The Dictatorship
Supreme Court starts new term with conversion therapy hearing before voting rights showdown
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. While President Donald Trump secures indictments against his political opponents and turns the military on Democratic-run cities and states, the Supreme Court that greenlit his second presidential term took the bench this week to start its new term.
Rejecting Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal was how the high court kicked things off Monday morning. I predicted that result in last week’s newsletterso it wasn’t surprising that the Jeffrey Epstein associate failed to win review of her petition. That would’ve required four justices’ approval, but none of the nine voiced any dissent in connection with the denial.
That turns attention to whether Trump will pardon the 63-year-old convicted child sex trafficker, who is poised to remain incarcerated for another decade unless the president bails her out. The administration already moved her to a minimum-security prison camp this summer after she said she never saw Trump do anything “inappropriate.” Whatever the political wisdom would be of granting Maxwell clemency, the president seems to be keeping the option open.
Turning to matters the justices are interested in, they heard oral arguments in six cases this week, including one involving so-called conversion therapy. That’s the practice of trying to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Colorado is one of about half the states in the country that ban or restrict the practice for minors. The issue came to the Supreme Court through an appeal from the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedomwhich represents a counselor who argues that the ban violates her free speech rights.
As I listened to the hearing on TuesdayI wondered not whether the counselor and ADF will win — that much sounded clear — but rather on what precise grounds and by how wide a margin on a court that has six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees. Despite warnings from medical associations that efforts to change orientation and identity are “illegitimate” and “ineffective” and can be especially harmful to minors, we should expect the court’s forthcoming ruling to side with the counselor on First Amendment grounds. The justices typically decide all the term’s cases by early July.
Election-related litigation is another theme of the term, with arguments coming up on campaign finance and voting rights. This week, the court held a hearing Wednesday in a challenge from a Republican congressman, who is seeking to take on an Illinois law that counts mail-in ballots that come in after Election Day. The high court seems inclined to side with Rep. Michael Bost, R-Ill., whose appeal concerns whether he has standing to sue, not the merits of the state law. His appeal is unsurprisingly backed by Republican groupsbut it’s also supported by the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union; those groups said that while they “vehemently oppose” Bost’s underlying challenge to the ballot law, they support the general notion of being able to get claims heard in court.
Voting rights will be center stage next week as the court hears arguments in Louisiana v. Callais. The court was set to decide it last term but did not do so, instead scheduling the case for re-argument this term while telling the parties to focus on a question that could further gut the Voting Rights Act. Previewing the case for MSNBCelection law expert Rick Hasen explained how it could not only “decimate minority representation in Congress and state and local government,” but also “allow yet another round of partisan redistricting that could affect which party controls Congress after the 2026 midterm elections.”
Finally, Alex Jones is hoping the justices help him avoid paying $1.4 billion for his lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School murders. The Infowars host filed an emergency bid this week to halt collection on the $1,436,650,000 judgment — which, as of Friday afternoon, the justices haven’t acted on. The justices separately considered in their private conference Friday whether to take up Jones’ underlying appealwhich argues that his First Amendment rights are at stake. He claims that he had expressed “opinions of media excesses” when he used terms like “hoax” and “staged,” which he said were “generally directed at the media circus, while often in the same broadcasts acknowledging that murders had in fact occurred.” The plaintiffs waived their right to respond to Jones’ petition and the court hasn’t asked them to respond, suggesting that his petition is headed for denial, just like Maxwell’s. We could learn more when the court issues its next order list on Tuesday morning.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.