Gun, transgender rights, porn cases loom as US Supreme Court returns

The U.S. Supreme Court launches its new nine-month term on Monday with several major cases already on its schedule — involving guns, transgender rights, online pornography and more — and with the possibility of confronting legal disputes that may arise from the Nov. 5 presidential election.

The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority continues to move U.S. law rightward on a range of topics, is coming off another blockbuster term capped by its contentious July 1 ruling granting Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for many actions taken while president.

The justices return from their summer recess under intense scrutiny by many politicians and the public not only for their legal rulings but for simmering ethics scandals, unsolved leaks of confidential information, and some public airing of differences among themselves.

“Something does feel broken,” Lisa Blatt, a lawyer who frequently argues before the court, said during an event in Washington on Tuesday. “Some of them up there — at oral arguments when I see them — they just seem visibly frustrated.”

The first big case before the court comes on Tuesday, when it hears arguments involving largely untraceable, home-assembled firearms called “ghost guns.” President Joe Biden’s administration appealed a lower court’s decision that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority in issuing a 2022 regulation intended to rein in these weapons that, according to law enforcement authorities, are regularly used in crimes nationwide.

Among other cases, the justices are due to hear the administration’s challenge to a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, upheld by a lower court.

Also in store are arguments in the adult entertainment industry’s appeal of a Republican-backed Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify the age of users in a bid to limit access to minors. Arguments are due as well in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s defense of its rejection of applications by two companies to sell flavored vape products it has determined pose health risks for young consumers.

Argument dates have not yet been announced in those three cases.

Deepening divisions

The ruling on Trump’s immunity seemed to deepen divisions within the court, mirroring ideological fractures in a divided United States.

“I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances, when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told CBS in August.

Some of the liberal justices previously went public with doubts about the court’s direction following the conservative majority’s 2022 rulings overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent that had legalized abortion nationwide and expanding gun rights. Those comments prompted push back from conservative justices including Samuel Alito.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said the court’s current heightened scrutiny arises from the “questionable behavior of some of the justices in terms of taking gifts, and for the Republican-appointed justices’ highly problematic approach to constitutional interpretation.”

The court’s majority, Stone said, “continues to impose politically conservative values in its interpretation of the Constitution.”

Others reject the notion of the court as politicized or corrupt.

“I think a lot of those arguments are made in bad faith by people who just disagree with the substance of the court’s decisions,” said Washington attorney William Jay, who has also litigated at the Supreme Court.

Trump is the Republican candidate facing Democratic rival Kamala Harris in November’s election. After losing to his Democratic opponent Biden in 2020, Trump made false claims of widespread voting fraud, as he and his allies pursued numerous legal challenges.

The justices declined to entertain those challenges, but could be called upon again in the coming months to deal with election disputes – an area Jay said they would prefer to avoid.

“I think they’re all of the same view that it would be undesirable for the court to have to resolve the case about the election,” Jay said. “But at the same time, we only have one Supreme Court, and there’s really only one body that’s able to definitively settle a case that could have really high stakes.”

Media reports since last year have documented the failure of some justices, notably conservatives Clarence Thomas and Alito, to publicly disclose private jet travel and other gifts from wealthy benefactors.

Under fire from some Democrats and other critics, the court last year announced its first code of conduct for the justices, though it lacked any enforcement mechanism. Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan both in recent months voiced support for adding such a mechanism.

Biden in July proposed 18-year term limits for the justices, who currently serve life tenures, and a binding code of conduct. Opposition by Republicans left his reforms with scant chance of enactment.

Confidentiality and trust among the justices has also been tested, first by the leak of a draft of the 2022 abortion decision and then in September when the New York Times published details from internal memos concerning Trump’s immunity bid.

Blatt called the latest leak “nothing short of shocking,” suggesting that there may be a sense “that the ends justify the means. But it’s not good.”