Trump’s assault on the US Supreme Court enters a decisive year

Tradition holds that the first Monday in October marks the start of the nine-month term of the United States Supreme Court. But it is well known that Donald Trump is not a man given to honoring every tradition.His return to power has altered American democratic life and the functioning of the country’s highest court, whose decisions can shape citizens’ lives. Trump’s push to expand executive power through executive orders and other presidential actions has driven a surge in emergency rulings by the Supreme Court over the last two terms as the administration pressed its cases.It has also blurred the lines between the end and start of terms for its nine justices. The latter used to hang up their robes in late June and, after a summer spent on the (lucrative) circuit of paid speaking engagements, return to work on a Monday. This year that Monday is October 5, when the court opens the term with one of its most prominent cases. Originating in Colorado, it examines whether state and local governments can sue energy companies if they believe they misled the public about the harmful effects of fossil fuels.Considered one of the most important climate cases in decades, it puts the conservative justices in a bind. On one hand, the current Supreme Court has consistently ruled in favor of rolling back environmental safeguards. On the other, doing so in this case would clash with a core tenet of ‘originalism,’ the legal theory those justices faithfully apply: that the Constitution’s framers designed a system intended to favor states’ power over the federal government’s.So the term begins forcefully after a summer in which the Supreme Court has been busy, issuing a series of rulings that affect Trump—though they have not always gone his way. The justices struck down an order that would have limited mail-in voting, blocked for the third time an electoral map favorable to Republicans, and rejected his effort to avoid a multimillion-dollar payment to E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a judgment against him for sexual abuse and defamation. But they also allowed construction of the White House ballroom to proceed and permitted a voter-suppression maneuver to continue.That mix of victories and setbacks has been constant in Trump’s relationship with the Supreme Court, although, as is also known, no show of loyalty ever seems to be enough for him. After rulings last term that went against him on key items of his agenda, the nine justices—six conservatives, three of them appointed to lifetime posts during his first term—became targets of his attacks when they voted against him.After the February decision that struck down his tariff policy, he called them ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘a disgrace.’ He called ‘faulty, political, and ridiculous’ the decision that voided an order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. And when his plan to curtail mail-in voting was struck down, he wrote: ‘These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the Supreme Court.’He was referring to the justices he appointed: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, about whom he said that “they are merely a shell of their original selves.” This week, Trump told Time magazine in an interview that he regretted selecting them. ‘I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often,’ he said, in another blatant breach of the principle of separation of powers.Immunity in officeIt was also another one of his habitual exercises in denying reality: the most conservative Supreme Court in eight decades—the same court that in July 2024 granted him broad immunity for acts performed in office in a decision that smoothed his path back to power—has delivered him a solid series of victories, especially in cases his justices resolved on an emergency basis.These are not well regarded among legal scholars: critics call them ‘shadow dockets,’ they typically involve limited deliberation, often lack detailed reasoning or come without signed opinions. In the term before Trump returned to the White House, the court addressed 55 cases through that route. In the term that (in theory) ended last June, there were 78 cases.‘They used to handle matters requiring immediate attention, like the imminent execution of a death-row inmate, but now the Supreme Court uses that procedure to resolve major public-policy questions,’ Paul Collins, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and an expert on the politicization of the high court, writes in an email. Collins offers another figure: during Trump’s first term, his administration turned to the shadow docket 41 times, compared with barely three occasions across Barack Obama’s two terms.The legal scholar adds that the government’s reason for using the shadow docket is ‘simple’: it often works for them. ‘During Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration in roughly 75% of these emergency requests. Those decisions include weighty cases, such as the one that allowed considering a person’s apparent ethnicity as a factor in immigration raids,’ Collins warns.Partly because of that unexpected workload, the ‘merit dockets’—cases considered at a measured pace—have fallen in recent years: from around 160 in the 1980s to 59 in the last term. Over that period the Supreme Court’s popularity has plunged to a record low: 33% of Americans approve of its performance, according to Gallup.Those merits cases are usually scheduled at the start of the term. They are argued at oral argument, followed by months of deliberation during which the justices have time to write majority and dissenting opinions and concurrences. On the calendar for the start of this term, besides the climate case, are a series of matters that, as usual, range from the technical to the philosophical.Among the most significant are two immigration cases. The first examines the legality of deporting undocumented immigrants to third countries. The second considers the constitutionality of Trump’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants without a bond hearing, even if they have been in the United States for an extended period.There is also the case of a Colorado school seeking state funding despite the state’s view that its policy of refusing to admit LGTBI students or students with transgender or gay parents violates anti-discrimination laws. In addition, the justices will decide whether banning the sale of semiautomatic weapons—capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute and often central to the deadliest mass shootings—contradicts the protections guaranteed by the Second Amendment.And then there are cases that could be accepted on the fly. That list includes, according to Nina Totenberg’s tally at NPR, whether prediction markets need regulation and the potential revisiting of precedent that bars mandatory classroom teaching of the Ten Commandments, given that Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have passed laws requiring it.The picture is completed by the emergency filings related to Trump decisions that could land at the high court in Washington as his administration presses its agenda. The month remaining before the election and the weeks after promise to be intense on that front.The administration has shown repeatedly that it does not intend to relent in its campaign to change voting rules in ways that favor Republican interests. Secretaries of state, lawyers and civil-rights organizations across the country are prepared to counter those efforts through the courts. On that path, the final stop is the Supreme Court.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition