term?

So I am focused on the very first case they're going to hear on Monday.

It's called Suncor versus Boulder.

And I should say off the top, Masha's firm is involved in the case, so she's going to bite her tongue at everything I say, or maybe some things I say, but she can't comment on it.

So this is a case about climate change, and the city and county of Boulder are trying to sue two oil companies, Suncor and ExxonMobil, for the costs that they incurred because of climate change.

And they are suing under Colorado state law.

They are making claims that the company has not only contributed to climate change, but misled the public about it.

Something maybe under the radar or, you know, a dark horse case that you have your eyes on.

What, what, what's a big case that you're, uh, you're looking at this term?

So I, I am focused on the very first case they're gonna hear on Monday.

It's called Suncor versus Boulder.

Um, and I should s-say off the top, Ma-Masha's firm is involved in the case, so she's gonna bite her tongue at everything I say or may-maybe some things I say, uh, but she can't comment on it.

So this is a case about climate change, and the city and county of Boulder are trying to sue two oil companies, Suncor and ExxonMobil, for the cost that they incurred because of climate change.

And, um, they are suing under Colorado state law.

They are making claims that the count-- uh, the company has not only contributed to climate change but misled the public about it.

[laughs]

Tell us about it.

So it's a temporary decision.

And it goes back to this executive order that Donald Trump issued about five months ago.

And this is a challenge to that executive order.

And it's important.

to keep that in mind.

The Supreme Court said that executive order, which, among other things, directs the Postal Service to restrict who can get mail ballots, the Supreme Court said that executive order in and of itself doesn't harm anybody.

So what's the time the conservatives are waiting for?

Are any cases coming up next term that might give them the same kind of opportunities?

We don't yet have the boundary pushing cases that we had last term.

So I would say birthright citizenship, tariffs, Lisa Cook, all of those were Donald Trump doing something that a couple of years ago, nobody was really thinking a president might be able to do.

And we don't yet have those cases, but we might.

So many of these cases at the lower court level get up to the Supreme Court through the emergency or shadow docket and can present that sort of issue.

That's what happened with Lisa Cook.

So it is certainly possible.

Finally, there was a rumor that Justice Alito was going to retire last term, and he has said that he is not retiring this term, at least.

So talk to us about the difference in this case and how you think the court might try to split those different arguments.

Right.

So that case is known as Slaughter, has to...

Uh, named after a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission.

So it goes back to the, the 1930s.

The Supreme Court at that point said Congress can set up independent federal agencies and say the leaders of them, the commissioners of the FTC, for example, can't be removed unless the president has a good reason like misconduct.

And that laid the legal groundwork for the administrative state that we all came to know, and the Supreme Court has been chipping away at that.

Again, I'll ask you sort of what the arguments in that case tell you about what outcome we might see here, uh, when that decision's handed down.

Critics from the left believe the court has not scrutinized the administration's moves enough, but President Trump has also attacked the court repeatedly following its decision to strike down his flagship tariff announcements.

Donald Trump is definitely adding fuel to the fire here.

He is, in a way that we're, we're almost getting used to, but we should always remember how remarkable they are, personally criticizing justices, including some of the ones he appointed because they ruled against him on the big tariff case a few months ago.

Stohr told us that tensions between justices were always more likely to flare up at this time of year.

It's not unusual to have this sort of back and forth, especially as we get towards the end of the term, where you have bigger and bigger decisions coming down involving things like the rights of transgender athletes, involving Donald Trump's efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, involving the president's effort to fire the heads of independent agencies.

So some really big issues are still before the Supreme Court, and the suggestion that we're perhaps taking from these comments is that those are cases that are gonna deeply divide the court.

Greg, the FDA under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I mean, is it changing or trying to change its, its viewpoint on mifepristone?

Yeah, it's sort of a tricky, uh, situation that the Trump administration and, uh, Secretary Kennedy find themselves in.

They have, obviously, anti-abortion groups and advocates really would like to restrict this pill because it, it has basically allowed women in states where medical abortions are banned to continue to receive pills that will let them have an abortion.

And the administration has said there are some safety concerns, but we wanna study those.

And that study has been taking quite a long time, and Bloomberg News has some reporting that, that they are basically trying to slow walk the issue until after the, the midterms.

So in this case, the administration is kind of trying to walk a fine line.

At the Fifth Circuit, they argued that the appeals court should not block male mifepristone, and their argument is basically that Louisiana does not have standing to challenge it.

As you know well, the Supreme Court doesn't have to take this case, but considering the ramifications here and the fact that it just takes four justices to grant cert, do you think they will take the case?

So is there any precedent or any other appeals that might give us a peek into where this is headed or how it's getting there? Or is this so unique because of the difference between or the disconnect between the federal and the state? So it

depends on which.

The oil companies will tell you that, hey, there are some Supreme Court precedents involving, say, the interpretation of the Clean Air Act where the Supreme Court said, no, you can't sue for that sort of thing.

You can't sue under your own law for a discharge out of state that made its way into your state, say, in the air or something like that.

And the – Boulder says actually that's not applicable here.

This is very different and in fact what the oil companies are asking you to do, Supreme Court, is basically unprecedented.

So Boulder's contention is that this notion that the Constitution – that preempts something because this is like inherently – this is an inherently federal matter, climate change.

Where do things stand now and what are you watching for in the next few weeks?

And what's the fundamental question that the judges are being asked to consider here? What is this case really about?

about?So you've basically got two things that Lisa Cook is arguing.

One, she says, "I can't be fired without some sort of process," more than just a social media post, which is how she was notified that Trump was trying to remove her.

And so there's a question of is she entitled to a chance to make her case before she's removed? And then the bigger question is, even if these allegations are true, and the allegations are that she engaged in mortgage fraud, she denies that vehemently, and her lawyer had said at most it was inadvertent.

Even if those are true, is that enough grounds for the president to fire her? So that's sort of the issues in the backdrop.

And then because it is coming to the court in the context of an emergency application, not looking for a final ruling, the court is also thinking about what would be the consequences in the short term of, say, letting Trump fire her for the time being, and they're thinking about things like what would the impact on the markets be? What would the impact on Fed independence be? So there are kind of, you know, non-legal factors that are at least in the air in this argument.

If the court rules against Trump, as perhaps seems more likely after these oral arguments, where does that put the president more broadly? How big of a loss is that?

It's significant, but keep in mind, this is a Supreme Court that over the last year in particular has done a lot of things to expand presidential authority.

you have to

produce an alternative map that would accomplish whatever the state's trying to accomplish without using race so much.

And they faulted the challengers for not doing that.

And then finally, the court said this decision came too close to the election.

In the past, the Supreme Court has said that federal courts should not change the state's election rules directly.

on the eve of the election.

And you might say, well, the election is not for another 11 months or so.

What was the focus of Justice Kagan's 17-page dissent?

Just to remind us, the Supreme Court has taken out in recent years two parts of the Voting Rights Act already.

Yeah.

So the big one that everybody remembers is this case called Shelby County, and that basically nullified the so-called preclearance regime under which a lot of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, had to go to either the Justice Department or a federal court to get clearance before they changed their voting rules because of the history of discrimination in those those jurisdictions so that was one big decision and then a more recent one just a few years ago was the court making it harder to show that voting rules as opposed to the maps are discriminatory so i'm talking about things like rules governing the collection of of mail ballots or you know the location of a polling place the court put in place a much tougher test to show that those changes are violations of the Voting Rights Act.

And since then, there has not been a successful claim of that type in court.

I mean, is there any chance that there'll be a very narrow ruling?

There's certainly a chance.

And, you know, keep in mind that just a couple of years ago, the court had a case that, you know, if I describe the circumstances, you'd say it's very, very similar about Alabama and whether Alabama had to create a second majority black district, which is exactly what's going on in Louisiana.

And in that case, the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh sided with the liberals and said, we're going to basically keep the rules the way they have been.

What does this ruling mean going forward for those challenges that we've become so accustomed to?

Unquestionably, it will make it more difficult.

But the court did leave open some other avenues, and we'll have to see how broad those avenues are.

One of them is that people can bring class actions.

And you have to go through some more hoops.

It's not automatic, but if you can file a lawsuit, and people may try to do that in birthright citizenship, actually they've already tried to do that in birthright citizenship to say, "Hey, we're filing on behalf of everybody who's like us across the country, or maybe just in the state or something like that.

Judge, can you give us an order blocking the policy as to that class?" That's at least still a theoretical a- avenue for them.

What are the implications for parents and for schools from that ruling?

How was this used against some of those Biden administration initiatives? I know it was specifically environmental like climate change.

Yeah, so I mentioned the 2022 case.

It actually stemmed from something Barack Obama had tried to do, his so-called Clean Power Plan, which would have – the EPA was going to put limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, trying to basically shift energy production away from coal-fired plants.

And the Supreme Court – In a case, the procedure is kind of complicated but not really important.

The essence of it was the Supreme Court said, even though the Clean Power Plan hadn't gone into effect, we're going to evaluate it and determine that the EPA did not have the authority to do this.

Congress in the Clean Air Act wasn't specific enough.

And that ended up limiting what Joe Biden could try to do going forward on climate change because, as with so many areas in this day and age, Climate change is an area where Congress really hasn't said a whole lot that the agencies had been trying to use really old statutes, decades old statutes like the Clean Air Act to do things.

In a situation like this, did the Biden administration or now the Trump administration, because the Court of International Trade invoked the same doctrine against those tariffs, did either administration have a defense? Is this a case that can continue?

Greg, what did the court rule here today?

So the Trump administration is trying to end so-called parole status for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

And what that is is a temporary status that lets people live and work here because their home countries are in crisis and it's designed to be for humanitarian reasons.

And the question was whether the Trump administration could do this categorically rather than on a case-by-case basis.

A lower court had blocked the Trump administration from doing this.

The Supreme Court today lifted that block.

That means these roughly 500,000 people, we don't know the precise number, no longer have those protections.

Are these widows and orphans or are they hardened gang criminals? Do we know anything more about them?

I mean, usually the Supreme Court, you know, likes the lower courts to look at things before they take it.

Yeah, and we'll see.

The Supreme Court could well wait for the D.C.

Circuit, the Federal Appeals Court here in Washington, to act before doing anything.

On the other hand, this is a topic that the court is familiar with, at least most of the numbers, because the Trump administration, the first time around, had a policy that didn't go quite as far, but the Supreme Court let the Trump administration ban transgender people from serving back the first time around.

The difference is, well, there are a couple differences.

One, this would actually force people who are openly transgender to leave the military.

I mean, what's the emergency there?

Are they up to about six emergency requests in a little over two months?

By my count, it's five times.

What they're asking for this week, well, the most recent case has to do with teacher training programs.

So the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order, a district judge's order, that temporarily requires the government, the education department, to keep funding teacher training projects in eight states.

The Education Department had said that it's canceling 104 out of 109 grants.

A U.S. district judge said that the challengers to that are likely to succeed, that the cancellations are arbitrary and capricious.

And so that judge issued a temporary restraining order saying you've got to keep paying those for now.

A little over two months? I mean, has any other administration made so many emergency requests to the court in such a short period of time? And they're calling issues like birthright citizenship an emergency.

to every lawyer, Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review.

Yeah, this is probably the most important case in the history of the country.

Written by Chief Justice John Marshall, as you said, it established that the court has the power to strike down acts of Congress.

But what's notable is how Marshall got to that conclusion.

The case is about when John Adams left the presidency after losing reelection.

On his way out the door in 1801, he appointed a bunch of judges known as midnight judges.

And kind of in the frenzy of doing that, with one of them, a guy by the name of William Marbury, the final step of paperwork didn't happen.

But tell us about some of the other presidents who chose not to defy a court order.

He suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

Yeah, this is probably the closest the president has ever come to directly defying the Supreme Court.

This is a situation where the war had started.

The war was precipitated in part by the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney issuing the Dred Scott decision that declared that freed slaves could never be citizens in the United States.

And as the war starts, Abraham Lincoln is very concerned about sabotage.

And he issues an order that authorizes one of his generals, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus near railroad lines in Maryland.

And habeas corpus is this notion that if the government holds you, arrests you, you can go to a judge and make the government defend why it's holding you.

So the court can't count on Congress to support it.

He's in Washington, D.C. Greg, what do you think the odds are that the Supreme Court will even hear this case?

Well, they're not non-existent, at least when it comes to halting the sentence, which is what Donald Trump is asking for right now.

So one of the things he's saying in this filing is there is this notion that the Supreme Court reiterated back in July in that big immunity case that when we have an issue like presidential immunity, that that gets resolved before lower court proceedings go forward.

And Donald Trump is saying, at a minimum, let's put the lower court proceeding, namely my sentencing, on hold while appeals courts consider this immunity question that I'm arguing.

And if that's what the Supreme Court does, that almost certainly means Donald Trump won't be sentenced any time over the next four years.

So does that mean that it picks it back up, sentencing picks back up, like, come four years later?

You know, I haven't thought it quite that far along, but it would certainly derail it in a major way.

There's also the substantive arguments that Donald Trump is making, which is that putting aside the timing of the sentence, that I am immune from these charges.