The Supreme Court is about to drown us in a deluge of explosive and massively consequential decisions involving some of the most controversial issues of the day. Right now, the justices are scrambling to complete blockbusters involving abortion, guns, homelessness, unions, social media, online disinformation, pollution, the administrative state—and, oh yes, hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions, including Donald Trump’s. Yet at the moment, there’s a logjam: The court, which likes to wrap up decisions by the end of June, is way behind schedule, releasing just a trickle of minor cases several weeks in a row. Even if it stretches into early July this year, SCOTUS has teed up a chaotic finale to the term. As soon as the current logjam breaks, the court will dump everything on us all at once.
This approach to judging—to ruling, really, in the monarchical sense—is both disgraceful and unnecessary. It’s disgraceful because regular people cannot possibly absorb the enormous amount of material that is poised to gush out of the court, as the justices surely know, much of it dressed up in legalese to obscure its meaning for nonlawyers. The overwhelming majority of Americans will have no hope of keeping up with the sweeping and complex decisions to come, even if those decisions have direct and negative impacts on their lives. And this inundation is unnecessary because the justices pick their own arbitrary deadline, then fail to manage the docket in a way that allows them to meet that deadline without cutting corners and overwhelming the news cycle with a glut of last-minute bombshells. The conservative supermajority has a checklist to clear, and it won’t temper its agenda to accommodate for a (gratuitously) tight timeline. Its smash-and-grab attitude toward the law requires aggressive, immediate intervention in cases that the court has no good reason to hear. And so this June, and maybe July, is shaping up to be an unprecedented season of ceaseless SCOTUS mayhem.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementA glimpse at the term’s remaining cases shows what a nightmare we’re in for. The justices are preparing to hand down roughly 14 extraordinarily high-profile opinions, triple or quadruple the number of an ordinary term. A decade ago, June’s biggest decision was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, allowing corporations to limit contraceptive coverage for employees; this year, there are at least a half-dozen cases that stand to eclipse Hobby Lobby in terms of impact and controversy. (Maybe a lot more, depending on how far the supermajority swings right.)
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