“What are the most significant Supreme Court cases to watch this term?” — John 

Hi John,

The court has already issued several significant rulings this term — on tariffs, voting rights, immigration and more.   

At this point, there are only eight cases left to decide, and they include some of the most consequential disputes. We could get decisions in any of them, though not likely all of them, when the justices next take the bench on Monday morning.

The court usually issues the term’s final rulings by the end of June or early July. Chief Justice John Roberts has a custom of announcing on the second-to-last day that the next opinion day will be the final one. But he made no such announcement when the latest batch of rulings came on Thursday, so it seems there will be at least one more opinion day after Monday.

Birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive order that purports to end automatic citizenship for babies born in this country. The order hasn’t taken effect because it’s “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one of the several judges who ruled against Trump in the lower courts observed.

Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether to maintain the status quo or to green-light one of the president’s most lawless moves yet. Trump himself has said he thinks the Republican-controlled court will rule against him as it did in the tariffs case.

Presidential firing power over independent agencies in Trump v. Slaughter

This is another big case, but Trump is expected to win it. The court is considering whether he can fire Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause. In weighing that question, the court is deciding whether to overturn its Humphrey’s Executor precedent from 1935, which has protected independent federal agencies for nearly a century. The ruling could upend agencies throughout the government, affecting many aspects of American life.

Whether the court formally overrules Humphrey’s Executor or not, the majority has broadly backed Trump’s federal firing spree and is poised to side with him here. One early signal was that the court let the president keep Slaughter out of her post pending the outcome of the litigation.

Presidential firing power over independent agencies in Trump v. Cook

A separate but similar case to Slaughter is Trump’s effort to oust Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Although the GOP-appointed high court majority has mostly been on board with Trump’s firings, it has shown that it wants to carve out special protections for the central bank, whose stability is important to the American economy.

One of the multiple signs that the court is more likely to back Cook is that, unlike Slaughter, the court kept Cook in her post pending the outcome of the litigation. Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at the January hearing that the president’s position would “weaken, if not shatter, the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Mail-in ballot deadlines in Watson v. RNC

The court has more election-related cases to decide ahead of the November midterms. The Watson case is a challenge by the Republican National Committee, backed by the Trump administration, to mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later. According to the Voting Rights Lab, 30 states have mail-in ballot grace periods for at least some voters: 14 states and Washington, D.C., have them for all mail-in ballots, while 16 more states have them specifically for military and overseas voters.

The president has railed against mail-in ballots while making unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. Yet at the March hearing, the lawyer who argued against the RNC said the administration couldn’t show “a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.”

Campaign finance in NRSC v. FEC

The court is considering whether to further loosen campaign finance restrictions, in a GOP challenge to limits on political parties’ coordination with candidates on campaign spending. The case was brought by Vice President JD Vance when he was a Senate candidate, along with national senatorial and congressional committees of the Republican Party and former Ohio GOP Rep. Steve Chabot.

Their appeal questions the precedent that upheld those limits in 2001 by a 5-4 vote. They called it a “5-4 aberration” that was “plainly wrong the day it was decided.” The only justice still on the court from that 2001 case is Clarence Thomas, who dissented then, but the current majority is more aligned with his view.  

Transgender athletes in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox

The court is also set to rule on whether states can ban transgender women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports. There are two separate cases regarding bans in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively. The court seemed likely to side with the states on the matter that implicates similar laws in 25 other states as well.

Last term, the majority upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in the Skrmetti case. Earlier this term, the majority sided with California parents on school policies that sought to prevent outing transgender students.  

Geofence warrants in Chatrie v. United States

Finally, there’s the Fourth Amendment case of Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of armed robbery based on evidence obtained from a “geofence warrant.” Such warrants are used to locate phones that were in the area of a crime to help law enforcement identify suspects. Chatrie argues that the government illegally invaded his property interest and privacy expectations. The government counters that he chose to share his location data with Google and that he lacked a constitutional interest in protecting it.

Geofence warrants have divided the lower courts and raised concerns for civil liberties, with one privacy group warning the justices that “the dragnet fishing expeditions that geofence warrants allow are not restricted to a small pond, but instead sweep in the full ocean of people who carry a cell phone.”

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