The Supreme Court added just one case – a technical dispute over the interaction between two federal environmental laws – to its docket for the 2026-27 term. The justices on Monday morning released a list of orders from their private conference last week in which they granted review in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guahan, but did not act on a variety of other high-profile cases that they considered last week, including a request from Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, to clear the way for a lower court to throw out his conviction for contempt of Congress.
In Prutehi Guahan, the justices will weigh in on a dispute that arises from the U.S. Air Force’s disposal of unexploded ordnance, which it burns or blows up, on a base in Guam. Four years ago, Prutehi Guahan, an environmental group, went to federal court to challenge the Air Force’s then-pending application to renew its permit, granted to it by Guam’s Environmental Protection Agency under a federal law called the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, for its disposal of ordnance. The group contended that before the Air Force submitted its application, it should have prepared an environmental impact statement, as required by a different federal law, the National Environmental Policy Act.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with the challengers and sent the case back to the trial court to allow it to go forward. The Air Force then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in. It contended that, under the federal law governing administrative agencies, the Administrative Procedure Act, the group could not challenge the Air Force’s permit yet because Guam’s EPA had not granted or denied it. And the Air Force was not required to submit an environmental impact statement, it argued, because it was seeking a permit renewal under one law – the RCRA – that specifically deals with the environmental impact of hazardous wastes.
After considering the Air Force’s petition for review at three consecutive conferences, the justices on Monday agreed to take up the case. The justices will likely hear oral argument in the case in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in early 2027.
In addition to Bannon’s case, the justices once again did not act on several cases challenging bans on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines. The court could be waiting to act on those petitions for review once it issues its rulings in a pair of gun-rights cases that the justices are currently considering on the merits. If so, a ruling on the disposition of those petitions might not come until late June or early July.
The justices also did not act on a petition asking them to decide whether a Massachusetts school district violated a couple’s parental rights when it both socially transitioned their child over their objections and also hid that fact from them. On March 2, the court granted a request from a group of California parents in a similar dispute on its interim docket, reinstating a ruling by a federal judge in that state that bars California schools from “misleading parents about their children’s gender presentation” and that requires schools to follow parents’ instructions regarding the names and pronouns that children use there.
In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan pointed specifically to the Massachusetts case as she criticized the court’s decision to “resolve[] the issues raised through shortcut procedures on the emergency docket even though it has had—for months now—the option of doing so the regular way, on our merits docket.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the case of Jaron Burnett, who was sentenced to just under nine years in a federal prison, followed by 15 years of supervised release, for a crime that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years.
After Burnett was released from prison, he was twice charged with violating the terms of his supervised release. After the first violation, he was sentenced to an additional 13 months, which he served, for a total of 118 months in prison. After the second violation, he argued that if the government wanted to try to send him back to prison for more than two months – that is, so that he would wind up serving more than the maximum sentence that he could have received – he was entitled under the Sixth Amendment to have a jury, rather than a federal judge, determine beyond a reasonable doubt that he had violated the terms of his release.
The lower courts rejected that argument, and the Supreme Court turned down Burnett’s petition for review on Monday. In his three-page dissent from that disposition of the case, Gorsuch wrote that “Mr. Burnett does not ask for much. He does not object to receiving new prison time for supervised release violations. He does not even object to a court issuing that prison time based on its own factual findings under a preponderance of the evidence standard, so long as the punishment issued does not exceed the statutory maximum for his underlying crime of conviction.” Rather, according to Gorsuch, “[a]ll Mr. Burnett claims is the right to have a jury decide any contested facts under the reasonable doubt standard where, as here, a court seeks to impose a sentence that will cause a defendant’s total time in prison to exceed the statutory maximum Congress has authorized for his underlying conviction.”
Gorsuch added that “even if the class of cases like Mr. Burnett’s is small, the stakes are high. Many federal criminal defendants today serve long terms on supervised release (terms that can be further extended after any new violation). Others serve on supervised release for life. And, under the logic of the decision below, defendants like these can effectively wind up losing for decades (and sometimes forever) the right to receive a federal jury trial to resolve charges against them under the reasonable doubt standard.”
The justices’ next private conference will take place on Friday, March 20. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday, March 23.
