Supreme Court heads into new term with one eye on President Trump

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — When the Supreme Court kicks off a new, nine-month term on Monday, one key player will be noticeably absent: President Donald Trump.

After months of near-constant confrontation with the White House, the nine justices will retake their seats behind the court’s mahogany bench without a docket full of Trump-driven, separation-of-powers blockbusters that defined the last term — from tariffs to birthright citizenship to the firing of once-independent government officials.

The respite is unlikely to last.

In the coming weeks, the justices will decide whether to wade into Trump’s messy defamation brawl with magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, his mass cancellation of federal research grants, whether the Department of Government Efficiency must provide records detailing its slashing of federal agencies last year, and the administration’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military.

Those and other cases could be added to a term that already includes an important Second Amendment challenge to bans on AR-15 rifles, the most significant case dealing with climate change to reach the justices in nearly two decades, and a fight over whether religious preschools receiving taxpayer money may decline to enroll the children of same-sex couples.

So far this next term, the court has granted 28 cases, less than half of what the justices will likely decide by June.

“There’s a very good chance that the 35 or so that the court is likely to grant in the remainder of the year will be the ones that are really the highlights,” Masha Hansford, an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell and a former assistant to the solicitor general, said at a recent event organized by the National Constitution Center.

One area where the court is already delving into Trump’s policies this term is immigration. The court has announced in recent days that it will hear arguments over the president’s mandatory detention policy and his push to deport migrants to countries other than their homeland. While important, neither of those cases has drawn the same level of attention as last year’s birthright citizenship case.

Dance with Trump

After Trump and his allies launched a rhetorical war against lower courts in early 2025, the president and the Supreme Court seemed to slide into a détente by the middle of the year — a delicate dance in which Trump has abided by the losses handed to him by the high court even as he has occasionally lashed out against the justices who supported them.

The court overwhelmingly sided with Trump on its emergency docket — the fast-track cases that are usually decided without argument. And it also backed the president in major regular cases that were argued during the last term and resulted in full opinions. One of those included the blockbuster decision allowing him to fire the leaders of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. But the court was also willing to push back against Trump in some of those cases, such as by rejecting his emergency global tariffs and his push to undo birthright citizenship as it had been understood for more than a century.

Still, Trump has not shied away from railing against the 6-3 conservative court this past summer, including the three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — whom he named to the bench during his first term. Trump told Time Magazine last week that he regretted nominated them.

“I gave them ​the position of a lifetime,” the president lamented, “and they vote against me often.”

The justices themselves have largely demurred when asked about Trump’s unusually personal attacks on the court. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative who spoke to CBS as he prepares to publish a new book this week, said there has been a “great change in what presidents have said about the court when they are unhappy about our decisions.”

But, Alito said, that “very harsh” criticism has been “bipartisan.”

Pressed on Trump’s harsher statements, Alito said, “he has his own way of saying things.”

Girding for an election

Before the court decides any of the regular — or merits — cases it has granted, there’s a chance it will have to deal with a flood of litigation tied to next month’s midterm election. Whether that is a deluge or a trickle may be in voters’ hands.

Derek Muller, a law professor and election law expert at Notre Dame, said he believes the likelihood of post-election litigation will be low “because there probably won’t be enough decisively close cases where litigation would really matter.” But, he said, “if it does happen, it could significantly transform the upcoming Supreme Court term.”

The court has already juggled a series of redistricting disputes spun off from the president’s push for a mid-decade redrawing of House district boundaries. And last month it shut down Trump’s controversial proposal to give the US Postal Service a role in screening — and potentially rejecting — mail ballots sent to voters across the country.

Also waiting in the wings are several important non-Trump merits cases that could define the 2026-2027 term. It seems almost inevitable that the court will review state laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. Moreover, a legal battle raging between prediction sites like Kalshi and Polymarket and state governments has already reached the high court and could make its way to an oral argument sometime next year.

Banning AR-15 rifles

The court’s conservative majority has been steadily expanding gun rights under the Second Amendment for years. It have a huge opportunity to do so again this term.

In December, the court will hear arguments in cases challenging bans on AR-15 rifles enacted in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. Gun rights groups say the semi-automatic rifles are widely owned by Americans and are permitted in the vast majority of states. Gun control advocates counter that the weapons have been frequently used in mass shootings and should not receive Second Amendment protection because they are more “dangerous” and “unusual” than other types of guns.

The case draws heavily on a landmark 2008 decision from the Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller, which stood for the prospect that arms “in common use” are protected under the Second Amendment.

“I think we know how this case is going to come out,” Deepak Gupta, a veteran appellate attorney, said at a recent event hosted by the Georgetown Law Center, suggesting that the court would likely strike down the AR-15 bans. “We know the outcome, but we don’t know how it’s going to be decided.”

Suing Exxon for climate change

On the very first day of the term, the justices will confront a long-running dispute about whether cities and states may sue fossil fuel companies for billions of dollars in damages caused by climate change. The appeal before the court deals with one such suit from Boulder, Colorado, but the decision will almost certainly play into dozens of other pending cases filed by cities and states attempting to hold oil companies accountable.

ExxonMobil and Suncor, the two companies that brought the case to the high court, argue that climate pollution is inherently a federal issue, in part because emissions waft across state lines. That understanding of federal control, they say, should effectively supersede state law. But Boulder says that there’s nothing in the Constitution or in federal law that backs up ExxonMobil’s position, and that the Supreme Court should let the lawsuit proceed.

Particularly notable is Alito’s decision to recuse himself from the case because of stock he owns in fossil fuel companies such as ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. That opens the possibility of a 4-4 split, a rare outcome that would uphold the decision by Colorado’s Supreme Court that allowed Boulder’s lawsuit to proceed without setting a precedent.

Immigration emerges as a theme

One important Trump-related case that has reached the docket deals with the administration’s policy of imposing mandatory detention without bond hearings for people who entered the country illegally and who are targeted for deportation. Though the cases are lower profile than birthright citizenship, the court’s decision in the detention case could have enormous consequences for the president’s push to round up migrants living in the United States.

Trump broke with decades of past practice – including that of his first administration – and reinterpreted an immigration law Congress enacted in the 1990s to find that people in the country illegally should be subject to mandatory detention without bond hearings. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recorded a massive increase in the number of migrants held in detention, from just under 38,000 at the end of the Biden administration to more than 65,000 this past summer.

The detention case is one of several dealing with immigration this term. Late last month, the court granted another important immigration case dealing with the Trump administration’s policy of removing certain people to countries other than their homeland – despite human rights concerns raised about some of those countries.

Religious schools v. LGBTQ rights

The Supreme Court in recent years has repeatedly sided with religious schools seeking public funding. Now it will answer a question it has largely avoided in those earlier cases: How to handle a religious school that declines to work with LGBTQ families.

The case comes out of Colorado, which enacted a ballot provision in 2020 that provides state funding for a universal preschool program. While the program allows religious preschools to take part, it also includes a nondiscrimination provision that requires each school receiving public money to provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll, regardless of race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity and other factors.

Two Catholic parishes in Colorado that operate preschools sued over the policy and brought the case to the Supreme Court in November. They argue that honoring that anti-discrimination provision in the program would require them to violate their faith.

“The tea leaves are pretty good for the challengers generally,” Roman Martinez, a Latham & Watkins partner who regularly appears before the Supreme Court, said at the Georgetown event.

“What’s driving the court is a commitment to a type of pluralism,” he said. “The court, I think, is very concerned about religious groups sort of having equal access and being treated equally as a matter of practice, not just as a matter of formalism.”

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