Abortion, gun cases to be taken up in new term while ethics concerns swirl
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is returning to a new term to take up the topics of guns and abortion and concerns about ethics swirling around the justices.
The year also will have a focus on social media and online free speech protections. A big unknown is whether the court will be asked to weigh in on the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump and others or efforts in some states to keep the Republican off the 2024 presidential ballot because of his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Lower-profile but vitally important, several cases in the term that begins Monday ask the justices to constrict the power of regulatory agencies.
“I can’t remember a term where the court was poised to say so much about the power of federal administrative agencies,” said Jeffrey Wall, who served as the deputy solicitor general in the Trump administration.
One of those casesthreatens the ability of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to function. Unlike most agencies, the bureau is not dependent on appropriations from Congress, but instead gets its funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The idea when the agency was created following the recession in 2007-08 was to shield it from politics.
But the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down the funding mechanism. The ruling would cause “profound disruption by (questioning) virtually every action the CFPB has taken” since its creation, the Biden administration said in a court filing.
The same federal appeals court also produced the ruling that struck down a federal law that aims to keep guns away from people facing domestic violence restraining orders from having firearms.
The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said its decision was compelled by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling expanding gun rights and directing judges to evaluate restrictions based on history and tradition. Judges also have invalidated other longstanding gun control laws.
The justices will hear the Texas case, in November, in what is their first chance to elaborate on the meaning of that decision in the earlier case, which has become known as Bruen.
The abortion case likely to be heard would also be the court’s first word on the topic since it reversed Roe v. Wade. The new case stems from a ruling to limit the availability of mifepristone, a medication used in the most common type of abortion in the U.S.
The administration already won an order from the high court blocking the appellate ruling. The justices could decide later in the fall to take up the mifepristone case this term.
The cases from the 5th Circuit could offer Chief Justice John Roberts more opportunities to forge alliances in major cases that cross ideological lines. In those cases, the conservative appeals court, which includes six Trump appointees, took aggressive legal positions, said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Georgetown law school’s Supreme Court Institute.
“The 5th Circuit is ready to adopt the politically most conservative position on almost any issue, no matter how implausible or how much defiling of precedent it takes,” Gornstein said.