Major Supreme Court decisions coming on Trump, religion, transgender care

WASHINGTON – And now we wait.

The Supreme Court on May 15 heard its final case before adjourning for the summer, debating how hard it should be to challenge President Donald Trump’s policy initiatives, particularly his executive order ending the guarantee of birthright citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States.

Their upcoming decision is one of nearly three dozen left for the court to hand down in the coming weeks.

Those opinions may not rise to the level of blockbusters from recent terms such as presidential immunity, overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, new tests for gun restrictions or upending affirmative action.

But some will have a major impact, particularly three big religious rights cases.

A freedom of religion term

“I think this is a big freedom of religion term,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The court’s 6-3 conservative majority is likely to continue its trend of siding with people who say their freedom of religion is being infringed upon over those who say there’s too much entanglement between the government and religion.

“This term, in many ways, is going to be the culmination of a number of cases that began eight to 10 years ago,” Levinson said.

While another major decision to come – whether states can ban gender affirming care for minors – is not about the free exercise of religion, it came to the court as part of the same cultural upheaval driving the religions rights case, said Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School.

“Certainly for the people who are involved in these cases, they see it as part of the same broader clash,” he said.

Moving in a more conservative direction, not charting a new legal course

Dorf agreed the coming decisions will likely be more of a continuation of past rulings, mostly in a very conservative direction, rather than the court charting a new course.

But there is a difference: the Trump administration.

“We’re living in pretty unprecedented circumstances given all of the ways in which the Trump administration is, at the very least, testing the boundaries of what is lawful,” he said.

That means the court’s decision on whether to limit the ability of judges to block Trump’s policies will be one of its most consequential, according to Dorf.

“If you think about any area where there’s an executive order,” Levinson said, “if federal judges don’t have the ability to stop that order from being implemented nationwide, that could significantly change the legal landscape.”

Here’s a look at what to expect.

Limiting challenges to Trump’s executive authority

Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship has been put on hold by judges across the country who ruled it’s probably unconstitutional.

During the May 15 oral arguments, none of the justices voiced support for the Trump administration’s theory that the president’s order is consistent with the 14^th Amendment’s citizenship clause and past Supreme Court decisions about that provision.

But several of the justices have expressed concern about the ability of one judge to block a law or presidential order from going into effect anywhere in the country while it’s being challenged.

It was unclear from the oral arguments how the court might find a way to limit nationwide – or “universal” – court orders and what that would mean for birthright citizenship and the many other Trump policies being challenged in court.

Religious rights versus separation of church and state

Of the three religious rights cases, the biggest is the Catholic Church’s bid to run the nation’s first religious charter school. Although the court has previously allowed the use of vouchers for religious schools and said scholarship programs can’t exclude religious schools, this case could allow governments to establish and directly fund religious schools for the first time.

“That really does go beyond anything we’ve seen before,” Dorf said.

In the other religious rights cases, the court is likely to side with Catholic Charities in a dispute over when religious groups have to pay unemployment taxes. And the court’s conservative majority sounded sympathetic to Maryland parents who raised religious objections to having their elementary school children read books with LGBTQ+ characters.

The battle over transgender rights

Transgender rights cases were already making their way to the Supreme Court from state actions and now the Trump administration policies targeting transgender people will accelerate that trend. The court has already granted the administration’s emergency request that it be allowed to enforce its ban on transgender people serving in the military while that restriction is being challenged.

In one of the court’s biggest pending decisions, the justices will decide whether states can ban minors from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy. During December’s oral arguments, a majority seemed to agree states can do that.

But how they reach that conclusion will affect how much their decision applies to other transgender rights case including those about transgender athletes, whether health plans have to cover gender affirming care, where transgender inmates must be housed and if transgender people can serve in the military.

Implications for parental rights

While the court seems likely to rule against the parents challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors, they sounded poised to back the Maryland parents who want their elementary school children excused from class when books with LGBTQ+ characters are being read.

And in a case about Texas’ requirement that websites verify users are 18 or over, one justice expressed her own parental frustration over trying to control what her children see on the internet. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children, said she knows from personal experience how difficult it is to keep up with the content blocking devices that those challenging Texas’ law offered as a better alternative.

But while the justices were sympathetic to the purpose of Texas’ law, they may decide a lower court didn’t sufficiently review whether it violates the First Amendment rights of adults so must be reconsidered.

Gun cases could bring mixed results

In one of the court’s biggest decisions so far this year, a 7-2 majority upheld the Biden administration’s regulation of untraceable “ghost guns,” ruling that the weapons can be subject to background checks and other requirements.

But the court is expected to reject Mexico’s attempt to hold U.S. gunmakers liable for violence caused by Mexican drug cartels armed with their weapons. A majority of the justices sounded likely to agree with the gun makers that the chain of events between the manufacture of a gun and the harm it causes is too lengthy to blame the industry.

Neither case is directly about the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The court is still deciding whether to take up next year two cases about that right – Maryland’s ban on assault-style weapons and Rhode Island’s ban on high-capacity magazines.

Planned Parenthood, but not abortion directly, is an issue

Unlike last year when the court considered two cases about abortion access, that hot button issue is not directly before the court. But the justices are deciding whether to back South Carolina’s effort to deprive Planned Parenthood of public funding for other health services because it also provides abortions.

The issue is whether the law allows a Medicaid patient to sue South Carolina for excluding Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program.

If the court says the patient can’t sue, other GOP-led states are expected to also kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid. And anti-abortion advocates are pushing for a national ban.

Conservative challenges to Obamacare and internet subsidies

The court is considering conservative challenges to Obamacare and to an $8 billion federal program that subsidizes high-speed internet and phone service for millions of Americans.

The justices seemed likely to reject an argument that the telecommunications program is funded by an unconstitutional tax, a case that raised questions about how much Congress can “delegate” its legislative authority to a federal agency.

The latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act takes aim at 2010 law’s popular requirement that insurers cover without extra costs preventive care such as cancer screenings, cholesterol-lowering medication and diabetes tests.

Two Christian owned businesses and some people in Texas argue that the volunteer group of experts that recommends the services health insurance must cover is so powerful that, under the Constitution, its members must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

It seems unlikely that a majority of the justices were persuaded by that argument.

Multiple discrimination challenges

The court is deciding a number of cases about alleged discrimination in the workplace, at school and in drawing congressional boundaries.

The justices appeared likely to rule that a worker faced a higher hurdle to sue her employer as a straight woman than if she’d been gay, a decision that would make it easier to file “reverse discrimination” lawsuits.

The court may also side with a Minnesota teenager trying to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to sue her school for not accommodating her rare form of epilepsy that makes it difficult to attend class before noon.

It’s less clear whether the court will agree with non-Black voters in Louisiana that the state’s congressional map, which includes two majority-Black districts, discriminates against them.

Decisions in all the cases are expected by the end of June or early July.