CNN —
The Supreme Court returns to the bench Monday with cases on guns, pornography and transgender health care, as justices brace for a number of last-minute races and a new presidential administration that could push the court deeper into politics. There is.
Of the 40 appeals the high court has agreed to so far, only a handful involve the kind of intense political controversy that has dominated the caseload in recent years. While it may be possible for the justices’ ranks to remain calm for now, there are signs that the relative calm may not last long.
The contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is now 6-3, with polls showing trust in the court near record lows. conservative majority could be thrown into political turmoil. The new president may reorganize cases that have already been granted. And President Trump is almost certain to return to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks to clarify the blanket immunity the court granted him in July.
All of this will be in mind as the nine justices take their seats Monday for the first oral arguments of their new term, which runs through next summer.
“As it stands, it feels like the court is trying to leave no spark in case the election turns into a hot mess,” Carter Phillips, a veteran Supreme Court litigator, told CNN earlier this week. told. “The number of cases is not very high, and there are very few high-profile cases.”
The court is scheduled to hear arguments in one of the biggest disputes on Tuesday. Advocacy groups and manufacturers are challenging the Biden administration’s regulation of “ghost guns,” communications kits that allow people to make untraceable weapons at home.
Police say the gun was present at the crime scene, but while important, the case does not involve the Second Amendment. Instead, the lawsuit challenges whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives overstepped its authority when it decided to count the kits as regulated firearms in 2022.
A Louisiana-based appeals court ruled last year that the ATF overstepped its authority, and the Biden administration appealed in February.
The court is scheduled to hear arguments later this year or early next year in the adult entertainment industry’s First Amendment lawsuit challenging a Texas law requiring age verification on pornographic websites.
On Friday, the court added 13 more cases to its lineup, but remained silent about other major pending cases dealing with religion and abortion. The justices agreed to decide whether federal law prevents Mexico from suing gun dealers for facilitating the distribution of firearms to drug cartels. And they filed a lawsuit from a straight woman who claimed she was discriminated against at work by her gay boss.
This relatively unassuming term comes as the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, expanded Second Amendment rights, ended affirmative action in college admissions, and this year This is in contrast to previous years, when President Trump was initially granted broad impunity.
This rapid shift to the right appears to be hitting hard with the drumbeat of the ethics debate. A poll released Wednesday by the Annenberg Center for Public Policy found that 56% of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the justices endured another embarrassing leak this summer when the New York Times reported an internal memo showing how Chief Justice John Roberts and some of his colleagues thought about President Trump’s immunity claims. Ta.
This unusual breach occurred months after a landmark opinion on abortion was prematurely posted on the court’s website and two years after the surprising release of a draft opinion reversing Roe’s opinion.
“It feels like something is broken,” Lisa Blatt, who regularly argues before judges, said of the leak at a recent Federalist Society event.
Given these pressures, Roberts and his colleagues will likely want to avoid getting drawn into a chaotic campaign this year.
Twenty-four years ago, another court, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, issued a hastily crafted 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively deciding former President George W. Bush’s presidential election.
The late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was instrumental in the decision, later regretted the court’s involvement.
“This court needs to understand that its institutional legitimacy is being called into question,” ACLU national legal director David Cole said during a recent panel discussion sponsored by Georgetown Law. “Getting caught up in a close election and voting partisan to decide who is president would be a disaster.”
Republican and Democratic lawyers have already filed a flurry of lawsuits ahead of the election, some of which could be used to challenge the election results in November. But whatever major election campaign reaches the high court next month, it could happen at breakneck speed and without much warning.
Kanon Shanmugam, a lawyer who has defended dozens of cases in high court, told CNN: “It’s impossible to predict how much election litigation will become and what it will look like.” he said. “At this point in 2000, no one expected Bush v. Gore to happen.”
Even after the next president takes office, there will likely be a slew of new high-profile legal disputes in federal courts.
New administrations often seek to make quick and dramatic policy changes through executive actions that can lead to swift appeals. Consider, for example, President Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries, which he repeatedly visited the Supreme Court.
A change in presidential administration could also affect cases already pending in the high court. One of the court’s most-watched cases this session concerns the politically sensitive issue of gender-affirming care, which could be especially vulnerable if Trump wins the election. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the Biden administration’s challenge to Tennessee’s transgender care ban. The ban prohibits hormone therapy and puberty-blocking drugs for minors and imposes civil penalties on doctors who violate the ban.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, nearly half of U.S. states have laws banning transgender care for minors.
The case also involves private parties, but no arguments have yet been scheduled and an appeal could be complicated by the new Justice Department’s position on transgender issues.
The Supreme Court has already intervened in next month’s election in several emergency cases, two of which involve third-party candidates seeking to remain on state presidential ballots.
In a more significant ruling in August, the court blocked some of Arizona’s citizenship proof requirements for voters, but the requirement that would-be voters document citizenship before registering to vote on state forms remains in place. I put it on hold.
Appearing on CBS News in August, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson smiled when asked if he was ready for elections to become an issue before the Supreme Court.
“I’m as prepared as anyone can be,” she said.
This heading has been updated.
