The U.S. Supreme Court term begins each year in October, with bigger decisions often not expected until the end of the term in June.
The term that starts this year will include cases that touch on issues related to campaign finance, the environment, voting rights, and immigration, among others.
Seth Chandler, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said he feels the most important case that is coming this term is Trump v. Slaughter.
“It’s about the ability of the president to control what were previously called ‘independent agencies.’ These are things like the Federal Trade Commission, the FCC, the Federal Election Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, all the agencies to which Congress has been delegated vast amounts of power over the past hundred years,” Chandler said. “And they’ve done so under the assumption that the president can’t fire people that he doesn’t like.”
However, Chandler said President Trump believes that those restrictions on his authority are unconstitutional.
“What the president wants ultimately is the ability to fire those people and replace them with people who are more persuaded of his ideology,” he said.
This is not the only case centering on Trump’s power as president this term. The case Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump is about the president’s tariffs, which he has passed without explicit authorization of Congress.
“Instead, what the president is relying on is a statute called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, which does give the president power to act in certain emergencies,” Chandler said. “And the thought is that this is really going beyond the expectations of Congress when they passed the statute and that the president shouldn’t be able to take such major actions without a clear statement from Congress that this is acceptable. The president takes the opposite view.”
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Voting rights are also on the agenda this Supreme Court term, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais. This case centers on whether section two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is constitutional.
“Louisiana believed that it needed to draw two districts of its seven in which African Americans would have a reasonable chance of getting their preferred candidate elected,” Chandler said. “But that doesn’t sound like race blindness of the sort that the court has said should apply in, for example, college admissions or elsewhere.
And so we have a tension between section two of the Voting Rights Act, which has been interpreted to require essentially race consciousness and notions of equal protection, which suggests that race should not be used except perhaps under the most extreme circumstances.”
The court will also likely rule on a case that will decide the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
“The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that every person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof is a citizen of the United States,” Chandler said. “Historically, that little qualifier, ‘subject to jurisdiction thereof,’ has been interpreted very, very narrowly to only apply, for example, to children of ambassadors or enemy aliens who have children while they’re here.”
The justices heard a case on this executive order last term, but didn’t rule on the executive order’s validity outright, Chandler said. Instead, they focused their ruling about the extent to which federal courts could offer relief.
But the case has now gone back down to lower courts and is very likely to rise up again to the Supreme Court.
