. All three of those decisions originated in the Fifth Circuit.
One might be tempted to see these rulings as signs of a more moderate Court. We should not be fooled. Just because this SCOTUS overturned them this time doesn’t mean they will next time, just as they rejected abortion ban cases until they finally settled on the Dobbs decision as the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade. These examples simply show how radical the Fifth Circuit is, and they serve as a preview of the priorities of the conservative movement in this country—priorities that by all accounts this radical Supreme Court majority shares.
"...this Supreme Court is fond of imposing its own will over the expertise of federal agencies". This is definitely a Republican stance to ignore expertise, whether it's scientific, medical, firearms, etc. Normally, you'd expect judges and justices to admit when something is outside their wheelhouse and to evaluate and rely on experts. But, that simple act relies on humility and wisdom, things that this Court is lacking. This Court has also ruled based on a made-up scenario (the wedding website case) and false facts (the coach praying on the field) demonstrating that the separation of church and state doesn't exist when the conservative justices don't like the result. It's going to be very tense couple of weeks.
Maybe there needs to be submission limits per Circuit because the 5th Circuit has proven to be hogging the Courts time with conservative garbage and hypothetical BS cases, they need a frivolous filing penalty. This piece from 2019 below is well worth your time, it foretold much of the MO that we've seen the past 5yrs, all a Con man shell game.
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-president-is-not-a-king/