Supreme Court expected to forge ahead with 8 justices

WASHINGTON — A shorthanded Supreme Court can move forward as usual with the slate of oral arguments already set for the first few months of its new term that starts in October, but having only eight members changes how they might be decided.

Among the potentially affected cases: the fate of the 2010 health care law known as Obamacare, set for argument Nov. 10, and the House Judiciary Committee’s push to see grand jury materials in former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into interference in the 2016 presidential election, set for argument Dec. 2.

President Donald Trump plans to announce later this week his pick to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday. But it’s unclear how quickly the Senate will act on the nominee.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed on Monday that there would be a Senate vote on Trump’s nominee but did not say whether the vote would occur before or after the election.

The eight-member court is still expected to hear this term’s oral arguments and decide the cases as usual, and issue rulings if there is a majority. But not having the typical nine justices can mean the court ends up equally divided, 4-4, and unable to decide the case.

The justices have several options for what to do with the case at that point. Any of the moves could take several months, and the only thing for sure is that the justices would have to do something by the end of the term at the end of June.

First, they could issue a 4-4 decision, which is really not a decision at all but affirms the lower court’s ruling. Such a deadlock would be as if the Supreme Court never heard the case.

That happened in a major case about President Barack Obama’s immigration executive actions in June 2016, when the court was shorthanded at the end of its term after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The 4-4 result left in place lower court rulings that halted an Obama program that would have allowed undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens and legal residents to stay in the country and get work authorization and other government benefits.

This time, a 4-4 tie in the health care case would leave in place a lower court decision that the law was unconstitutional after Republicans effectively ended the “individual mandate” in the 2017 tax overhaul by zeroing out the penalty for most Americans without insurance coverage.

A coalition of Republican state attorneys general, led by Texas’ Ken Paxton, sued in 2018, and the Trump administration called on the Supreme Court to strike down the full law. The justices agreed in March to hear the case.