Being a Supreme Court justice is a pretty sweet gig.
The Court typically hears about 60 cases a year, plus a smattering of “shadow docket” cases that receive expedited review. Like schoolchildren, the justices take their summers off — typically wrapping up their pending cases in June and then skipping town in early July.
And the justices are currently in the final stretch before they can enjoy their summer off. On Wednesday, the Court heard the last arguments of its current term. So all that is left for the justices to do is finish writing their current slate of opinions (along with a mix of concurrences and dissents), before their summer breaks can begin.
Two issues dominate this term’s remaining cases: democracy and President Donald Trump. The Court just decided a case that kicked off another round of Republican gerrymandering in the US South — and that will likely eviscerate Black representation in many Southern red states in the process. There are two more election cases coming before the justices peace out for the summer.
The Court will also decide several cases where Trump seeks to expand his power and the power of the presidency. These include some cases where the outcome is preordained — the Court’s Republican majority, for example, has long fixated on the “unitary executive,” a legal theory that gives Trump the power to fire nearly anyone who leads a federal agency. But the Court is also likely to reject Trump’s claim that he can strip citizenship from many Americans who were born in the United States.
This term also features two perennial culture war issues: guns and LGBTQ rights. Gun advocates will probably celebrate two upcoming decisions, where the Court is likely to take an expansive view of the Second Amendment. Transgender student athletes, meanwhile, should brace themselves for bad news.
On Wednesday, the Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais, a hugely consequential — but not exactly unexpected — decision neutralizing a provision of the Voting Rights Act that sometimes requires states to draw additional majority-Black or -Latino districts. The upshot of this decision is that between half-a-dozen and a dozen seats that currently are held by Democrats of color are likely to be held by white Republicans after several red states redraw their maps.
The Court will also decide National Republican Senatorial Committee (“NRSC”) v. FEC, where the Republican Party asks the Court to strike down limits on how much money party organizations like the Democratic and Republican National Committees may spend in coordination with candidates. This matters because the law permits donors to give much larger sums to the DNC or RNC than they can give to candidates, so a decision in the GOP’s favor will allow wealthy donors to exert more influence over individual races.
The Court’s Republican majority has already taken a flamethrower to US campaign finance law, so the decision in NRSC will probably only matter around the margins. But the Court is expected to use NRSC to remove one of the few remaining limits on money in politics.
And then there’s Watson v. RNC, where the GOP asks the justices to potentially trash thousands of absentee ballots; in recent elections, Democrats have been much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. In an age of less partisan judges, Watson would have been rejected by a lower court and never heard from ever again. The GOP’s legal theory is that a 160-year-old law setting the date of federal elections requires all ballots that arrive after that date to be thrown out even if they were mailed before the election — and that somehow no one noticed this limit on ballot counting until after Trump started claiming that voting by mail is bad.
At oral arguments, however, at least four of the Court’s Republicans appeared sympathetic to the GOP’s arguments in Watson. So the case is worth watching for the same reason that coal miners keep a close eye on their canary. If the Supreme Court embraces the GOP’s cockamamie legal arguments in Watson, that’s a warning that they will accept other highly dubious legal arguments that benefit the Republican Party.
Trump already lost one big case this term. In Learning Resources v. Trump (2026), three of the Court’s Republicans hewed to their party’s traditional support for free trade and struck down many of Trump’s tariffs. All three of the Court’s Democrats also joined this decision.
Trump’s also likely to lose Trump v. Barbara, his challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision granting citizenship to nearly everyone born in the US. Like Learning Resources, Barbara involves an issue that divides the Republican Party, and where Republicans largely agreed with Democrats until Trump came along.
Meanwhile, the president is likely to score a big victory in Trump v. Slaughter, a case asking whether Congress can create “independent” federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission or the National Labor Relations Board, whose members may only be removed by the president for negligence or malfeasance in office. The Court’s Republicans are all devotees of the “unitary executive,” a legal theory which holds that such agencies cannot exist, with one exception. The Court already signaled last year that members of the Federal Reserve can be protected from presidential firing, and it is likely to reaffirm this decision later this year.
There’s some uncertainty about how the Court will rule in Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, two cases asking if the Trump administration followed the right procedures when they stripped “temporary protected status” from Haitian and Syrian nationals living in the United States. If the Court rules in favor of these foreign nationals, that will mean that some citizens of very dangerous countries will get to remain in the United States for maybe a few more months.
But the legal issue in Doe and Miot is purely procedural, and no one really questions that the Trump administration can deport these individuals if it gets the process right. So a victory for these Syrian and Haitian plaintiffs will only be a minor defeat for Trump.
Guns and the Second Amendment
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Supreme Court announced a widely derided framework that now governs Second Amendment cases. A lawyer defending a gun law must point to a law from around the time when the Constitution was drafted that is similar to the law they are defending today. If five justices deem the old law to be sufficiently similar to the new law, the new law is upheld. Otherwise it is struck down.
The justices have struggled to explain just how similar the two laws must be, or in what ways the new law must resemble the old one, and multiple judges have complained that this new framework is unworkable, and that they do not know how to apply it. Indeed, in a 2024 opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen different judicial opinions — some of them authored by Trump appointees — who’ve complained that, in one judge’s words, Bruen has caused “disarray” because it “does not provide lower courts with clear guidance as to how analogous modern laws must be to founding-era gun laws.”
In any event, this term the Court will decide two cases that may give the justices a chance to clarify how Bruen’s unusual historical test is supposed to work. The first, Wolford v. Lopez, concerns a Hawaii law that requires gun owners to obtain permission from shops, restaurants, and other private businesses before they bring a gun onto the premises. The second, United States v. Hemani, concerns a federal law prohibiting an “unlawful user” of marijuana from possessing a gun.
At oral arguments in both cases, most of the justices appeared likely to strike both laws down. The most uncertain question is whether they can do so in a way that brings clarity to the extraordinarily murky Bruen framework.
One of the most astonishing decisions of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure at the head of the Court was last March’s opinion in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), where the Republican justices said that the Constitution requires public school teachers to out transgender students to their parents, even if the student wishes to keep their gender identity secret.
As I explained shortly after it was handed down, Mirabelli is such a surprising decision because the Court relied on “substantive due process,” a controversial legal doctrine that was also the basis of the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, and that allows the Court to create “rights” that are not explicit in the Constitution.
For decades, legal conservatism defined itself by its opposition to substantive due process. The fact that the Republicans were willing to rely on this doctrine in Mirabelli suggests that their personal distaste toward trans people has overcome their commitment to applying the law in a predictable and consistent way.
Mirabelli left little suspense looming over Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., two pending cases that challenge state laws prohibiting trans women student athletes from playing on women’s sports teams. The Republican justices’ questions at oral arguments over these cases gave trans athletes little reason to be hopeful. Both Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, the only Republican justices who’ve supported trans rights in the past, had skeptical questions for the lawyer representing the athletes.
The plaintiffs in these cases always faced a tough road in court. Though the Supreme Court held in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that laws forbidding “sex” discrimination sometimes protect trans people from unequal treatment, sex discrimination is not forbidden in competitive sports. Indeed, sex discrimination is the whole reason why women-only sports teams exist.
Given the Republican justices’ willingness to place anti-trans politics over legal principles in Mirabelli, it’s difficult to imagine this Court going beyond Bostock to hold that trans athletes have a right to compete on the team that aligns with their gender identity.
