237. Last Week's Other News

The Supreme Court handed down a number of headline-grabbing rulings last week. Today's issue is devoted to some of the biggest things that happened *away from* those headlines.

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Usually, I use the Monday issue of the newsletter to cover both the news of the past week (“On the Docket”) and a deeper dive into either one of the news stories or some broader historical point about the Court (the “Long Read”). But given just how much news the Supreme Court made last week, I thought I’d use today’s issue for the rest of the news—the developments out of the Court last week that didn’t generate the same headlines as, e.g., Tuesday’s birthright citizenship or transgender sports rulings or Monday’s rulings in Slaughter and Cook, three of which I covered to some degree in last Thursday’s bonus issue.

Plenty of these other developments would have gotten a lot more attention at any other point in the news cycle. But one of the problems of covering the Court is that there’s only so much oxygen/ink that can be consumed by news out of One First Street—which tends to come down in fits and spurts, especially in the days leading up to the justices’ summer recess. So consider today’s issue an extended “On the Docket”—and my attempt to fill out all (or, at least, most) of the “other” news that the justices made last week. (Okay, there’s docket-number trivia at the end, too.)

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Bucket #1: The Other Merits Rulings

NRSC v. FEC (June 30)

In a 6-3 decision by Justice Kavanaugh, the Court struck down the Federal Election Campaign Act’s limits on “coordinated party expenditures”—the caps on how much party committees can spend in coordination with their own candidates—as a First Amendment violation. The ruling overruled the Court’s 2001 decision in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (“Colorado II”), which had upheld those same limits—the second time in two days that the same 6-3 majority scrapped a decades-old precedent.

The heart of Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion was the claim that the only constitutionally sufficient basis for campaign-finance restrictions is preventing quid pro quo corruption, and that existing safeguards already address that concern. Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. Among other things, Kagan’s dissent flagged not only that the majority was dramatically underselling the other legitimate grounds for campaign-finance restrictions, but that getting rid of the limit on coordinated party expenditures would encourage more quid pro quo corruption, too. What’s more, Kagan’s dissent warned (almost certainly correctly) that the majority’s reasoning reopens a route for donors to channel far larger sums to candidates through party committees than the remaining direct contribution limits would otherwise permit. Just what we need…

Watson v. Republican National Committee (June 29)

In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld Mississippi’s law counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within five days, holding that federal law does not prohibit such grace periods simply by defining Election Day as the first Tuesday after the first Monday. Justice Barrett wrote for the majority (joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson); Justice Alito dissented for four justices.

Watson is a good example of a case that would have been even “bigger” had it come out the other way. At it stands, it preserves similar grace-period laws, while also sparing election officials a last-minute overhaul just before the midterms and protecting military, overseas, and rural mail voters. It also marks a notable rebuke to the Trump administration’s broader campaign against voting by mail—which may have atmospheric consequences, even if not doctrinal ones, in some of the other pending lawsuits.

Chatrie v. United States (June 29)

In a 6-3 decision, the Court held that law enforcement’s use of a “geofence warrant” to obtain cell-phone location-history data is a Fourth Amendment search. Justice Kagan, writing for the majority (joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, with Gorsuch concurring in the judgment), reasoned that individuals retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in location data, even when shared with third parties like Google. The Court remanded the question of the particular warrant’s validity to the Fourth Circuit. Justice Alito dissented (joined in part by Thomas and Barrett), calling the decision an “irresponsible escapade.” For now, the ruling narrows the third-party doctrine and could extend Fourth Amendment protection well beyond location data to the broader universe of app-generated records users share with tech companies. But as with Watson, the Court largely avoided any “bigger” ruling (including by leaving the warrant’s validity in this case open), so its practical reach remains unsettled.

Bucket #2: The Important Orders

There were two different Order Lists last week, along with a significant separate denial of an emergency application:

The June 29 Order List (from the June 25 Conference)

In Monday’s “regular” Order List, the Court added seven new cases to the October 2026 Term merits docket—on topics ranging from election law to parental rights.¹ Among the notable grants:

• Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota: A challenge to Arizona’s requirement that voters using the state registration form must show documentary proof of citizenship, and whether the National Voter Registration Act lets states remove noncitizens from voting rolls within 90 days of a federal election. This case could reshape how far states may go in imposing citizenship-verification requirements and conducting voter-roll purges, with direct consequences for registration practices (to say nothing of the ability to vote of eligible voters without easy access to the relevant documents) nationwide.

• International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson: Whether parents have standing to challenge Washington laws that let licensed youth shelters provide mental-health services, including gender-transition-related care, to runaway minors without parental notice or consent. The grant puts parental-rights and gender-transition questions back before the Court, and its standing holding could set the terms for how parents can challenge state policies that displace their decision-making role.

• Wassily v. Blanche: Whether noncitizens who receive asylum that is later terminated can still become lawful permanent residents, or are instead permanently ineligible. The outcome could determine the immigration-status pathway for asylees whose protection is revoked—a recurring question with significant stakes for affected noncitizens.

The same list included some notable denials of certiorari (some with dissents): The Court denied review in President Trump’s appeal of the $5 million judgment in the second of the two E. Jean Carroll cases (which I covered in a prior issue). Justice Thomas (joined by Gorsuch) dissented from the denial in Alan Dershowitz’s defamation suit against CNN, indicating yet again that he would like for the Court to reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan. And Justice Sotomayor (joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson) dissented from a cert. denial in a qualified immunity case, calling the Seventh Circuit’s grant of immunity “clearly wrong,” and flagging, yet again, the asymmetry in the Court’s approach to qualified immunity rulings—where “clearly wrong” denials of immunity are summarily reversed, but “clearly wrong” grants of immunity are … left intact.

The June 30 Order List (from the June 29 “Clean-Up” Conference)

The Court dropped a second Order List on June 30—this time, from the “Clean-Up Conference.” Among other things, the Court granted and consolidated two Second Amendment cases—Viramontes v. Cook County (from the Seventh Circuit) and Grant v. Higgins (from the Second Circuit)—to decide whether bans on AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles violate the Second Amendment. The cases were consolidated for one hour of argument, likely in the fall, on the question presented in Viramontes; the Court left the related large-capacity-magazine cases on hold, keeping the dispute focused on the rifles themselves. This is the Court’s first plenary look at “assault weapon” bans since Heller and Bruen, and the decision could very well reshape firearms regulation nationwide.

The clean-up list also included a grant in Grand v. City of University Heights. That case involves an Ohio homeowner’s claim that city officials violated his constitutional rights by requiring a permit before he could host a neighborhood prayer group in his home. The case raises religious-liberty and property-use questions about how far local governments may regulate religious gatherings in private homes

In the same list, the Court also denied the Trump administration’s long-pending (and long-deferred) emergency application in Blanche v. Perlmutter, leaving in place a lower-court injunction that restored Shira Perlmutter to her position as Register of Copyrights after the Trump administration attempted to remove her. Perlmutter had argued that her removal was unlawful because only the Librarian of Congress may remove the Register, and that then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was not lawfully serving as Acting Librarian when he purported to fire her.

The Court had deferred action since November 2025, holding the application pending Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. That never made a lot of sense, in my view, since the issue in Perlmutter is a very specific statutory question—whether the “Library of Congress” is an “executive branch agency” for purposes of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. That answer has nothing to do, of course, with the questions the Court ultimately decided in Slaughter and Cook.² If the point of the deferral was merely to play for time, well, I guess it worked. There were no public dissents from the order—which stressed (entirely unnecessarily) that “The denial of the application is not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation.” It’s interesting that the Court feels impelled to provide those kinds of caveats when ruling against Trump—and in very few other contexts.

The Stay Denial in Herridge (July 2)

The Court issued a single ruling last week after rising for its summer recess—denying former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge’s emergency application to stay a lower-court order forcing her to either disclose a confidential source or pay $800 a day in civil-contempt sanctions. (Chief Justice Roberts had issued an administrative stay the previous Friday.) In a brief, unsigned order with no reasoning or vote count, the justices left the sanctions in place; only Justice Kavanaugh noted that he would have granted the stay.

The underlying dispute arises from 2017 Fox News stories Herridge wrote about a scientist investigated by the FBI but never charged; the scientist sued the government over the leak alleging a violation of the Privacy Act, and sought to compel Herridge to identify her sources. Herridge invoked a First Amendment reporter’s privilege, but the district court and D.C. Circuit held that the privilege was overcome by the plaintiff’s specific interest in establishing a Privacy Act violation here.

Bucket #3: Miscellaneous

Financial Disclosures

Eight of the nine justices released their 2025 financial disclosures on Monday, June 29; Justice Alito (yet again) received an extension, so his will follow later in the year. The annual disclosures continue to draw scrutiny amid ongoing debate over Supreme Court ethics and transparency, and Alito’s extension has perhaps the unintentional result that his filing will be watched even more carefully when it eventually arrives—versus coming right in the middle of the news cycle of last Monday’s rulings in argued cases. (Fix the Court has a lot more here.)

The Alito Non-Retirement Story

Not long after the Court literally left the bench on Tuesday morning, NPR published—then quickly retracted—a story reporting that Justice Alito was retiring. Veteran legal correspondent Nina Totenberg had apparently misheard Chief Justice Roberts announcing upcoming staff retirements as she was leaving the Court, and NPR pressed “publish” on a lengthy, pre-written career recap under an erroneous headline before pulling it. NPR issued an on-air correction and an apology; Totenberg called it “the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism” and personally apologized to Alito.

Because people like gossip, there has been an inordinate amount of speculation online about how the mistake actually happened (and skepticism from too many people who ought to know better as to whether Totenberg is telling the truth). I’ll just say that I emphatically agree with the piece Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West published in Slate, which argues that the episode is “not really a press story at all—it is a story about court transparency and hubris.”

As Lithwick and West note (and as I’ve flagged here before), the Supreme Court is the only branch of government that bars cameras; it refuses to release same-day transcripts or audio of opinion announcements; and it forces reporters to rely on hurried, in-person observation in a room where electronic devices are restricted. (Someone who sat in the Courtroom last Monday, for instance, wouldn’t have known the Court had carved out the Federal Reserve from Slaughter until the justices had finished reading Slaughter; everyone else knew immediately, because the Court handed out—and posted to the internet—the two rulings simultaneously, a move that, whether intentional or not, avoided spooking the markets.) Indeed, I noted last week that Totenberg’s error would not have been possible (or, at least, would not have led to NPR publishing an Alito retirement story) if we all had live access to the same audio that the press corps can already hear from the Court’s press room (and that members of the Supreme Court bar can hear from the attorneys’ lounge). Why shouldn’t the public at large (or producers in newsrooms) be able to hear the same things at the same time as the folks who make it into the Courtroom on hand-down days?

Instead, as Lithwick and West argue, all of these self-imposed obstacles set the press corps up to fail. And when the inevitable error occurs, the pile-on lands on the journalist rather than on the institution whose opacity made the mistake possible. The same lack of transparency, they rightly note, let Justice Alito “go rogue” in response to Justice Sotomayor’s oral dissent in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado with almost no public notice (something I flagged last week). Meanwhile, when a justice makes an error in a published opinion (even a biggie), it can be quietly corrected in-house—a very different accountability standard than the one everyone’s applying to NPR. Maybe accountability ought to be a two-way street for everyone, here?

Internal Tensions

Finally, all of this landed the same week as reporting from James Romoser in the Wall Street Journal of rising internal tensions at the Court, with several current justices said to privately miss the presence of retired Justice Stephen Breyer “both as a friend and for his ability to lower the temperature.” Breyer, according to Romoser’s sources, “could be counted on to help keep the peace,” in part by “lightening the mood” using “anecdotes about modern architecture and knock-knock jokes he learned from his grandchildren.” His embrace of collegiality “helped contribute to a sense that the court was a functional, collaborative institution, even when it was divided over tough cases.” What’s especially telling is the unspoken insinuation—that this sense is no longer … present. It may be inside baseball, but the less the justices are getting along, the harder it is for them to forge the kinds of compromises that might allow the Court to rise above the politics of the moment—something it repeatedly failed to do this term, as I argued last week. It’s hard to view these points as wholly unrelated.

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SCOTUS Trivia:
The Resetting of the Docket Numbers…

Speaking of “inside baseball,” last Wednesday brought with it the annual resetting of the Court’s docket numbers—with 26-1 and 26A1 both being docketed the day after the justices rose for their summer recess.

I’ve written before about why the Court picks the (arbitrary) day after the justices rise for their summer recess to reset docket numbers (TL;DR: Until 1980, the Court formally adjourned when it rose for its summer recess, bringing the current Term to an official close). But however logical that numerical practice may have been until 1980, it’s completely anachronistic today (when the Court remains in session—and hands down lots of big rulings—over the summer). And the absence of any remaining direct justification exposes a practice that is otherwise both (1) arbitrary (since it depends on the unpredictable day that the justices rise for their summer recess); and (2) openly misleading when it comes to the data-gathering errors it provokes. The Court’s docket numbers should reset to 26-n, 26An, and 26Mn either on the day the October 2026 Term actually begins or on January 1, 2026—and not some random and otherwise irrelevant day in late June/early July.

This really shouldn’t be hard. Then again, it’s the Supreme Court.

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1. There were six grants of certiorari, but the Court also granted Nebraska’s motion for leave to file an original bill of complaint against Colorado in a water-rights dispute. The grant reinforces the line the Court appears to have drawn in original jurisdiction cases—between true state-state cases (like this one) and cases that could be brought by private parties, but where state attorneys general are trying to jump the queue and get the justices’ immediate attention (like the ones in which it regularly denies leave to file—over dissents from Justices Thomas and Alito).

2. It’s possible Perlmutter was deferred in light of the second question the justices had written (and simultaneously granted) in Slaughter—“Whether a federal court may prevent a person’s removal from public office, either through relief at equity or at law.” But as footnote 2 of Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Cook makes clear, that question was never seriously in dispute.