Just before the Supreme Court handed down its final crush of opinions at the end of its last term in June, Chief Justice John Roberts strolled onto a stage in Washington and extolled the virtues of taking it easy.
He told the audience that the high court’s summer break wasn’t just a vacation for the justices – it also gave them time to cool off from the clashes that arose in the term’s final weeks, so they could return in the fall ready to face new controversies, without the old baggage.
“That break,” the chief justice said at the time, “is critical to maintaining a level balance.”
The nine justices will retake their seats behind their mahogany bench on Monday to start a momentous new term after a summer that was anything but peaceful. Over the past three months, the court was repeatedly forced to hammer through major emergency cases involving President Donald Trump – often with sharply written dissents that looked more like rancor and resentment than rest and relaxation.
Now the court is embarking on a new term that will thrust the justices into even more high-stakes political confrontations with Trump, wrenching culture war disputes over transgender youth and a case that has threatened a key provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
As the justices toil over the next nine months on their march toward June, they will be working through an extraordinary tension that has developed with some lower court judges. Polling, meanwhile, indicates that the American public is deeply divided about their work.
A recent Gallup poll showed that 79% of Republicans approve of the Supreme Court, compared with only 14% of Democrats.
Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law Center, warned this month that if the 6-3 ideological splits that were so prevalent over the summer in emergency cases continue into the major merits appeals this year, “we are in for one of the most polarizing terms yet.”
Given the legal and political whirlwind that has surrounded Trump’s second administration, it was no surprise that the Supreme Court wrapped up its last term in June with an important decision that touched on his power.
A 6-3 majority wiped out one path lower courts have used for years to temporarily block presidents’ policies – an opinion that put on display the end-of-term conflicts that can arise on the court.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the three-justice liberal wing, used her dissent to accuse the conservative majority of fostering a “culture of disdain for lower courts” and “enabling our collective demise.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative author of that majority opinion, responded by calling Jackson out by name, accusing her of embracing a “startling line of attack” that she said was not tethered “to any doctrine whatsoever.”
With the back-and-forth still fresh, the court now turns to three major cases involving the president.
Next month it will hear arguments over a challenge to the president’s authority to impose sweeping global tariffs.
That appeal followed a divided decision over the summer from a federal appeals court in Washington that found Trump overstepped his authority by relying on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose many of those duties. The power to impose taxes, including tariffs, is “a core congressional power” that the Constitution left to the legislative branch, the appeals court ruled.
Later this year and early next, the court will move on to arguments in a pair of cases challenging the president’s firing of leaders at independent government agencies – including the powerful Federal Reserve.
Trump fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook in late August after a member of his administration alleged she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence. Cook has called those charges “manufactured” and framed them as a pretext for Trump to assert control over an entity he long scorned.
In December, the court will also hear the case of a former member of the Federal Trade Commission Trump fired in March. That appeal, in particular, tees up an opportunity for the court to overturn a Franklin D. Roosevelt-era precedent that permitted Congress to protect independent agencies from the whims of the White House.
There have been signs for years that the conservative majority is ready to take that step.
Barrett, who spent much of September crisscrossing the country to promote a new book, was repeatedly asked in public events about her dust-up with Jackson. And she repeatedly gave the same answer: Her attack was focused on the junior justice’s ideas, not her as a person.
For her part, Jackson hasn’t let up on criticizing the court.
“We once again eschew restraint,” she wrote in a solo dissent Friday, blasting the majority for allowing Trump to end temporary deportation protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelans. “We once again … allow this administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”
In some ways, the term that kicks off Monday will feel familiar to the one that ended in June – similar cases, but with the potential for far greater reach. That is particularly true on the issue of transgender rights. In June, a 6-3 conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law that banned gender-affirming care for trans minors, a significant blow to the LGBTQ community.
The court will dive right back into the sexuality and gender of minors just one day after reconvening. The court will hear arguments Tuesday in a challenge to a Colorado law banning “conversion therapy,” the discredited practice that purports to “convert” gay or transgender people. That law is being challenged by a licensed counselor in the state who says the restrictions violate the First Amendment’s speech protections.
Roughly 25 states have enacted similar bans on licensed mental health professionals attempting to “convert” gay people.
Patrick Jaicomo, a senior attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice, noted that the Supreme Court had several cases before it that dealt with the issue of professional speech but with less controversial facts. Instead of taking one of those, the court selected the transgender case.
“I do think that there are instances where the court unnecessarily wades into culture war issues when it could address these issues in a way that is much more toned down,” Jaicomo said.
Early next year, the court will turn to the question of whether states may ban transgender students from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. The justices have agreed to review two cases challenging state trans sports bans, including one from a rising sixth grader at the time one of the bans was enacted.
Lower courts have temporarily allowed that student, a transgender girl, to play on girls’ sports teams.
And in November, the court will hear arguments – for the second time – about Louisiana’s congressional redistricting. On the final day of its last term, the court took the rare step of punting the case so it could further review a claim of racial gerrymandering. Over the summer, the court reframed the question in the case – expanding the scope of the appeal in a way that indicates some justices are at least thinking about wiping out legal protections for minority voters.
“Stakes are high,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, which represents a group of Black voters in the case. Without the provision in place for redistricting, she said, “there will be no check – or very few checks – on undoing all that progress that has been made since 1965.”
Even as the court turns to its regular docket this month – in which it hears oral arguments and hands down major opinions – it will continue to simultaneously juggle a flood of emergency applications on a short fuse, many of them dealing with the Trump administration.
Hours after it finishes its first set of arguments Monday, the court will receive briefing in Trump’s emergency request to allow the State Department to limit passport sex markers for transgender and nonbinary individuals. It may decide what to do with that policy in the short term as soon as this week.
The Trump administration has filed eight emergency appeals at the high court since the justices stepped down from the bench in late June. The justices have backed Trump in six of those and they deferred another to hear arguments. One – dealing with the passports – is still pending. Since Trump returned to power, the administration has won 86% of the emergency cases it has filed. President Joe Biden, by contrast, won about half of his emergency appeals.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote in August when the court allowed the Trump administration to halt about $800 million in research grants. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
Many of the cases have prompted scathing opinions, like Jackson’s in the research case, that underscore that the justices, even when they leave Washington for the summer, can no longer escape the heat.
Justice Elena Kagan, a member of the court’s liberal wing, lamented the change at an event last summer – a year before the number of cases jumped exponentially.
“Our summers used to be actually summers,” Kagan told a group of judges and lawyers meeting in California. “The relentless bringing of these emergency petitions, makes that not the case anymore.”
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