by Jordan Rubin | Oct 3, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court, White House
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. The new Supreme Court term starts Monday. We’re coming off a huge term that featured historic decisions on birthright citizenship, voting rights, tariffs, presidential firing power and more. Despite losing on citizenship and tariffs, and despite being blocked from immediately firing Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, the Trump administration is pressing backup plans on those fronts that could eventually return them to the high court.
The justices were off the bench for the summer, but they decided several important emergency matters, including ones related to the November midterm elections. Although they backed Donald Trump’s White House ballroom construction — over a notable dissent led by Chief Justice John Roberts — the justices blocked the president’s mail ballot restrictions as well as Missouri’s bid to use a congressional map that could’ve gained Republicans another House seat next month.
Trump lashed out on social media following those losses, calling his three high court picks who ruled against him “merely a shell of their original selves.” In a line that Democrats likely agree with but for different reasons, he said the court’s “inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.”
The dramatic complaint follows a term that was an overall win for Trump and the GOP. And just this month, the court granted emergency relief ahead of the midterms for Republicans on campaign broadcast advertising rates and, for the administration, on using a citizenship verification database — the latter over dissent from the court’s Democratic appointees, who raised concerns about lawful voters being
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 30, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for the execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee for the brutal 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, who was a 19-year-old classmate of Pike’s at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville.
The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented from what they said was the majority’s decision to let the execution proceed “before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts.”
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an application from Pike, who was 18 at the time of the crime, to halt her execution that was scheduled for Wednesday. In that application, her lawyers cited clinical psychological evidence that Pike’s post-traumatic stress disorder “would be profoundly triggered before and during the execution process because it will simulate her repeated rapes and sexual abuse as a child.” They wanted the justices to put off her execution so that the high court could consider whether severe psychological torture violates the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.
But then a divided federal appellate panel halted the execution on Wednesday morning. The panel majority said it was entering a “short stay” to properly analyze the legal issues Pike raised, over a dissent that called it “another last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution.”
The state then brought the matter back to Washington, urging the high court to lift the stay, calling it an unjust reward for Pike’s “gamesmanship.” The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices have made similar criticisms of capital defense litigation.
Opposing the state’s application for her execution to go forward, Pike’s lawyers said her case raises “grave concerns about the execution of a teenaged
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 30, 2026 | culture, Deadline: Legal Blog, White House
When he was running for his first presidential term in 2016, Donald Trump told the nation: “I alone can fix it.”
A decade later, his administration is making a similar pitch to a federal appeals court, proclaiming the president as the only one who can save the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts from what the Trump-allied center’s board says is certain ruin.
And how can he pull off that feat?
By letting the board recognize him personally at what is, by law, a memorial to Kennedy in the nation’s capital.
“This Court should reverse the district court and allow the Board and President Trump to restore the Kennedy Center to greatness,” Justice Department lawyers told the Washington appeals court Monday after a district judge ruled against them.
The district judge’s orders “preventing the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to cease,” the DOJ said, touting the president’s “unrivaled expertise and experience in real estate and construction.”
The board “has long recognized that President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival and structural renewal,” the government’s brief said, kicking off appellate litigation that is set to continue through the fall.
Meanwhile, there is parallel litigation in the trial court before the district judge who ruled against the government, Obama appointee Christopher Cooper. Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, the board member who successfully sued for the removal of Trump’s name from the center, earlier this month brought to Cooper’s attention that the president was spotted reading a placard that seemed to say “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED” while his allies
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 28, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court
The Supreme Court announced Monday that Justice Samuel Alito won’t participate in the first case that will be argued in the new court term, which kicks off in just a week.
The surprise announcement follows a previous statement from the court that Alito was advised by the court’s counsel that, despite his energy stock holdings, his recusal wasn’t required in the appeal from oil and gas companies seeking to avoid state court liability for alleged damage from climate change.
The news appeared in the form of a letter published on the docket in Suncor v. Boulder, stating only that Alito “has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case.”
Although the letter gave no explanation for the last-minute exit, the George W. Bush appointee’s idiosyncratic investment practices have prevented him from participating in previous cases. A 2024 Bloomberg report noted that he was the only justice “with a stake in more than two dozen individual companies” and that most justices own mutual funds, which don’t create the same conflicts posed by individual stocks.
The financial conflict issue led Alito to recuse from another energy case earlier this year right before it was argued. Notably, in that prior case, Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish, the court provided an explanation for his recusal, writing that it was due to a “financial interest” in a company that was a party in the litigation. Alito’s absence doesn’t seem to have mattered to the outcome in the Chevron case, in which an eight-member court unanimously sided with the company in April.
The effect of his absence in the Suncor case, which presents different legal issues, remains to be
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 28, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court, White House
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to enforce its ban on gender-affirming medical care for inmates after a federal judge blocked the policy.
Urging the justices to lift the judge’s order while it appeals, the administration argued that the public interest favors such a result because the policy “provides appropriate, individualized treatment for gender dysphoria, while disallowing only interventions that are medically unnecessary.”
The Supreme Court over the last couple of years has ruled against transgender people in a series of cases involving sports, the military, passports and gender-affirming care for minors.
When he granted a preliminary injunction for inmates in June, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said he didn’t intend to wade into “the culture war being waged against transgender individuals.” Rather, he said he was merely making a legal decision that the government failed to follow proper procedures when it implemented the new policy.
The Washington judge called the government action “arbitrary and capricious” because it “failed to seriously consider its own experience providing gender-affirming care to inmates for years under its prior policy.” Lamberth issued a subsequent order in August maintaining the injunction, finding that despite officials’ claims, it wouldn’t cause safety issues to continue inmates’ medical care while the litigation proceeds.
Over dissent from a Trump appointee, a federal appellate panel declined to lift Lamberth’s injunction.
In the administration’s application to the justices, Solicitor General John Sauer said the Bureau of Prisons had previously provided both what he called “mental-health treatment (such as psychotherapy and psychiatry services)” and “sex-rejecting interventions (such as sex-trait-modification surgeries, hormone interventions, and social accommodations).”
Sauer said the government concluded it could no
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 26, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections, Supreme Court, White House
When the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to use a citizenship database ahead of the midterm elections, the court noted a limitation on the ruling: the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which bars states from systematically purging voters 90 days before federal elections.
Likewise, in her dissent for the court’s three Democratic appointees, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the “bright side” of the ruling is its “minimal short-term impact,” because states can only conduct individualized voter roll maintenance ahead of November.
But in a footnote to Friday’s ruling that discussed the NVRA’s limitation on states ahead of federal elections, the majority recalled that the court will consider the scope of that provision in a case this coming term, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota.
One of the issues in that case is whether the law bars states from implementing programs within 90 days of federal elections to cancel the voting registrations of noncitizens.
“The parties in this case do not ask us to address that question and have not briefed it, and we do not need to decide it here,” the court said in the footnote Friday in the database case, Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters.
So whatever impact the database ruling will have (or not have) for the midterms, it highlights that the broader issue isn’t going away in the months and years ahead.
RNC v. Mi Familia Vota is scheduled for oral argument in December, with a decision expected by July. The justices agreed to review the Republican-backed appeal in that case over opposition from Democrats and voting rights groups. It
