One mystery, and two looming disasters, in the next Supreme Court term

Three issues dominate the Supreme Court term that begins next week, based on the cases the justices have agreed to hear so far. Realistically, however, there is little uncertainty about how this GOP-dominated Court will resolve two of them. The uncertain question is whether the Court will strike down President Donald Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs — a question the justices will take up in November. The tariffs are clearly illegal under a doctrine the Republican justices used to halt many of President Joe Biden’s policies. And many leading conservatives are vocal opponents of the tariffs, some of whom are even involved in this case. But the Court’s Republican majority rarely breaks with Trump. There’s less mystery about how the Court will handle two other groups of cases, which concern election law and LGBTQ issues. The Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act — the landmark 1965 law that banned race discrimination in elections. Kagan’s Republican colleagues repealed central provisions of the law, and misread other provisions of the law so egregiously that it is hard to believe they are acting in good faith. In its upcoming term, the Republican justices are widely expected to expand on this project — abolishing the Voting Rights Act’s longstanding safeguards against racial gerrymandering. And they are expected to do so at the very moment that President Donald Trump is pushing Republican lawmakers to gerrymander their states to lock the Democratic Party out of power. The Court is also likely to advance another of the Republican justices’ longstanding projects: destroying campaign finance regulation. One of the few campaign finance laws that even most Republican judges have historically supported is a cap on donations to individual candidates. During the 2026 election cycle, for example, congressional candidates may only accept up to $3,500 from each individual donor to their primary election campaign, and another $3,500 for their general election campaign. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, however, the Republican justices are likely to open up a loophole that would effectively allow donors to give tens of thousands of dollars to individual candidates, thus increasing wealthy donors’ ability to trade money for favors. The other big loser in the upcoming term is likely to be queer people. The Court seems poised to strike down bans on “conversion therapy,” where therapists try to suppress their patients’ sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s also likely to uphold state laws requiring student athletes to play on a sex-segregated team that aligns with their sex assigned at birth. Many of the biggest cases of the upcoming term, moreover, are yet to be determined. The Court announces which cases it will hear during its October to April argument sessions on a rolling basis, typically finalizing the full list during the winter. Last term, the Court handed down a long string of temporary decisions handing significant victories to Donald Trump — including a decision permitting him to fire so many federal employees that many federal programs cease to function. Several of these cases are likely to return to the Court in 2026, so we will find out soon if the justices intend to permanently endorse many of Trump’s most aggressive attempts to remake American society. In the meantime, here are the significant cases the Court already plans to hear in its upcoming term, and what’s at stake in each of them. The tariffs cases: Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources v. Trump If you’ve paid attention to US economic policy or business news these past several months, you’re already familiar with the tariffs cases. Trump has imposed very high, and frequently changing, taxes on goods imported to the United States. Many federal judges have determined that these tariffs are illegal. The justices will decide in the upcoming Supreme Court term whether they agree. Trump claims that the tariffs are permitted under a federal law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), which enables the president to “regulate…transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” IEEPA, however, only permits the president to use this power “to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat.” The plaintiffs challenging the tariffs raise several statutory arguments against them. Among other things, they argue that the power to “regulate” imports does not include the power to tax them. And they also argue that Trump hasn’t identified any “unusual and extraordinary threat” that can justify the tariffs. The president points to trade deficits with other nations; those have been commonplace since the 1970s. Additionally, the Republican justices frequently struck down Biden-era policies that, in their words, involved questions of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Trump’s tariffs have enormous economic and political significance. So, if the Court’s Republicans intend to apply the same rules to Trump that they did to Biden, they must strike the tariffs down. It’s springtime for gerrymandering: Louisiana v. Callais In 2023, the Supreme Court shocked pretty much everyone who follows election law when it upheld a lower court decision requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional maps to include an additional Black-majority district. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Allen v. Milligan, the lower court’s decision holding that Alabama’s original maps violated the Voting Rights Act “faithfully applied our precedents.” But the Republican justices had shown such unrelenting hostility to the Voting Rights Act that the Court’s decision to honor those precedents was shocking. Now, however, it appears that Milligan was a one-off decision, and the Court’s decision in that case was likely due to bad lawyering by Alabama’s attorneys. On October 15, the Court will hear oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that is virtually identical to Milligan, and the justices asked for special briefing on whether the Voting Rights Act’s anti-gerrymandering safeguards violate the Constitution. So it’s not hard to guess how this case will turn out. A decision abolishing those safeguards is likely to devastate Black representation in red states where voting is racially polarized — meaning that Black people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats while white voters similarly favor Republicans. It’s also likely to supercharge Trump’s efforts to gerrymander Congress to lock the GOP into power, because it will remove a barrier that Republican lawmakers had to overcome in order to draw partisan gerrymanders. It’s winter for campaign finance regulation: National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC In their infamous decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Republican justices held that corporations may spend unlimited amounts of money to influence US elections. That led to a proliferation of entities, such as super PACs, that can spend millions of dollars on behalf of a particular candidate, but which are at least nominally distinct from that candidate’s campaign. In theory, super PACs are not supposed to coordinate their spending or messaging with the candidates they support. Direct donations to candidates, by contrast, are still capped; in the 2026 election cycle, congressional candidates may raise no more than $7,000 per donor. Political parties, meanwhile, may accept donations subject to a higher cap. Party committees like the Republican State Leadership Committee or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for example, may accept donations up to $44,300 per year. Federal law prohibits these party groups from coordinating with individual candidates to determine how these larger donations are spent. As the Supreme Court warned in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), “expenditures controlled by or coordinated with the candidate and his campaign might well have virtually the same value to the candidate as a contribution and would pose similar dangers of abuse.” If the DCCC, for example, can accept a $40,000 donation from a donor who wants to use that money to elect Joe Smith to Congress, and if the DCCC can work with Smith’s campaign to determine how that money is spent, then the law might as well allow donors to give $40,000 directly to Smith’s campaign. In National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP asks the Court to tear down this prohibition on coordinated expenditures, and effectively permit wealthy donors to give tens of thousands of dollars directly to candidates. Given the Republican justices’ hostility to campaign finance laws, it is likely that Republicans will get what they want. The trans sports cases: Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. Much of transgender politics over the past several years have focused on the issues at the heart of Little and B.P.J. Many states have laws that prohibit trans student athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. The Supreme Court is going to decide whether those laws violate either the Constitution or a federal ban on sex discrimination in education. Realistically, these would be tough cases for the trans community to win even if the Court were not dominated by conservative Republicans. In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Court held that a federal law prohibiting “sex” discrimination by employers forbids anti-trans discrimination in the workplace. The Court reasoned that if an employer “intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth,” then it is treating workers differently based on their sex. But the Bostock framework does not apply to sports, because sports teams are one of the few areas where US law generally tolerates sex segregation. Sex discrimination is inherent in the very concept of a men’s or women’s sports team, so trans advocates cannot challenge exclusionary policies simply by pointing out that they engage in sex discrimination. And, of course, the Court is dominated by conservative Republicans who, in United States v. Skrmetti (2025), recently held that states may prohibit minors from receiving gender-affirming health care. So trans advocates face a difficult uphill climb in Little and B.P.J. Conversion therapy: Chiles v. Salazar About half of US states have laws restricting “conversion therapy,” a discredited method of counseling that attempts to turn LGBTQ patients cisgender or heterosexual. The Colorado law at issue in Chiles, for example, bars conversion therapy for patients under age 18, though it also exempts counselors who are “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.” As one federal appeals court explained, “every major medical, psychiatric, psychological, and professional mental health organization opposes the use of conversion therapy.” The American Psychological Association, for example, says that it “‘puts individuals at a significant risk of harm’ and is not effective in changing a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.” That said, Chiles does raise a difficult First Amendment question. On the one hand, it’s not hard to imagine how a law prohibiting some forms of talk therapy implicates the constitutional guarantee of free speech. On the other hand, the law has historically permitted states to regulate professional misconduct, even if that misconduct involves speech. A lawyer may be disbarred for telling a client that it is legal to rob banks, and a physician can be charged with murder if they tell a patient to drink a jug of arsenic. Will those examples be enough to persuade this Supreme Court that the Colorado law is a regulation of professional misconduct, and not an attack on free speech? Unlikely. But the justices will, at least, need to wrestle with how to distinguish speech by a lawyer or doctor from speech by a therapist. Executing people with an intellectual disability: Hamm v. Smith Nearly a quarter century ago, in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), a coalition of Democratic and moderate Republican justices held that offenders with an intellectual disability may not be sentenced to death. They reasoned that these individuals have diminished mental capacity, at least as compared to nondisabled adults, and thus bear less moral responsibility for homicide crimes. Another decision three years later applied the same logic to juvenile offenders. Both decisions were met with mockery and derision from the Court’s right flank, and that right flank now controls the Supreme Court. So the question in Hamm v. Smith is just how far these justices will go to roll back decisions like Atkins. The death row inmate at the heart of Smith, Joseph Clifton Smith, took several IQ tests where he scored slightly above 70. Courts often look at whether an inmate’s IQ score is below 70 when determining if they are intellectually disabled, though the Supreme Court has held that other factors can support a finding that Smith has an intellectual disability. Nevertheless, if a majority of the justices want to decide Smith narrowly, they could simply rule that borderline cases such as Smith do not fall within Atkins, and that Smith may be executed. A second possibility is that the Court could overrule Atkins, thus permitting people who unquestionably are intellectually disabled to be killed by the state. And then there’s a third possibility. Writing for the Republican justices in Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed to suggest that the past six decades of Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments should be tossed out, and that courts should simply ask whether a particular form of punishment was considered too cruel in 1789. If Gorsuch gets his way, that would be a catastrophic event for all criminal defendants. Among other things, Gorsuch’s approach would likely eliminate any constitutional concerns about disproportionate punishments. So someone could potentially get the death penalty for shoplifting, or life in prison for jaywalking. It’s also theoretically possible that the Supreme Court will agree with a lower court that held that Smith may not be executed. But, given the Republican Party’s broad support for the death penalty, that outcome seems unlikely. Arbitrarily tossing out ballots: Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections The specific legal issue before the Court in Bost is fairly low stakes: The Court will decide if the plaintiffs in this case — candidates for federal office — are permitted to bring a lawsuit seeking to toss out many ballots in states that permit voting by mail. Even if these plaintiffs prevail in the Supreme Court, though, that will only give them an opportunity to pursue their (entirely ridiculous) legal challenge in lower courts. The case is worth watching, however, because three of the Trumpiest judges in the country handed down a decision last year claiming that it is illegal for states to count mailed-in ballots that are mailed before Election Day, but that arrive afterward.The three Fifth Circuit judges’ opinion in that case, known as Republican National Committee v. Wetzel, claims that an 1872 law setting the date for federal elections also prohibits states from counting ballots that arrive after that date, and somehow no one noticed this fact for the previous 152 years. In any event, the Fifth Circuit routinely hands down decisions that are too outlandish even for this Supreme Court, and it is likely that the justices will eventually reverse the decision in Wetzel. Depending on what the Court says in Bost, that decision may wind up shutting down Wetzel as well. The cases listed above are drawn exclusively from the matters the justices have already agreed to hear on their merits docket. They will undoubtedly be joined by several more blockbuster cases, including multiple challenges to Trump’s mass firings, attempts to cancel federal spending, and his aggressive use of federal law enforcement. Even without these additional cases, however, the 2025–’26 term is already shaping up to be extraordinarily consequential.