(AFP) – The US Supreme Court opens its new term on Monday with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, gun rights, and the fate of climate change lawsuits on the docket. The session opens one month ahead of a crucial midterm vote that could see President Donald Trump’s Republican Party lose its majority in the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate. Losing control of Congress would force the president to have to rely even more on the conservative-dominated top court to push through his policies.
Not that it has always been in lockstep with Trump. Trump suffered stinging defeats this year over his tariffs and bid to restrict birthright citizenship, sparking tirades by the president against the court, particularly the three justices he appointed during his first White House term. “I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often,” he told Time magazine in a recent interview. At the same time, the 6-3 conservative majority has allowed Trump to vastly expand his executive powers and handed him a number of victories on what is known as the emergency docket, where cases are fast-tracked without oral arguments.
At the end of September, for example, in an immigration case in which the three liberal justices dissented, the court allowed the administration to continue for the time being to deport undocumented migrants to countries that are not their own. The court will hear oral arguments in that case during the fall term, and a ruling in the administration’s favor could open the floodgates to more so-called “third country” deportations. More than 25,000 people have been sent to third countries since Trump returned to office after reaching secret agreements with some 35 nations, most of them in Latin America and Africa.
In another immigration case, the court will weigh a new practice of automatically detaining undocumented migrants — even those who have lived in the United States for years — instead of releasing them while their cases are being adjudicated. “The Trump administration is interpreting that mandatory detention statute in a way that no administration has ever done in the 30 years since that statute was enacted,” said Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “It’s to pressure people to, as the government puts it, self-deport.”
The opening case of the term may decide whether climate suits brought by local governments against oil companies for their role in global warming can proceed or whether federal law should prevail. On the election front, the Supreme Court will take up an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Trump and fellow Republicans have baselessly claimed for years that many non-citizens vote in US elections, but studies have shown the actual number is insignificant.
Gun ownership returns to the court in a case challenging state or local bans on certain semi-automatic weapons such as AR-15s. The role of religion in public education will be tested when the justices hear a case involving a Catholic preschool in Colorado that denies admission to children of LGBTQ+ parents. The question in the case is “whether they have a right to receive taxpayer dollars without following the non-discrimination rules that apply to everyone else,” said Dan Mack, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
On the eve of the new term, Justice Samuel Alito, a staunch conservative, gave a rare public interview in which he told Fox News Sunday he was “concerned about the future of the court.” “There has been a concerted effort to intimidate the court and justices on the court to try to influence us to decide cases,” the 76-year-old Alito said. A recent Gallup survey found that Americans’ views of the Supreme Court are at their least positive since the organization began polling on the institution in 1972. Only 34 percent of US adults approve of the job the court is doing, essentially unchanged from the record-low 33 percent approval tallied in July, Gallup said.
– Selim SAHEB ETTABA
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