Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. The new Supreme Court term starts Monday. We’re coming off a huge term that featured historic decisions on birthright citizenship, voting rights, tariffs, presidential firing power and more. Despite losing on citizenship and tariffs, and despite being blocked from immediately firing Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, the Trump administration is pressing backup plans on those fronts that could eventually return them to the high court.

The justices were off the bench for the summer, but they decided several important emergency matters, including ones related to the November midterm elections. Although they backed Donald Trump’s White House ballroom construction — over a notable dissent led by Chief Justice John Roberts — the justices blocked the president’s mail ballot restrictions as well as Missouri’s bid to use a congressional map that could’ve gained Republicans another House seat next month.

Trump lashed out on social media following those losses, calling his three high court picks who ruled against him “merely a shell of their original selves.” In a line that Democrats likely agree with but for different reasons, he said the court’s “inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.”

The dramatic complaint follows a term that was an overall win for Trump and the GOP. And just this month, the court granted emergency relief ahead of the midterms for Republicans on campaign broadcast advertising rates and, for the administration, on using a citizenship verification database — the latter over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees, who raised concerns about lawful voters being disenfranchised.

Emergency shadow docket rulings happen year-round and will continue even after the new term starts. The justices could be called on to quickly decide any urgent matters that arise in connection with the midterms, as well as enduring issues such as capital punishment.

The death penalty was in focus this week after the GOP-appointed majority cleared the way for Christa Pike’s execution in Tennessee, over dissent that accused the majority of abusing its power. Despite the high court’s help, the state failed to carry out the death sentence that was imposed for the brutal 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike survived what her lawyers called a “torturous” botched lethal injection, the state’s second failed attempt to execute an inmate this year. (As of this writing, the latest reporting is that Pike is unconscious on a ventilator at a Nashville hospital.)

The court’s regularly scheduled business for the term starts Monday morning. The first case set for argument is Suncor v. Boulder, in which oil and gas companies want the justices to block a lawsuit in Colorado state court that seeks to hold them liable for climate change damages. The companies say federal law bars the suit. They’ll make their case to an eight-member bench after Justice Samuel Alito’s surprising, last-minute recusal due to his financial interest in the energy sector.

Alito’s absence raises the prospect of a 4-4 deadlock, which would effectively uphold the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that the companies want the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn. Supported by the Trump administration, they tell the justices that letting the suit move forward could be ruinous for corporations nationwide. The hearing should signal where the court is headed.

On top of that important climate case, other big ones this term will include appeals over whether the Second Amendment protects AR-15 ownership; requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in Arizona; and immigration cases featuring the administration’s unprecedented mass detention policy and its efforts to quickly deport people to countries other than their country of origin.

For a refresher on (or introduction to) how the term will unfold, the justices hold two-week hearing sessions from October through April and typically decide all the cases by July. They issue opinions on a rolling basis throughout the term, with some of the most consequential rulings coming in late June because those can take the longest for the court to sort out.

We don’t know all the cases the justices will decide this term because they fill out their calendar as the year goes on. Among the issues they could add to their docket are the constitutionality of Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms, as well as administration policies such as banning transgender people from the military.

Trump is also pressing the justices to take up several appeals from his personal docket, including his effort to upend the $83.3 million defamation judgment that E. Jean Carroll won against him (the justices previously declined to review his appeal in the separate $5 million case she won against him). He also wants to revive a defamation case against CNN that stems from his 2020 election loss, as well as a case against Hillary Clinton in which he claims that the former secretary of state and others conspired to “weave a false narrative” that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

Speaking of elections, on top of any emergency midterms litigation that comes to the court, if Democrats regain Senate control next month, that will prompt another round of speculation over whether Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas or both will step down so that a Republican president and Senate can replace them before the chamber changes hands. The court’s senior-most members haven’t given any indication they are going anywhere — quite the opposite — but would they want to roll the dice on potentially leaving the court someday with Democrats in power?

One thing we know for sure is that Trump is happier with those two justices, who were appointed by previous Republican presidents, than he has been with his own appointees. In the same breath that he trashed Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, he called Thomas and Alito “legends.”

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