Major cases and why they matter

The Supreme Court’s new term starts next week, but its critics are already furious.

For the first time in the 19 months of the Covid pandemic, oral arguments will be made in person rather than virtual.

The nine justices will consider pivotal cases that broach some of the most contentious issues in American politics — including religion, guns and abortion — with plenty of space left on the calendar. But courtroom dramas this term may be matched or even eclipsed by several outside pressures facing the institution.

Here are some of the big cases the justices will hear:

The court, stacked 6-3 with justices chosen by Republican presidents, already kicked up a firestorm weeks earlier, when a bare majority of five justices declined to block a strict Texas abortion law from taking effect.

That decision, justified on procedural grounds in a one-paragraph order via the so-called shadow docket, prompted fierce condemnation, including from President Joe Biden, who had already commissioned a group of experts to study possible reforms to the court.

With public support eroding — a Gallup poll conducted just after the Texas ruling showed the court’s approval rating sinking to its lowest level ever — some justices in recent weeks have spoken out in their own defense.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer argued in a new book and in interviews that a judge’s judicial philosophy outweighs partisan political association.

The 83-year-old justice, the court’s oldest member, has also resisted pressure from the left to step down and allow Biden to appoint a liberal replacement before the 2022 midterms, when Democrats risk losing their slim majority in the Senate.

In a recent speech, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas denounced the media for suggesting that judges “are just always going right to [their] personal preference.”

And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest addition to the bench and the third conservative appointee of former President Donald Trump, bluntly declared recently that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Not everyone is convinced.

“I think they’re anxious that the cat’s out of the bag,” said Samuel Moyn, a Yale Law School professor who teaches a class on Supreme Court reform.

“Increasingly it’s an open secret that judges are political just like the rest of us, and they’re making political choices,” Moyn said.

He pointed to Barrett’s confirmation as a chief source of fuel propelling the latest push for reforms.

In 2016, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s pick to fill the seat vacated by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, citing the impending midterm election. But during the presidential campaign four years later, McConnell rushed Trump pick Barrett through…