“As far as I know, the Supreme Court has always ruled on every case heard within a term before ending it. But were there any exceptions? Could SCOTUS simply have backed off this mandate and gone on vacation without issuing a ruling on the presidential immunity case?”
– Lauren T., Glen Ellen, California.
Hi Lauren,
The court generally decides in all cases before the deadline. Judges are not mandatory do that – that’s almost always what happens. But there were exceptions.
A notable one is the notorious United Citizens campaign finance case, decided in January 2010. This is what led then-president Barack Obama, in his State of the Union Address that year, to regret a decision he told the nation would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” (Justice Samuel Alitowho was part of the 5-4 majority and present that night, memorably uttered “it’s not true.”)
But the expansive outcome in the Citizens United case was only achieved after the court, in June 2009, set the case for reargument. The court initially heard arguments in March. Instead of deciding the case by the end of June on narrower grounds, it instead scheduled a rare hearing in September, asking the parties to discuss whether the campaign finance precedent should be overturned. In its decision the following January, the majority overturned the precedent. “Essentially, five judges were dissatisfied with the limited nature of the case before us,” Judge John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent, “so they changed the case to have the opportunity to change the law.” In addition to Alito, the majority included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In retrospect, as this term has shown more recently, these were just the early days of the Roberts Court’s reshaping of the law, which aligned itself with Republican interests.
A more recent and less obscure example of not deciding an appeal in the normal course occurred in 2019, in a major case about Native American tribal sovereignty called Carpenter v.. Justice Neil Gorsuchwho replaced Scalia after Republicans blocked Merrick Garland, was recused from the case that came from the appeals court Gorsuch sat on before his appointment to the high court.
Without the full set of nine justices, the court apparently would not be able to break the 4-4 impasse and get the case back on the calendar for the next term. The justices eventually decided the issue with another case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, in which Trump-appointed Gorsuch authored the historic 5-4 decision in 2020, supporting tribal interests and joining the court’s then-four Democratic nominees despite dissent from Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who replaced Kennedy).
As for Trump’s immunity case, we now know that the court issued it within this period – but only at the end of it. For anyone concerned that delaying the decision until next term would have prevented a trial from proceeding before the election, the ship has probably already sailed anyway. As I noted above, if Donald Trump loses the election, the big question may be what remains of the federal election interference case after passing the court’s newly devised immunity test.
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This article was originally published in MSNBC.com
