“As far as I know, the Supreme Court has always ruled on all cases that were heard within a term before the term ended. But have there been any exceptions? Could the Supreme Court have simply suspended the term and gone on vacation without ruling on the presidential immunity case?”
— Lauren T., Glen Ellen, California.
Hi Lauren,
The court usually decides in all cases before the term ends. The judges are not required to do that — that’s just almost always what happens. But there have been exceptions.
One notable case is the infamous Citizens United campaign finance case, decided in January 2010. That was the case that prompted then-President Barack Obama to lament in his State of the Union address that year a decision that he had told the nation would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend unlimited amounts of money on our elections.” (Justice Samuel Alito, who was part of the 5-4 majority and was present that night, memorably said “not true.”)
But the comprehensive outcome in Citizens United was not reached until the court set the case for reconsideration in June 2009. The court initially heard arguments in March. Instead of deciding the case on narrower grounds in late June, it then set a rare hearing for September, at which the parties were asked to argue whether the campaign finance precedent should be overturned. In its decision the following January, the majority overturned the precedent. “In essence, five justices were dissatisfied with the narrow nature of the case before us,” Judge John Paul Stevens wrote in a dissenting opinion: “so they changed the case to give themselves a chance to change the law.” In addition to Alito, the majority included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.
In retrospect, as this term recently showed, these were only the early days of the Roberts Court’s overhaul of the law, which was more in line with Republican interests.
A more recent, less murky example of failure to decide an appeal in the normal manner came in 2019 in a landmark case involving Native American sovereignty called Carpenter v. Murphy. Neil Gorsuchwho replaced Scalia after Republicans blocked Merrick Garland, was withdrawn from the case that was being heard by the appeals court on which Gorsuch sat before he was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
Without a full complement of nine justices, the court apparently could not break a 4-4 deadlock and reschedule the case for the next term. The justices ultimately resolved the issue with another case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, in which Trump’s appointee Gorsuch wrote the landmark 5-4 ruling in 2020, siding with tribal interests and supported by the court’s then-four Democratic appointees, despite dissents from Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who replaced Kennedy).
As for the Trump immunity case, we now know that the court did issue this deadline — but only at the very end of it. For anyone worried that delaying the ruling until next term would have prevented a trial before the election, that ship has likely sailed anyway. As I said above, if Donald Trump loses the election, the bigger question may be what will be left of the federal election interference case after it has been through the wringer of the court’s newly invented immunity test.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
