Say what you will about the Supreme Court, but it does have a flair for the dramatic. Every term, the justices hold the decisions for the biggest cases until the very end, adding to the suspense. I realize this is not by design. The bigger the case, the more likely it is that the justices will need and take more time to craft a decision.
With this in mind, there are a handful of doozies still pending. Since the high court wraps up this month, and there are only two weeks left in June, we’re going to see some real fireworks, perhaps as soon as today. (The Supreme Court issues rulings every Monday morning at 10 ET, which gives this post a shelf life of about 30 minutes.) Some of these cases even have the potential to shape the presidential election.
There are about 20 decisions that will be handed down between this morning and the end of the month. It’s a list that features quite a few huge controversies. Here are some to look out for:
Cheney vs. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — The VP’s office is resisting a court order to release meeting notes from its secret energy task force.
Elk Grove Unified School District vs. Newdow — Testing the constitutionality of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Rasul vs. Bush — Testing the Bush administration’s power to hold “enemy aliens” at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely and without hearings.
Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld — Similar to Rasul, Hamdi challenges Bush’s ability to detain an enemy indefinitely, without a hearing or access to a lawyer. The key here is that the “combatant” is a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld vs. Padilla — Another one of the three “enemy combatant” cases, this one tests whether the administration can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil.
Those are the biggest cases in terms of political impact, but there are other high-profile decisions on the way as well, including the boundaries of Miranda warnings (United States vs. Patane and Missouri vs. Seibert), the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (Ashcroft vs. ACLU), the right to sue HMOs in state court (Aetna vs. Davila), environmental protections for national wilderness areas from off-road vehicles (Norton vs. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance), and the rules for handling sexual harassment claims (Pennsylvania State Police vs. Suders).