David Souter, retired Supreme Court justice, dies at 85

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:

• Called out by Trump for how he leads the Supreme Court, John Roberts is fine keeping a low profile (Maureen Groppe, USA Today)
• Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts Sends New Message to Trump (Anna Commander, Newsweek)
• One of the most controversial executive orders will shortly land at SCOTUS (The Economist)
• C-SPAN asks the Supreme Court to televise arguments for Trump’s birthright citizenship case (Amanda Friedman, Politico)
• The Universal Injunction Cases, Part 1: The Origins Debate (Samuel Bray, Divided Argument)

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Wednesday morning read:

• Supreme Court Lets Trump Enforce Transgender Troop Ban as Cases Proceed (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)
• In win for Trump, Supreme Court allows ban on transgender troops to take effect (Maureen Groppe, USA Today)
• Trump’s Deportees to El Salvador Are Now “Ghosts” in U.S. Courts (Jonathan Blitzer, The New Yorker)
• Shadow Docket Requests Threaten to Delay High Court Opinions (Lydia Wheeler & Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson, Bloomberg Law)
• Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked if He Must Uphold the Constitution (Jess Bravin, The Wall Street Journal)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday afternoon cleared the way for the Trump administration to enforce a Department of Defense policy prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. With the court’s three Democratic appointees indicating that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request, the justices paused an order by a federal judge in Washington state that had barred the government from implementing the policy anywhere in the United States. 

Shortly after taking office in 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that allowed transgender troops to serve openly in the military. On Jan. 20 of this year, President Donald Trump revoked Biden’s order and issued another order requiring Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to put into effect a ban on “individuals with gender dysphoria” – the medical term for the psychological distress caused by a conflict between the sex someone is assigned at birth and that person’s gender identity. 

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:

• Trump administration asks judge to toss suit restricting access to abortion medication (Lindsay Whitehurst & Rebecca Boone, The Associated Press)
• Trump to continue Biden’s court defense of abortion drug mifepristone (Daniel Wiessner, Reuters)
• What the Constitution, Supreme Court say about ‘due process’ for Trump deportees (Devin Dwyer, ABC News)
• An anti-trans lawmaker brings a Supreme Court case that she absolutely must win (Ian Millhiser, Vox)
• Trump’s Justice Department Is Squandering Its Biggest Asset (Ankush Khardori, Politico)

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices on Monday afternoon that Congress has given the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services the power to appoint members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, while the lawyer for a group of individuals and small businesses challenging the constitutionality of that group’s structure countered that Congress failed to do so. The arguments came in relatively rare supplemental briefs filed at the justices’ request two weeks after the oral arguments in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management. 

Under the Affordable Care Act, the task force – an independent panel of experts – makes recommendations about which “preventive health services” private insurers and group health plans must cover at no additional cost to the patient. One such recommendation, made in June 2019, was for the HIV prevention medicine pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP.