Supreme Court justices will return to the bench on Monday to start their new term. But they haven’t completely been on vacation since handing down rulings at the end of June in a term that, on the whole, was a win for President Donald Trump and his party.
Even though they were out of the Washington courtroom in the summer months, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have settled several important emergency disputes ahead of the November midterm elections. In the process, they dealt some significant losses to the Trump administration and Republicans, who are trying to maintain congressional control.
Two of the latest rulings did well to sum up the high court’s approach, which has boiled down to backing the GOP while rejecting some of its most extreme requests.
‘Electoral chaos’
In one of the latest emergency cases, decided last week, the majority approved the government’s use of a citizenship verification database, over dissent from Democratic-appointed justices who warned that the court was needlessly putting lawful voters at risk.
In another decision that day, the justices unanimously smacked down — for a third time — Missouri officials’ bid to use a newly gerrymandered map for the midterms after the state’s top court said they couldn’t do so.
Allowing that new map while the election was already underway “would usher in electoral chaos,” the justices wrote in a joint opinion for the court, effectively blocking Republicans from gaining another congressional seat in the Trump-backed mid-decade redistricting push.
Of course, the Roberts Court has helped the GOP in the midterms and beyond with its April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which further weakened the Voting Rights Act. That the Missouri ruling came from the same court underscores the radical nature of that state’s officials and the Republican-appointed lower court judges who would have let them press their partisan advantage had the justices not intervened.
Justices say no to postal rule for midterms
The majority’s refusal to help Missouri Republicans followed its rejection earlier this month of Trump’s desired mail-ballot restrictions for the midterms, over dissent from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. The president responded by writing on social media that the court’s “inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.”
Apparently referring to his three appointees who were in the majority against him in the mail-ballot case — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — Trump lamented that “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”
That didn’t keep Kavanaugh or Barrett (or Roberts) off the guest list for Trump’s state dinner honoring Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week.
Ballroom split
Roberts was the lone Republican appointee who dissented from last month’s ruling backing one of the president’s top priorities: his White House ballroom construction.
The chief justice, who has led the majority in other expansions of presidential power over dissent from the Democratic appointees, notably led the ballroom dissent on behalf of himself and those same Democratic appointees. He quoted Winston Churchill for the proposition that we “shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
“All the more reason,” he wrote, “to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”
GOP win on campaign ad rates
The only dissenter was former President Joe Biden’s lone high court appointee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, when the court granted Republicans emergency relief this month on broadcast campaign advertisement rates in the run-up to elections.
The national GOP senatorial and congressional committees had launched an urgent bid to halt an appellate ruling that was poised to benefit Democrats ahead of the midterms. The justices obliged, nearly unanimouslyy so, reasoning that the appeals court lacked jurisdiction to hear the Democrats’ challenge.
Deportations, gender care in prison
Emergency applications and orders will continue as the justices return to the bench, including any further litigation that arises regarding the midterms.
On Tuesday, the court granted the latest urgent relief for the administration, over dissent from the Democratic appointees, on the subject of deporting immigrants to countries they aren’t from.
One of the next cases the justices could act on is yet another application from the administration to enforce one of its policies that have been blocked in the lower courts, this time in its bid to ban medical care for transgender inmates. The justices have previously ruled against transgender people in a series of cases.
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