Each week on The Term, Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover and co-host Natalie Rodriguez break down all the high court action.
The justices wasted no time making headlines after returning from its lengthy break this week, rejecting President Donald Trump's request to shield his tax returns from Manhattan prosecutors and denying long-pending GOP efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr. and Neil Gorsuch said that the court should have taken a case over the extended deadline for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania to clarify the rules of the road for future elections.
But while it cleared the decks of Trump-era cases, it also raised eyebrows by granting two cases that might be moot before they go to oral arguments. The first involves a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services "gag rule" that prohibits doctors who receive federal funds for family planning services from helping patients access abortion services.
The next involves the Department of Homeland Security's "public charge" rule, which makes obtaining green cards more difficult for immigrants deemed likely to use public benefits based on factors such as age, education level and health.
Biden has ordered both agencies to reexamine those rules and decide whether they should be rescinded, which would effectively render the cases moot, as happened to previous high court challenges to Trump-era policies on the border wall and asylum processes.
Natalie discusses the court's sole merits decision this week, a unanimous opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas on the Federal Tort Claims Act. And Jimmy highlights a new petition from the anti-affirmative action group suing Harvard that seeks to end affirmative action in college admissions.
Finally, the hosts preview next week's arguments in cases involving the Voting Rights Act and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
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