Supreme Court returns to the bench, bats away 800 appeals, including challenge to Trump’s reelection

The Supreme Court batted away an appeal Monday from a man trying to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot and shot down a request from a Trump lawyer who wanted to erase a lower-court ruling that he had probably engaged in illegal activity surrounding his advice after the 2020 election.

In a move that surprised court-watchers, Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself from that case involving John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who lost in lower court when he tried to shield his communications with Mr. Trump from a congressional committee.

Mr. Eastman argued he was protected by attorney-client privilege, but a lower court ruled that his communications may have engaged in criminal activity surrounding the aftermath of the 2020 election. Crime is an exception to the attorney-client privilege.

The justices declined the case without comment, other than to note Justice Thomas’s recusal.

Mr. Eastman had served as a law clerk to Justice Thomas, and his wife communicated with Mr. Eastman surrounding the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Justice Thomas took part last year when the court dealt with the congressional committee’s work, so his recusal this time was noteworthy. Justices do not have to divulge a reason for recusal.

“We don’t know if he recused because of his wife Ginni’s activity, or because of his close relationship with Eastman,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law.

Mr. Blackman said there were no other surprises out of the court’s lengthy list of orders, which disposed of more than 800 appeals, part of a traditional house cleaning at the start of the justices’ new session each October.

The court heard its first oral argument of the new term on Monday in a case involving how courts should interpret the First Step Act of 2018.

That law lowered sentences for thousands of criminals. The case turns on whether the word “and” means a defendant must meet all or just one of the requirements to qualify for having a sentence reduced.

On Tuesday, the justices will hear a major case challenging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat. The court will be asked to rule on the CFPB’s ability to set its own budget and receive funding from outside Congress. 

Should the justices rule against the CFPB, it could upend the bureau’s previous work and could call into question other major independent regulatory bodies, such as the Federal Reserve.

The 2020 election reverberated in other cases before the court.

The justices declined to hear a challenge to Mr. Trump’s ability to appear on ballots in 2024, based on his activities surrounding the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

John Castro, a long-shot GOP presidential candidate, argues that Mr. Trump should be disqualified under the Constitution’s insurrection clause, which bars anyone who led an insurrection or rebellion against the government from holding public office. It was ratified as part of the 14th Amendment following the Civil War.

Mr. Castro asked the justices to decide whether he has legal standing to challenge Mr. Trump’s place on the ballot.

He lost in lower court and the justices declined to take the case.

It’s possible the justices will revisit the issue, given the slew of other similar challenges working their way through lower courts.

The justices also declined to review a lower court’s sanctioning of lawyers who brought a lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook and several swing state officials to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Gary Fielder and Ernest Walker, the attorneys, filed a class-action lawsuit alleging a vote-and-election-law-changing scheme in several swing states on behalf of a group of voters.

Lower courts, though, rejected the fraud claims, finding that the lawyers — and their clients — did not have sufficient standing to bring the lawsuit, meaning there was not sufficient legal injury to bring the case. The lower court also raised issues with procedures the attorneys took in bringing the case. They were ordered to pay $186,000 in sanctions.

Other cases the justices denied review include:

• A challenge from a pro-life activist seeking to release hundreds of hours of undercover videos of the abortion industry and its alleged sales of fetal body parts. David Daleiden and his advocacy group, the Center for Medical Progress, asked the high court to review a lower court’s injunction against him sharing more footage allegedly showing crimes in the abortion industry, his attorneys say.

• A man who claimed he was fired from his job in a Defense Department school because of his accent, which he said amounted to discrimination based on national origin. Lower courts had said the issue wasn’t his accent so much as that he was unintelligible, which made his service as a teacher problematic.

• A challenge to New York’s rent control law. Property owners had complained that the law amounted to an unlawful taking, saying they were forced to provide a public benefit — subsidized housing at below-market rates — without compensation from the government. Lower courts ruled in favor of the law, saying owners invite tenants onto the property, aren’t forced to rent it out, and have ways of ousting tenants.

• An appeal from a Michigan county that foreclosed on a home for unpaid taxes, but failed to pay the owner the rest of the money beyond the tax bill. A lower appeals court had sided with the owner.

• A challenge to the Senate’s ability to set its own rules, including the ability to filibuster and to create exceptions to the filibuster. The challengers argued that those exceptions, when a filibuster is disallowed, create a two-tier voting system. Lower courts ruled the plaintiffs didn’t have legal standing to challenge the filibuster, and rejected their complaint about the exceptions.

• A man who challenged New Hampshire’s criminal defamation law. Robert Frese was charged with defamation after he posted on a newspaper’s website that a particular police officer was “corrupt” and the police chief “covered up for a dirty cop.” The charges were later dropped, but Mr. Frese said the law itself — and similar laws in more than a dozen other states — impinge on free speech.

The justices already have a weighty calendar of cases on their docket, including a challenge to social media censorship laws, a First Amendment fight over public officials’ ability to block users from their social media accounts and a Second Amendment case involving prohibitions on gun purchases.