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 Dion Nissenbaum | Sep 28, 2026 | 2026 election, 2026 Elections, 2026 midterms, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Disenfranchisement, elections, midterms, News, SAVE database, Supreme Court, Texas, Trump Administration, Voting Rights
The Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for election officials to resume using a federal immigration status verification system to check voter rolls for potential noncitizens — a significant victory for President Donald Trump’s administration, but one that’s likely to have little impact on the November midterm elections. The unsigned opinion hit pause on a lower court’s ruling from June…
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by Rudi Keller | Sep 26, 2026 | Congressional Map, elections, Gerrymandering, Missouri, News, Republican Party, Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday drove a stake through the heart of Missouri’s undead congressional map, ordering it be buried for the year and for voters to cast ballots in the districts they’ve used the past two election cycles. In a unanimous decision, the court said that state law rules in the case. “In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map — not the 2025 map — must be used…
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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
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections, Supreme Court
The Supreme Court on Friday refused yet again to back Missouri Republicans’ preferred congressional map, marking the high court’s third action this month against the state GOP’s bid to further increase its partisan control in the midterm elections.
It’s the latest Supreme Court order ensuring that Missouri’s congressional delegation will be decided this fall with the state’s existing map, which is poised to favor Republicans over Democrats by a 6-2 margin, rather than with a map passed last year that could have widened that gap to 7-1.
Voting is already underway with the existing map, which was passed in 2022.
“In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map — not the2025 map — must be used in the 2026 congressionalelection,” the justices said Friday, without any noted dissents, in an opinion that should definitively settle the matter.
“At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map inthe midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos,” the court said in an unsigned “per curiam” opinion, which is the sort of opinion that the court has been using to resolve emergency rulings lately.
Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled in early September that the 2022 map is the lawful one for the midterms and that voters will decide with a November ballot measure whether to approve the 2025 map going forward. In reaching that conclusion, the state court sided with Richard von Glahn, who backed the referendum with his group, People Not Politicians. It was a loss for the state, which had sought to use the 2025 map for November while trying to block the ballot measure from going to voters.
In its first
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 25, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court, White House
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been calling out her colleagues in public remarks over their use of the shadow docket, through which the GOP-appointed majority has granted emergency relief for the Trump administration to quickly carry out policies that lower courts have blocked. The Biden-appointed justice has also been refusing to defer to this administration in her actions on the bench.
Those two phenomena were both in play on Thursday as the justice spoke out in public against the court’s fast-track moves while declining to give the administration instant relief in its latest urgent application.
In her remarks at a law school in Washington, Jackson reportedly told the crowd of her “serious concern” that the high court’s handling of its emergency docket is “having an enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the court system.
That same day, the administration brought its latest bid for speedy relief on deportation powers to Jackson. The application went to Jackson because it had to, not because the administration wanted to bring it to her. The justices are assigned to field emergency motions from different geographical regions in the nation’s lower courts, and Jackson is assigned to the Northeastern circuit that has been ruling against the administration on the immigration issue.
It’s not unusual for this administration to seek such emergency relief. In these applications, it will not only ask for a “stay” (or pause) of a lower court action but also for an immediate “administrative stay” that instantly halts the lower court action while the justices consider whether to grant a longer-term pause.
But this latest application from Solicitor General John Sauer contained an unusual request.
