By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court launches its new nine-month term on Monday, with several major cases already scheduled – on guns, transgender rights, online pornography and more – and with the potential for legal challenges suits that could emerge from the November 5 presidential election.
The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority continues to move US law to the right on a range of issues, is coming off another blockbuster term capped by the controversial July 1 ruling granting Donald Trump broad immunity against criminal charges for many actions taken during his presidency.
The judges return from their summer recess and are under intense scrutiny by many politicians and the public, not only because of their legal rulings, but also because of simmering ethical scandals, unresolved leaks of confidential information and the public expression of mutual disagreements.
“Something does feel broken,” Lisa Blatt, a lawyer who regularly argues before the court, said at an event in Washington on Tuesday. “Some of them up there — during oral arguments when I see them — just seem visibly frustrated.”
The first major case in court comes Tuesday, when arguments are heard over largely untraceable, home-built firearms called “ghost guns.” President Joe Biden’s administration appealed a lower court’s decision that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority by issuing a 2022 regulation intended to ban these weapons, which the law enforcement authorities across the country are regularly used in crimes.
The justices will hear, among other things, the government’s challenge to a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, which is upheld by a lower court.
There are also arguments in the adult entertainment industry’s appeal of a Republican-backed law in Texas that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users in an effort to limit access to minors. Arguments are also needed in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s defense of its denial of applications from two companies to sell flavored vape products that it has determined pose health risks to young consumers.
The dates of oral arguments in these three cases have not yet been announced.
IN-DEPTH DIVISIONS
The ruling on Trump’s immunity appeared to deepen divisions within the court, reflecting ideological fault lines in a divided United States.
“I was concerned about a system that seemed to grant immunity to one individual under one set of circumstances, when we have a criminal justice system that normally treated everyone the same,” liberal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson told CBS in August.
Some liberal justices previously voiced public doubts about the court’s direction after the conservative majority’s 2022 rulings overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent that had legalized abortion nationwide and expanded gun rights. These comments sparked backlash from conservative justices, including Samuel Alito.
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said the court’s current heightened scrutiny stems from the “questionable behavior of some justices in the area of gift acceptance, and from the highly problematic approach to constitutional interpretation taken by the the Republicans appointed judges.”
The court’s majority, Stone said, “continues to impose politically conservative values in its interpretation of the Constitution.”
Others reject the idea that the court is politicized or corrupt.
“I think a lot of these arguments are being made in bad faith by people who simply don’t agree with the substance of the court’s decisions,” said Washington attorney William Jay, who has also litigated before the Supreme Court.
Trump is the Republican candidate who will face Democratic rival Kamala Harris in the November elections. After losing to his Democratic opponent Biden in 2020, Trump made false claims of widespread voter fraud as he and his allies mounted numerous legal challenges.
The justices declined to hear those challenges, but could hear election disputes again in the coming months — an area Jay said they would prefer to avoid.
“I think they all have the same opinion that it would be undesirable for the court to have to resolve the election case,” Jay said. “But at the same time, we only have one Supreme Court, and there is really only one body that can definitively settle a really high-stakes case.”
Media reports since last year have documented the inability of some justices, most notably conservatives Clarence Thomas and Alito, to publicly disclose private jet trips and other gifts from wealthy benefactors.
Under fire from some Democrats and other critics, the court announced its first code of conduct for judges last year, although there was no enforcement mechanism in place. Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan have both expressed support for adding such a mechanism in recent months.
In July, Biden proposed an 18-year term for the judges, who are currently serving a lifetime term, and a binding code of conduct. Due to Republican resistance, his reforms had little chance of being implemented.
Confidentiality and trust among judges have also been tested, first by the leak of a draft of the 2022 abortion decision and then in September when the New York Times published details from internal memos about Trump’s immunity bid.
Blatt called the latest leak “downright shocking,” suggesting there may be a sense “that the end justifies the means.” But it’s not good.’
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
