Nearly a quarter-century ago, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Federal Republican Campaign Committee to the constitutionality of limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. On Tuesday, Dec. 9, the justices will hear oral arguments in a case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, asking them to strike down the coordinated party expenditure limits and, if necessary, overrule that 2001 decision.

Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices.

Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.

Receiving asylum in the United States is complicated, but, traditionally, beginning the application process has been straightforward. A migrant had to travel to the United States and inform an immigration official that they came in search of safe harbor. Starting in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the federal government tried to control the number of asylum applications that border officers received by stopping migrants from reaching United States territory. On Nov. 17, the Supreme Court agreed to review a federal appellate court decision, Noem v. Al Otro Lado, that prohibits the government from blocking migrants before they cross the nation’s threshold. If the court sides with the government, however, it may inadvertently incentivize attempts to circumvent border-enforcement tactics.

On Wednesday, Dec. 3, the Supreme Court heard argument in Olivier v. City of Brandon, Mississippi, and considered the tension between the broad language and potentially narrower purpose of a ruling from three decades ago on whether an individual convicted of violating a law can later challenge the law as unconstitutional and seek to protect him or herself from its future enforcement.

The Supreme Court’s relist rolls served up the term’s first two summary reversals last week. As we have observed, the more times a case has been relisted, the likelier it is to be resolved by some kind of summary order. We saw that in five-time relist Pitts v. Mississippi, where the court unanimously reversed a Mississippi Supreme Court decision upholding the child-abuse conviction of Jeffery Pitts. The court held that a state statute authorizing a child witness to be shielded by a screen (so that the child cannot see the defendant) does not by itself satisfy the Sixth Amendment right of face-to-face confrontation: Before allowing such screening, the trial court must make a “case-specific” finding that screening is necessary to protect the child from trauma.

Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Court’s decisions will mean for the law, for lawyers and lower courts, and for people’s lives.

Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.

Rarely has a solo dissent in a Supreme Court case eventually triumphed, but that is likely to happen as a majority of the justices appear poised to accept the “unitary executive theory” of presidential power. This is the view that the president has authority over the entire executive branch of government, including the ability to fire heads of agencies and any such government employees. 

But it should be remembered that when the court considered the unitary executive theory in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, the justices, by a vote of 7-1, emphatically rejected it. Only Justice Antonin Scalia dissented and embraced it. His view is now likely that of the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court and may be adopted when the court considers two cases this term concerning presidential removal power: Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook.