Supreme Court ducks cases involving everything from abortion to Elon Musk

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The new Supreme Court term started Monday, but it also declined to intervene several controversial cases. / Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in a bunch of controversial cases, leaving in place the decisions of the lower courts.

• The high court let stand a Texas a decision by the ulta-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of appeals, which ruled that hospitals in Texas cannot be required to perform  emergency abortions on women if doing so would violate Texas law. The Texas abortion law is one of the strictest in the country. Doctors have said it bans abortions that are needed to prevent sepsis, organ failure, and other serious threats to women’s health. Importantly, there were no noted Supreme Court dissents on Monday, suggesting that the court expects it will have to resolve a conflict on this issue between a similar law in Idaho, which protects the life, but not the health of the mother. In June, the court, which had heard arguments in the Idaho case,  decided not to decide the issue for now, sending it back for a full hearing by  the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had  temporarily blocked enforcement of the law.
• The  justices left in place a Michigan state constitutional amendment that barred the use of public funds for private schools. A group of parents who wanted to get public assistance for their children's private school tuition challenged the constitutionality of the state law. They contended that although the law technically banned public money for all private schools, the burden fell primarily on parochial schools. The Michigan Supreme Court agreed but was overruled by a federal appeals court and the parents then appealed to the Supreme Court, but failed to win high court intervention.
• The court left in place a workaround for Uber and Lyft drivers in California who are bound by agreements they signed committing them to resolving labor disputes by  arbitration under federal law. In other words, they can’t go to court with their claims.  But the California state attorney general and various city attorneys in the state sued the drive-share companies on behalf of the drivers for monetary damages. Two state courts allowed the cases to proceed, on grounds that the California officials were acting independently and had never signed an arbitration agreement.
• In the only election case that was pending on the docket, the justices left in place a decision by a federal appeals court, dismissing a case brought by poll watchers in Michigan during the 2020 election. The poll watchers had signed affidavits alleging suspicious activity in the voting machines.  Dominion Voting Systems accused them of defamation and got a cease and desist order barring them from continuing their campaign. So the poll watchers sued, and their case was dismissed.   The Supreme Court on Monday left the dismissal in place.
• In yet another potentially important case, this one involving a judge’s refusal to step aside in a Guantanamo case, the court again refused to intervene. The case arose in the case of Ali Hamda Ahmad Suliman al Balhul, one of the first prisoners taken to Guantanamo in 2002. One of the lawyers who was on the prosecution team against al Balhul was Gregory Katsas. Years later, Katsas, by then a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was assigned to hear Balhul’s appeal. Balul’s lawyers moved to disqualify Katsas based on his involvement in the Guantanamo litigation, but Katsas refused to recuse himself. The government contends that the issue that Katsas was involved in as a lawyer in Balul’s case was not the one that was on appeal to the Supreme Court, and that Katsas therefore did not have to recuse.  On Tuesday, the justices left Katsas’ participation undisturbed.
• Finally, the court rejected billionaire Elon Musk’s attempt to avoid compliance with a warrant for private Twitter communications sent and received by Donald Trump right before and after the 2020 election. The warrant was issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith for communications between October 2020 and January 2021 and barred Twitter, now called X, from informing Trump of the warrant’s existence.  Musk contended that the warrant and the conditions of the warrant prevented Trump from asserting executive privilege, and that “gagged” Twitter’s First Amendment rights “in a highly public investigation.” But the justices left the warrant undisturbed nonetheless.

While the court’s actions do make judgments in these cases, they are not viewed as “precedent” and there is always the possibility that some of the cases could come back to the court again.