Guns, Abortion Pill and Free Speech Top Supreme Court Docket Amid Ethics Questions; Justice Sotomayor’s Lack of ‘respect’: Justices Stew as High Court Opens New Term

The U.S. Supreme Court opens a new term on Monday staring down a fresh docket of cases and more opportunities to deliver big wins for conservatives that could continue to transform American life and the law.

Second Amendment advocates want the justices to allow Americans under domestic violence restraining orders to possess guns. Business groups are seeking to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and roll back federal agency power. South Carolina Republicans are asking to reinstate an election map that lower courts deemed racist.

The justices will also likely take up the legality of Food and Drug Administration regulations around the abortion pill mifepristone; a federal ban on machine guns applied to bump stocks; and school bans on transgender students using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

The big question is how far the high court’s six-member conservative-leaning majority will go.

“There was a lot of evidence that the court had become a 6-3 conservative court that was moving very quickly and very far in a rightward direction. This past term, though, looked different,” said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

Decisions handed down in June upholding a key section of the Voting Rights Act, siding with Native American tribes and affirming President Joe Biden’s immigration policy surprised many veteran court watchers for their restraint compared to prior rulings like the 5-4 decision to reverse Roe v. Wade’s protections of abortion access.

Gornstein said the more recent decisions reflect a “3-3-3 court” — referring to the alignment of the justices — with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in the middle bloc, exerting a relatively moderating influence that could extend into the new term.

“The liberal justices on the court last term were more often in the majority than Justices [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas,” said David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This term will give us more evidence as to what type of court this is.” —>READ MORE HERE

Justice Sotomayor’s lack of ‘respect’: Justices stew as high court opens new term:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor seems to have lost respect for her colleagues on the Supreme Court — literally.

In several of her major dissenting opinions last term, Justice Sotomayor dropped the usual decorum, in which justices write that they “respectfully dissent,” and instead flatly declared, “I dissent.”

Court observers said it’s a sign of growing frustration from Justice Sotomayor and the high court’s two other Democratic-appointed members, who are limited in their ability to prevail on the big questions of law that are reaching the court with increasing frequency.

The court opens its term Monday with the justices engaged in brazen public sniping over ethics rules and with nerves still somewhat frayed from the end of the last term in June when the conservative majority issued rulings striking down race-based college affirmative action programs, sided with artists in a dispute over doing business with same-sex couples and erased President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Mike Davis, a court watcher and founder of the Article III Project, said the liberal justices feel embattled.

“I do sense there’s more tension than normal, and I think it’s because the three Democratic appointees kind of feel desperate,” Mr. Davis told The Washington Times. “They feel it’s 6-3. Sometimes they can pick off [Justice Brett M.] Kavanaugh and the chief, but they’re going to be in the minority for probably the rest of their lives.”

The tension roiled the court’s final ruling of last term: the student loan case.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in the key opinion, delivered a judicial spanking to the three Democratic-appointed justices, who complained that the majority was engaging in judicial adventurism and straining legal reasoning to erase one of the president’s marquee accomplishments. The chief justice called the vehemence of the dissent “disturbing.” —>READ MORE HERE

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