It's already time for a new SCOTUS term. Or, the summer that wasn't.

A look back, a look ahead. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will be taking the bench, hearing their first arguments of the new term after a summer recess that was anything but.

Since the justices left for the summer, entering what should be a down time, the Supreme Court issued orders that included opinions in nine “emergency” applications addressing challenges to President Donald Trump’s actions, as well as a handful of orders with no opinions, including the decisions to hear cases over Trump’s tariffs in November and over Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook in January. I have published more than a dozen articles at Law Dork about the Supreme Court’s summer actions and the fallout from those actions.

The message coming out of the summer is not a good one for those who want the Supreme Court to act as a constraint on the lawless excesses of Trump and his administration. There were multiple orders allowing varying aspects of the Trump administration’s harsh anti-immigrant policies to proceed, several orders advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to fire federal workers and to consolidate firing power under Trump, and multiple orders giving the go-ahead to unilateral funding cuts.

And now, on Monday, we start a whole new term. It could, as I detail below, fundamentally challenge the balance of powers in America — all but eliminating the “separation of powers” that were purportedly essential to the so-called genius of America’s Constitution.

Will Chief Justice John Roberts and the Republican appointees end the notion of co-equal branches by raising the executive above all else in backing Trump’s unending desire for more power and fewer limits?

That is the question of this term, and Law Dork will be covering all of it — as I have done from Washington, D.C. since 2010.

Because of the non-summer vacation that we had this year, I didn’t spend significant time over the summer writing about the upcoming term. That should not, however, suggest that this term isn’t important. It is, and the key cases going into the term sort into three areas: “executive,” as in Trump’s, power; cases addressing LGBTQ people’s lives; and American elections, as in democracy.

Trump power

As noted the Supreme Court will be hearing the cases over Trump’s tariffs. They are consolidated and have been set for argument on November 5.

The Cook request, as well as the case over Trump’s effort to fire Rebecca Slaughter as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission will determine the extent to which the moribund Humphrey’s Executor precedent from 1935 is overruled.

The Justice Department is asking the justices to take up multiple cases — that it has uniformly lost — challenging Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. Although the justices could turn away the requests given the uniformity, it would be unusual — though not at all unprecedented — for the court not to provide national resolution of a presidential action, especially after already having heard an underlying issue in the challenges once.

As cases over Trump’s military deployment efforts continue moving forward, expect at least one of them to reach the Supreme Court this term as well.

Independently, each of these issues represent a potential dramatic shift in the balance of powers in American government. Together, they could result in America being a different nation — with Trump being given almost limitless powers — by next June. Vigilance and public pressure will be essential parts of limiting how far the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointee supermajority goes.

LGBTQ people’s lives

Right away on Tuesday, the justices will hear arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a First Amendment speech claim challenge to Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The Supreme Court has denied cert in several of these cases previously, so the fact that they took this case is itself a sign of greater willingness to look skeptically at the laws. A key, and perhaps pivotal, question in the case is what level of scrutiny such laws should receive from courts when challenged. If the justices side with Chiles and the Trump administration Justice Department, strict scrutiny would apply and the laws will likely be struck down — although Colorado insists that the law even passes that intense examination.

The court has also already agreed to hear Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., two cases challenging Idaho and West Virginia’s laws, respectively, banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports. In considering these cases, the justices are expected to address a question avoided in last term’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti — how laws that classify trans people should be considered under the Equal Protection Clause.

The justices also already have a shadow docket request pending in Trump v. Orr, with the Justice Department seeking a stay of a lower court class action injunction blocking enforcement of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s anti-trans and anti-nonbinary passport policy.

Elections and democracy

Along with the cases directly addressing Trump’s powers and those of his administration, there already are two key cases set for argument this term about American elections.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the case set for reargument this term, the justices will be considering whether a key remedy in Voting Rights Act vote dilution cases — a state’s “intentional creation of a … majority-minority congressional district“ — “violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.“ Such a decision could eviscerate the power of Section 2 of the VRA, the last real way under federal law for people to challenge discriminatory redistricting efforts.

Cases over the constitutionality of restrictions on coordinated party expenditures and who has standing and when to challenge states’ time, place, and manner regulations regarding federal elections are also set to be heard this term — the latter case on Wednesday.

Other cases of note

On October 3, the justices agreed to hear a case over the constitutionality of a provision in a Hawaii law that bar guns from private spaces open to the public unless the owner expressly allows guns.

As always, there also will be several key criminal cases, including first thing Monday morning.

And, finally, there will be much more that we don’t know of yet. There will be new certiorari grants from cases working there way up the pipeline, of course, but there also will be new developments that quickly push their way up through the courts and to the justices — especially given the court’s not irregular practice, as with Cook’s case, to schedule oral arguments over certain stay applications.

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Closing my tabs

For those who don’t what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories and cases open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of those I was unable to cover during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.

This Sunday, these are the tabs I am closing: