The Supreme Court is expected to start its 2024–2025 term after a blockbuster year of considering contentious cases and challenges to longstanding precedent.
Already, the court has accepted petitions related to hot-button topics including gender, ghost guns, immigration, pornography, and electronic cigarettes for the term starting on Oct. 7.
Trump Back at Supreme Court?
Last term, the Supreme Court heard several cases related to former President Donald Trump, resulting in landmark rulings on immunity and the disqualification clause under the 14th Amendment.The immunity ruling in Trump v. United States held that presidents enjoy different levels of immunity from criminal prosecution. That ruling stemmed from an appeal that Trump filed in his election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the D.C. Circuit.
Both the immunity decision and another related to Jan. 6 defendants could return to the Supreme Court as Trump’s lawyers raise their arguments in Washington.
So far, Chutkan has set a timeline through the beginning of November with opportunities for Trump’s legal team to make arguments on immunity and the special counsel.
Smith has also filed a large immunity brief, indicating that the appeals on that issue could be complex. Trump’s lawyers are set to reply with a very large brief of their own.
Smith has appealed Cannon’s decision. With the appointment question being challenged in two circuits, this could create a circuit split, or differing legal rulings on the same issue in different circuits, which often prompts the Supreme Court to take up the matter to resolve the conflict.
If Trump wins reelection, each of the federal criminal cases will likely be withdrawn.
Calls for Reform
Regardless of who wins the presidency, Democrats will likely continue pressing for reform to the nation’s highest court—attracting further scrutiny to the justices and amplifying the tension surrounding hot-button issues such as gender.Democrats didn’t make much headway on their proposals in recent terms, but that could change depending on which party wins Congress and the presidency in the 2024 elections.
Besides court-packing and term limits, a binding ethics code has been floated by Democrats. Whatever passes could come before the Supreme Court itself. The court already implemented its own code of ethics in 2023 but faced criticism for not including an effective enforcement mechanism.
Since then, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan have backed some kind of ethics enforcement. However, it’s unclear how the court as a whole might rule on something such as this.
Reforming the Supreme Court could prove more difficult than other reforms advanced by Congress. Article III of the Constitution, which allows judges to hold office “during good Behaviour,” has long been interpreted to offer life tenure.
Guns
So far, the court has stated that it will take at least one major firearm-related case called Garland v. VanDerStok, which addresses the government’s attempt to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” The term refers to firearms that are untraceable because they lack serial numbers and are made outside of the normal process involving a licensed manufacturer.
Oral argument for that case was set for Oct. 8, months after the Supreme Court issued its decision on bump stocks, which are accessories added to guns to increase the rate of fire.
Both that case (Garland v. Cargill) and the VanDerStok case involve the Department of Justice, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), attempting to interpret decades-old laws to prohibit certain products.
In the bump stock case, a 6–3 majority held that the ATF exceeded its authority in outlawing bump stocks based on statutory phrasing in federal law.
The brief also expressed concerns about the impact on minors.
Two Texas residents—Jennifer VanDerStok and Michael Andren—along with Tactical Machining, a producer and retailer, and the advocacy group Firearms Policy Coalition, sued the ATF.
VanDerStok and her co-respondents told the Supreme Court that the ATF’s definition isn’t logical and that the agency is attempting to regulate items that aren’t frames or receivers.
Pornography and E-Cigarettes
Youth public health is coming up in two other major cases—one involving the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) refusal to approve flavored e-cigarette products and another challenging Texas’s law requiring age verification on pornographic sites.Industry groups have brought legal challenges to those decisions, with both of their cases reaching the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court stated that it would take up both cases, although the dates for oral arguments haven’t been announced.
It’s unclear how the two cases will be resolved. Nearly 20 states have passed laws requiring age verification for pornographic platforms. The Supreme Court’s decision could change how lower courts evaluate First Amendment challenges to porn restrictions.
The Free Speech Coalition is arguing that the Fifth Circuit erred in applying a lower standard of review, or requiring less from the government in showing that its restriction on speech was justified.
Erin Hawley, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, said the Supreme Court will likely focus on that question.
In the e-cigarette case (FDA v. Wages and White Lion), the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of the industry. The appeals court reasoned that the FDA’s rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act by, among other things, not considering the manufacturers’ marketing plans or giving them fair notice before allegedly changing its approach to approval.
Administrative Law
The Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946 after the New Deal era, was critical of one of the court’s most controversial decisions in its prior term that overturned the decades-old Chevron precedent.Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that courts had been judging agency decisions based on a misinterpretation of the 1946 legislation. The Chevron doctrine required courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of law when there were ambiguities.
Dan Greenberg, general counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, disagreed.
“Loper Bright really indicates a stronger and stronger desire by the Supreme Court to instruct every other part of government to stay in its lane,” he told The Epoch Times.
Greenberg said he thought it was “highly likely” that the court would grant certiorari, or agree to take on, Consumers’ Research v. Federal Communications Commission. That case questions whether Congress unconstitutionally delegated its power to raise revenue to the agency.
Hawley suggested that Loper Bright could also affect a case being heard in October involving the Clean Water Act.
“I would imagine that post-Loper Bright that San Francisco will win this one,” Hawley said.
Gender
In the 2023–2024 term, the court took on many hot-button issues but seemed intent on leaving one, in particular, gender, for another term. This summer, the justices took the long-awaited step of taking up a case on gender, which touches on various aspects of federal law.In that case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Biden administration is challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender transition procedures for minors. The administration contends that Tennessee’s ban is a form of discrimination that violates the equal protection clause.
The case is likely to set a major constitutional precedent and be one of the most watched in the upcoming term.
It will also present an opportunity for the court and its various justices to clarify the stances they took in a similar case, Bostock v. Clayton County, from 2020. In that case, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined a majority of the court in holding that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity violated Title VII’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination.
Its decision was rooted in the idea that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity was ultimately based on sex.
That decision has played a role in lower court decisions on gender-related medical procedures, as well as litigation over Title IX, or the civil rights statute prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration prompted a flood of lawsuits when it passed an Education Department rule interpreting Title IX to apply to sexual orientation and preferred gender identity. Conservatives have argued that doing so wrongly forces women to compete with men in athletics and share spaces such as locker rooms with them.
Whatever the court decides, it could affect how the U.S. legal system views gender and its implications in a wide range of contexts.
