How the Midterms Could Complicate the Supreme Court’s New Term
New York Times · LC · trust 58/100
Even before the justices start their new term on Monday, the court has spent the summer resolving fast-moving requests on election-related disputes.
Listen · 11:14 min Share full article 24 The court will hear oral arguments in about 60 cases starting on Monday and continuing through late April. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times By Ann E. Marimow and Abbie VanSickle
Ann E. Marimow and Abbie VanSickle cover the Supreme Court.
Yet with the court’s new term beginning Monday, scarcely a month before the closely watched midterms, the court may be unable to avoid getting uncomfortably pulled into electoral politics.
With partisans on both sides primed for potential election challenges, lawsuits to settle hotly contested elections could end up before the court, potentially with the control of Congress at stake. They would land on top of an already packed docket of cases on culture war issues and President Trump’s agenda that were selected by the justices to be heard from the thousands of petitions they receive each year.
The result could be another consequential and controversial span on the bench for the justices, even as their public poll numbers have dipped and elected leaders and candidates, particularly in the insurgent wing of the Democratic Party, have called for an overhaul of the court.
The court “knows what an extraordinary politicized moment we are in,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University Law School. For that reason, the justices would prefer not to be involved in lawsuits that would affect results or allow state officials to affect results.
But, he said, if the justices see a true post-election emergency, “it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t intervene” if called on.
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