Dems are looking at the future in blocking Kavanaugh.
The list of cases pending on the Supreme Court’s calendar this year lacks blockbusters — but court-watchers say they’re hopeful some of the big ones get added in before the end of the term.
The justices convene their 2018-2019 session Monday with far more drama over who will be the ninth member of the court than over the cases already on the schedule.
This month’s cases include a fight over property rights, whether a death row inmate can be executed if he can’t remember committing the crime following a stroke, and the extent of the Endangered Species Act and unoccupied private land.
But all sides are hoping once a ninth justice is confirmed, the court will be ready to accept some of the more consequential issues now percolating in the lower appeals courts.
Options include gay rights in the workplace, transgender rights in the military, the legality of President Obama’s DACA deportation amnesty and President Trump’s attempted phaseout of the program, the drawing of congressional districts ahead of the 2020 census, and abortion rights for illegal immigrant teens.
“The real key to the coming term is what is in the pipeline,” Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, said at a preview of the term last week.
The court could still be suffering a hangover from its previous term, which ended in June, and which Mr. Francisco called the most consequential in years, with decisions upending 40 years of precedent on mandatory union dues, legalizing sports gambling across the nation, and upholding President Trump’s travel ban.
The term also ended with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy calling it quits after three decades.
Justice Kennedy had been considered a swing vote on cases involving how congressional district lines are drawn in the states — and how much of a role politics can play.
Last term the court punted on several such cases, sending them back to lower courts for more development.
One of those could soon be back.
“A big one to watch is a North Carolina case that could bring the question of the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering back to the court,” said Brianne Gorod, chief counsel at the Constitutional Responsibility Center.
Another case working its way through lower courts involved whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects gay and lesbian employees from workplace discrimination.
Lower courts had traditionally ruled that gay rights wasn’t part of sex discrimination as envisioned in the law — but a handful of appeals courts have since ruled that the law does in fact cover LGBT claims from employees who say they were fired because of their orientation.