Winter storm warnings continue in northern Minnesota 

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

The Supreme Court term usually ends with a bang, not a whimper. This is crunch time at the court, as the justices push to issue their opinions by the end of June. Some 20 cases remain to be decided —

 —     many of them the most important of the term.

The Supreme Court used to be a rather stately beat with a distinct, and predictable, rhythm of its own. But something happened in the first Trump administration that, in the second Trump administration, has morphed into a phenomenon that has really changed the nature of the court's work.

Put simply, the emergency docket, sometimes referred to as the shadow docket, is taking up more and more of the justices' time.

, the tale is really told in the numbers, according to statistics compiled by Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck, author of 

In the George W. Bush Bush and Obama administrations, a period of 16 years, the government filed a request for emergency action only eight times. That's one every two years. The two administrations 

 got what they wanted only four times in those 16 years.

That changed dramatically with the election of Donald Trump, who in his first term asked the court to block lower court orders 41 times.

He got what he wanted in whole or in part in 28 of those cases. In nearly all of those cases, the court, with three new Trump appointees, simply issued an order without any explanation as to why it was granting or refusing to grant the president's wish.

That trend has continued during President Trump's second term, where again, the tale is in the numbers. In the first 20 weeks of his second term, Trump sought emergency action from the court in 19 cases. For comparison, that's the same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years.

So how has Trump fared so far? The justices have ruled in favor of the administration in 10 of the 12 decided cases. These are consequential cases involving the administration's efforts to 

Bottom line, the workload at the court has increased exponentially on the emergency docket. The court is most often deferring to the president, blocking the decisions of lower courts without explanation and then telling those judges to spend months litigating critical disputes further, regardless of the interim impact on whole agencies, farmers, scientists, tens of thousands of federal employees, and people rounded up for deportation, to name just a few of the affected groups.

As for the cases that were fully briefed and argued before the court, there are 20 of them left to be decided this term. Almost certainly the biggest one is the "

) in which Trump claims that the Constitution does not guarantee citizenship to all people born in the U.S.

To date, no judge, including Republican-appointed judges, has agreed with Trump's legal claim that only certain people are entitled to birthright citizenship. But the administration, knowing that it would likely lose on the birthright citizenship question, didn't actually appeal those lower court rulings.

Yes, the Justice Department asked the court to block them, but for a different reason. The administration asserts that those lower court judges exceeded their authority when they applied their rulings not just to the individual litigants, or the region in the case, but to the whole country.

In other words, Trump is trying to prevent lower court judges from making nationwide rulings when they find a policy to be illegal.

tests a state law that bars minors from accessing gender-affirming care 

as they transition from their sex assigned at birth.

Twenty-five states have already enacted laws banning gender-affirming care for minors. The transgender kids and their parents contend that these laws unconstitutionally discriminate based on sex because the same medications banned for trans kids are available to other minors for conditions ranging from endometriosis to early or late onset puberty.

In the coming days, the court will also make an important decision on religious rights in public schools that has school administrators shaking in their boots. Parents in Montgomery County, Md., want an opt-out provision for public schools — they want their children excused from class when materials, in this case books with LGBTQ+ characters, offend their family's religious views.

If the Supreme Court sides with the parents, and it certainly sounded that way during oral arguments, school officials fear everyone would want to opt out of something, leading to frequent disruptions in classes.

There's another important case challenging a Texas law that seeks to 

crack down on kids' access to pornography

using adult websites to provide proof of age first.

another challenge to the Affordable Care Act

. This time, Obamacare's opponents are targeting a measure that requires most private insurance companies to provide free preventive care, without co-pays or deductibles, to adults and children. These free treatments include, among other things, immunizations, colorectal, breast, and other cancer screenings, and treatments to prevent people with HIV infections or those who have been exposed, from developing AIDS.

These preventive treatments have benefited millions of people since the ACA went into effect 11 years ago — a sufficiently long time for most people to take the free coverage for granted. But if the court rules for the groups challenging the law, the benefits could disappear.

Politics and Government News

Homepage

Nina Totenberg

Author

Some 20 cases remain to be decided — about a third of the total argued cases — many of them the most important of the term. But the shadow docket, with its own list of cases, looms over the other opinions.

Supreme Court faces new headwinds with roughly 2 weeks left in the term

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox