The first Monday in October used to mark a beginning. The ritual is familiar to every American who was taught civics by a teacher who believed in it: the justices file back into the marble, the gavel falls, a new term begins. On Monday, when the nine file back into the courtroom at One First Street, the ritual will be back. The institution behind it is not the one most Americans remember. What begins this week is the next chapter of the most consequential transfer of constitutional power in modern American history. The Supreme Court of the United States has, by design and by accumulation, become the auxiliary courthouse of the second Trump administration. The docket lays the transformation bare.
Start with religion, because that is where the century gets flipped fastest. St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado, wants the state’s universal pre-K money and does not want to admit the children of gay or transgender parents. The parish claims free-exercise protection. The state points to its civil-rights law. The case asks whether the Constitution now requires taxpayers to fund religious schools that are free to discriminate. For the better part of a hundred years the court emphasized separation of church and state, with free exercise as the secondary concern. As Michigan State’s Frank Ravitch puts it, “It’s literally the opposite of what the law was not that long ago, and it’s just a complete shift.” Last term a separate religious-school case out of Oklahoma deadlocked 4-4 after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused, leaving in place a state-court ruling that barred taxpayer funding of an overtly religious charter school. Barrett is participating this time. Taxpayers should expect to lose.
The numbers behind all of this are the scandal. As Georgetown’s Stephen Vladeck observes, the court now issues “twice as many full court rulings on emergency applications as we have on the merits docket.” That is not a court. It is a switchboard. Emergency rulings are decided fast, with thin briefing, no oral argument, and explanations so abbreviated that lower-court judges — liberal and conservative alike — openly complain they cannot follow them. The Trump administration has learned how to use the switchboard. It leapfrogs the courts of appeals it dislikes, files for emergency relief, and walks away with the result it wanted before a single appellate judge has weighed in. That is a new institution, not a busy court. The fall term will look like a summer term that never stopped.
Then the guns. In December the court will hear a Second Amendment challenge to state and local bans on the AR-15, the weapon of choice for mass shooters from Parkland to Uvalde. The argument will turn on whether Americans have a right to bear the same arms the modern military uses. The plaintiffs’ framing, as gun-rights lawyer Erin Murphy puts it, is that “you’ve got this right against the government, but the government decides which arms you can get.” That framing is itself the story. A court that took the Second Amendment seriously as a constraint on the popular branches would weigh public safety against individual rights and almost certainly uphold a ban on the weapon of choice for the country’s worst mass shootings. A court that has been captured by the gun lobby will strike the ban down, because striking the ban down is the work it has been assigned.
On Monday itself — the ceremonial opening — the justices take up a fossil-fuel deception suit brought by state and local governments against the energy industry. Ten years ago the plaintiffs would have had a real chance. Most court observers now see the case as an uphill fight, and that is precisely the point. The energy companies are accused of allegedly deceiving the public about fossil fuels for decades. State and local governments want to hold them accountable. The court’s recent signals are not favorable. The case is being heard first, and likely to be lost, so the bigger prizes can be argued and won.
Immigration arrives in December on the same pattern. The administration is testing how far the law will bend: third-country deportations, sending migrants to nations where they have no ties, may not speak the language, and have reportedly been jailed and tortured. The administration claims it can deport people to Sudan, South Sudan, El Salvador — wherever — with no notice, no due process, and no regard for whether the deportee has ever set foot in the destination country. The court has twice blocked lower-court rulings against the policy and has now agreed to hear the merits. The justices will, in all likelihood, bless it. A second immigration case, testing indefinite detention without a bond hearing regardless of how long a person has lived in the country, will be argued in the same posture. Both cases are about executive power at its outermost edge, and the merits argument is less about the legal merits than about whether the court is willing to write the new policy into doctrine.
In the wings are more cases that will define the term. One asks the court to overturn its 1980 ruling — nearly half a century old — barring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama have already passed laws designed to collide with that precedent. The lower courts have split; the circuit split all but guarantees review, and reversal. Another asks whether states can regulate Kalshi, the $40 billion prediction-market platform that lets Americans bet on everything from the next pitch to the next Supreme Court ruling — a question of state regulatory power heading straight up on appeal. The existence of a market in which the justices’ decisions are themselves a tradable asset is, on its own, a quiet monument to what the court has become. Also pending: the administration’s slow-walked cases against law firms it views as hostile, back from the dead after a one-day reversal, and the Harvard medical-research grants case. And on the merits docket itself, election law is “waiting in the wings.”
That last phrase matters. The biggest cases of this term are not on the docket yet. As Vladeck warns, “The real story of the upcoming term hasn’t been written yet because what we’re going to look back on as the biggest cases of the term … are not on the docket yet.” They will arrive through the emergency channel, in the weeks before the midterms and after. With voting fewer than forty days away, the administration has built an aggressive, multi-front effort to influence the midterm outcome, and every serious challenge will land at One First Street, on the shadow docket, with no oral argument and a one-paragraph explanation. Lawyers for both parties are already lined up at the steps. The institutional infrastructure for a contested post-election season is being built in real time, with the court as the terminal. As Stanford’s Pam Karlan puts it, the administration’s lawyers “don’t want to take up cases that they’re going to lose, but on the other hand, they have a boss who wants everything taken up there.” That tension — between an executive who wants everything and a court that is increasingly unwilling to disappoint him — is the engine of every emergency ruling the country will read this term.
The Roberts Court once pretended that its emergency docket was a stopgap, that its religion cases were about narrow exemptions, that its gun cases were about historical analogues, that its immigration cases were about deference to the political branches. That pretense is over. The pattern of the new term will confirm it: an unsigned, two-paragraph order, arriving without warning, that overrides a circuit court’s reasoned judgment in an afternoon — that is the opinion that will tell the country what kind of court it is living under. This is not a court gradually adjusting doctrine. It is a court that has been re-engineered, term by term, to do the work the elected branches will not do — or, increasingly, the work the executive wants done quickly and quietly. The same court, in the same building, is now the press’s last line of defense against a White House that wants to silence critical coverage, and the executive’s first call when it wants a result it cannot get anywhere else — the same pattern of institutional-norm rollbacks inside the executive branch that this court will be asked to adjudicate. The cases coming this term are not isolated controversies. They are the visible surface of a much larger transformation.
The first Monday in October is no longer a beginning. It is a confirmation. The country is going to learn the difference between what a court was and what this one has become, whether or not it is paying attention to the docket.