In the headline for my July 6 story revisiting the major interim docket matters that kept the justices busy during last year’s summer recess, I posed a question about the months ahead. “This year,” I asked, “will they actually get a break?”
Nearly three months later, we know the answer: not so much.
Since early July, the justices have received more than 30 significant interim docket applications, including several high-profile requests from the Trump administration. In response, they requested additional briefs, reviewed all these filings, and issued orders and opinions – the kind of work that was once rare from July through September.
Election-related action
Much of the justices’ summer work stemmed from election-related conflicts, including challenges to President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting and verify state voter rolls ahead of the midterm elections in November. This category also includes the major dispute over redistricting in Missouri, which came to the interim docket three times over the past month.
The Missouri dispute began last year, when Republican leaders in the state adopted a new congressional map expected to favor candidates from their party. In December, opponents of the new map, including the group People Not Politicians and its executive director, Richard von Glahn, submitted more than 300,000 signatures in support of a petition that would require lawmakers to put the map up for a vote in the 2026 midterm elections. Eight months later, in August, Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s secretary of state, rejected the petition, clearing the way for Missouri to use the new map for its August primaries.
Von Glahn challenged Hoskins’ decision in state court, and on Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court agreed with von Glahn that the referendum petition should appear on the November ballot and that November’s elections should be conducted using the old map. Hoskins asked the Supreme Court to put the state supreme court’s ruling on hold, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has initial responsibility for emergency appeals from the region that includes Missouri, denied that request on Sept. 8.
But it wasn’t over. Moments after Kavanaugh announced his decision, a federal judge in Missouri weighing a separate but related case brought by a group of candidates and voters who support the 2025 map ordered the state to use that new map in November. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit declined to stay that order, von Glahn and People Not Politicians urged the Supreme Court to again weigh in. On Sept. 10, the justices granted their request to prevent Missouri from using the new map.
The next week, the 8th Circuit heard argument in the map dispute, and, on Sept. 21, held that using the old map in November would violate the Constitution. The next day, von Glahn and People Not Politicians asked the Supreme Court to put that ruling on hold. On Friday, the Supreme Court did so, with no public dissents. “The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed,” the brief, unsigned opinion said. “At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos.”
Like Missouri redistricting, disputes related to Trump’s executive order on election integrity also came before the court several times this summer. The order, which the president signed in March, outlines a range of policies, but the interim docket disputes focused on instructions related to how the U.S. Postal Service deals with mail-in ballots.
The Supreme Court first weighed Trump’s guidance on mail-in voting in August and determined, by a vote of 6-3, that states challenging the order itself had filed their lawsuit too soon, because this directive had not been put into effect.
The USPS then issued its rule for mail-in voting, which became the center of the litigation. A federal judge in Boston barred the USPS from implementing new requirements for the envelopes used to mail ballots and for voter tracking, and on Sept. 14, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7-2, left her decision in place, essentially ensuring that new mail-in voting restrictions won’t go into effect before November’s elections.
In a related dispute, the justices considered a second executive order on election integrity, which, among other things, directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create systems that would allow state and local governments to verify the citizenship status of voters. In response to the order, DHS and the SSA overhauled the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as the SAVE system, to serve this purpose.
The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center challenged the changes to the SAVE system in federal court in Washington, D.C., contending that the administration had violated a number of federal laws, including the Social Security Act. A federal judge agreed with them, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to pause her order barring the government from using the modified SAVE system.
On Sept. 8, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to put the lower-court ruling on hold and allow the government to use the voter eligibility database. The court, by a vote of 6-3, granted that request on Friday, concluding that the claims made by the challengers “likely lack merit.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
In addition to these applications on the Trump administration’s voting policies and Missouri’s maps, the Supreme Court this summer addressed several lower-profile election-related filings, involving everything from which candidates or proposals will appear on ballots in November to the cost of running political ads.
Additional requests from the Trump administration
The Trump administration brought more than election-related disputes to the interim docket this summer. It also asked for – and received – relief in an ongoing conflict over construction of a new White House ballroom, as well as urged the justices to address a case on deporting noncitizens to countries not included on their removal orders for a third time.
The ballroom battle began last fall, when the Trump administration tore down the East Wing of the White House to make room for a new, 90,000-square-foot ballroom. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit dedicated to “sav[ing] places where our history happened,” sued to block construction, contending, among other things, that the project had not been authorized by Congress.
In March, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon issued an order temporarily blocking above-ground elements of the project, including construction of the ballroom. In early August, the D.C. Circuit upheld Leon’s ruling, concluding that Congress “has exclusive authority to regulate the construction and demolition of White House structures.” Leon’s order never went into effect, however; the D.C. Circuit first paused it while considering the Trump administration’s appeal and then put its own ruling on hold for 14 days to give the administration time to go to the Supreme Court, allowing construction to continue throughout the process.
On Aug. 13, the administration did so, asserting that Leon’s order was “extraordinary and unlawful” and that the ballroom project served national security interests. It further argued that the National Trust for Historic Preservation had no legal right to sue, because none of its members had suffered the sort of injury that would give it standing.
Just before the order blocking above-ground construction was set to go into effect, Chief Justice John Roberts on Aug. 21 issued an administrative stay, preserving the status quo while the court continued weighing the case. Ten days later, by a vote of 5-4, the court paused the lower-court ruling, holding that the National Trust for Historic Preservation likely lacked standing to challenge the ballroom project. Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by the court’s three Democratic appointees, describing the decision as “no victory for the separation of powers.”
An application on deportations to third-party countries is still pending, as it was just filed on Thursday. The Trump administration has asked the court to pause a lower-court ruling preventing the government from deporting noncitizens to a country not identified on their removal orders without first notifying the noncitizens of the plan and giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to raise concerns about being persecuted or tortured there.
At an earlier stage in the case, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to put a similar order on hold and then, in a follow-up order, allowed it to move forward with the deportation to South Sudan of eight men being held on a U.S. military base in Djibouti.
Other memorable applications
In addition to serving as a reminder that the court’s summer recess often is a recess in name only, some of this summer’s filings raised awareness of just how diverse the interim docket has become. These unique filings did not come from the Trump administration, state officials, or political candidates, and did not address upcoming executions or a policy change. Instead, they invited the Supreme Court into a high-profile surrogacy dispute and a months-long battle over the fate of a dog.
The surrogacy-related emergency application came from McKenna West, an Alaska woman who served as a surrogate for a California couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed. During the pregnancy, the fetus was diagnosed with a serious cardiac defect, and the couple asked West if it was possible to have an abortion, according to West’s application. West states that she objected and moved to Texas, which highly restricts abortion access. The baby was born there on Aug. 12.
West’s interim docket application stemmed from a complex custody battle involving multiple rulings from multiple states. She specifically asked the Supreme Court to pause a California court order that recognized Gilkar and Ahmed as the baby’s parents and that was preventing her from being involved in the baby’s medical care.
Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency applications from the region including California, received West’s application on Sept. 9 and called for a response two days later. On Sept. 22, she denied West’s request without comment and without referring the matter to the full court. Unlike most orders from a single justice, Kagan’s decision was widely covered by the media, likely because the overall dispute had been in the headlines.
Another filing to receive a seemingly outsized share of media attention addressed a 3-year-old dog named Bruce. Bruce’s owner and an animal rescue group asked the justices to ensure Bruce would remain alive while a challenge to a plan to euthanize him because of several violent incidents continued. However, he was killed before the Supreme Court could weigh in. (Kagan ultimately denied the request to save Bruce the next day.)
Looking ahead
Now that the summer recess is essentially over – the justices meet for their “long conference” on Monday and the first arguments of the 2026-27 term are just one week away – life at the Supreme Court will go from busy to busier. Over the next month, the justices will hear six arguments, hold two more conferences, and grant several cases while continuing to manage the interim docket.
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[ H/T SCOTUSblog ]
