A new analysis published in Slate about the upcoming end of the current Supreme Court's term declares that the court right now is "off the rails" and poised to get "worse" as it stares down tight deadlines to rule on a number of high-profile cases.
Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck, in a conversation with Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, broke down the large number of still-pending cases that the court must rule on by the end of the month.
"You’ve got these major administrative law cases, abortion cases, and social media cases," said Vladeck. "You’ve got two major gun cases. Oh, by the way, there are those two small Jan. 6 cases, including one about whether former President Trump can be criminally prosecuted. So depending on how you count, that’s about 20 major decisions that the court has to get through between now and the end of June. And they’re doing three or four a week right now."
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Vladeck said that the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had been essentially spamming the Supreme Court with major cases that the justices feel they have to take on so they don't allow them to set bad precedent.
"Some of this is because the 5th Circuit has just gone completely off the deep end on some of these cases, and the court has to reverse them," he said. "That’s the CFPB case. That’s almost certainly going to be the case with the mifepristone case, with Rahimi, a big gun case, and probably with NetChoice, the social media content-moderation case."
Vladeck then warned that all of this stress on the court could result in some rushed or poorly considered rulings that he warned could create instability ahead of a crucial presidential election.
"So we’re in for a s--tstorm," he said bluntly. "And it’s not just because of what the court’s going to do in these cases, which is going to be really problematic politically, but just from a matter of the stability of law, it’s gonna be ugly."
