Updated on Nov. 18 at 7:23 p.m.
Over the past two weeks, the Supreme Court resolved two of the longest-standing matters on its interim docket with orders clearing the way for the Trump administration to implement new rules for sex markers on passports and denying a request to allow a young girl set to be sent to family members in Venezuela to remain in Texas with her mother. And on Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied a stay in a case on whether the Republic of the Philippines or a class of individuals who suffered (or whose families suffered) at the hands of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos should have control of $40 million from his estate that’s in a New York bank account, writing that a stay is not needed in order to maintain the status quo while the dispute continues.
The oldest pending request from the Trump administration – filed on Sept. 19 – concerns its effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. But this won’t be addressed until January at the earliest, when the court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case.
So what does that leave on the justices’ short-term to-do list? As of Tuesday morning, there were three notable applications that the court feasibly could have answered by the end of the month, perhaps most prominently a dispute over President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. Later on Tuesday, one of those applications was withdrawn.
National Guard deployment
When the Trump administration asked the court on Oct. 17 to pause an order from a federal judge in Illinois preventing the National Guard deployment, it appeared that the justices would issue their decision in a matter of days. Justice Amy Coney Barrett instructed lawyers for Illinois and Chicago to respond to the administration’s request by 5 p.m. on Oct. 20, putting the case on a much more condensed timeline than most interim docket matters.
More than a week went by, however, before the court addressed the briefs. And its response on Oct. 29 wasn’t a decision; it was a request for new briefs on the law that Trump invoked when ordering the deployment. Specifically, the court asked whether the law, which allows a president to call the National Guard into federal service when they are unable to “execute the laws of the United States” with “regular forces,” is referring to the regular forces of the U.S. military.
Both sides filed their new briefs on Nov. 10. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer contended that “regular forces” refers to civilian law-enforcement officers and that courts should give “extraordinary deference” to Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to protect federal officials in Chicago rather than the standing military. For their part, lawyers for Illinois and Chicago argued that “regular forces” “refers to the full-time, professional military” and that, therefore, Trump had not satisfied the conditions laid out in the law before federalizing and deploying the National Guard.
On Monday, Sauer and the lawyers for Illinois and Chicago filed what are thought to be their final briefs in the case, responding to arguments made in the Nov. 10 briefs. The Supreme Court can now act at any time.
Register of Copyrights
The Trump administration is also waiting for the justices to act on its request for the court to pause a ruling by a federal appeals court that reinstated Shira Perlmutter to her position as head of the U.S. Copyright Office. The administration fired her on May 10, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked Perlmutter’s removal (at least temporarily) on Sept. 10.
This dispute, like the Cook case or the case on Trump’s effort to fire a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, raises the question of who has the authority to remove various federal officials. Perlmutter was fired after her former boss, Carla Hayden, then the Librarian of Congress, was fired by the president and replaced by Todd Blanche, the Deputy U.S. Attorney General, whom Trump appointed as the Acting Librarian of Congress. Perlmutter was then fired two days later. Perlmutter contends that the president did not have the power to fire Hayden because the Library of Congress is part of the legislative branch, and that, therefore, he did not have the authority to fire her.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, told the court that the Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights (Perlmutter’s title) “are part of the Executive Branch” and that the register “wields executive power” through her work on copyright registration and copyright law and her participation in “negotiations with foreign governments concerning copyright issues.” The D.C. Circuit’s order, therefore, represented “improper judicial interference with the President’s power to remove executive officers,” Sauer wrote.
Blanche v. Perlmutter has been fully briefed since Nov. 12.
Climate-related reports in California
The newest application, in Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Sanchez, centered on two California laws requiring covered businesses to file reports with the state on climate-related issues, including financial risks to their global operations created by weather changes and emissions generated by those operations. The chamber and other business groups urged the court to pause enforcement of the laws, contending that they violate free speech by “compel[ling] businesses to speak on climate change—even if they have said nothing about climate, emissions, or sustainability in the past.” And the violation can’t be justified by the government’s plan for the information, the chamber added, because California “has identified no evidence that the speech it compels will produce any measurable effect on emissions.”
In August, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California denied the business groups’ request for an injunction, holding that the California laws regulate commercial speech and thus should be subjected to a less stringent level of scrutiny than other types of speech-related regulations. The laws likely satisfy that lower standard, the court said.
One of the laws is set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2026, which is why the business groups came to the Supreme Court before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had weighed in on their appeal of the district court’s decision. When the groups filed their application, the 9th Circuit had “set oral argument in the appeal for January 9,” but “not acted on Applicants’ motion for an injunction pending appeal.”
That changed on Tuesday, when the 9th Circuit announced that it would enjoin the law set to take effect in January. The chamber and other business groups noted that decision in their letter withdrawing their Supreme Court application.
