Top 5 Supreme Court Cases To Watch In December

Authored by Sam Dorman and Stacy Robinson via The Epoch Times,

The month of December is set to be a big one for the Supreme Court, which has scheduled oral arguments in hot-button issues such as President Donald Trump’s ability to fire people, campaign spending, and the death penalty.

Its eventual decisions are expected to better define Congress’s power, while creating potentially long-lasting impacts for Americans’ civil liberties.

Here is a breakdown of the cases.

1. Trump’s Ability to Fire Bureaucrats

For months, Trump has been asking the Supreme Court to block lower court orders halting his ability to remove high-level bureaucrats. While the justices have granted him tentative relief on their emergency docket, they’ve yet to fully weigh in on the president’s removal authority.

That’s expected to change after Dec. 8, when the Supreme Court is hearing oral argument over Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) member Rebecca Slaughter.

In March, Slaughter received a letter in which Trump said her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent” with his administration’s priorities. Slaughter sued, alleging that Trump violated not only federal law but Supreme Court precedent as well.

With the FTC Act, Congress specified that presidents could fire people only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance”—none of which Trump identified in his letter to Slaughter.

Instead, he cited Article II of the Constitution, which vests the executive power within the president. Slaughter and a district court both disputed this argument on the basis of a nearly 90-year-old precedent called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.

In that case, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s argument that the FTC Act intruded on his authority. In his majority opinion, Justice George Sutherland said that commissioners exercise “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” functions, and therefore can receive extra protection from Congress.

Trump is asking the Supreme Court to either overrule Humphrey’s Executor or hold that it doesn’t apply to Slaughter’s firing. He also wants the Supreme Court to say that lower courts lack authority to reinstate fired officers.

Slaughter, meanwhile, argues that Trump is misinterpreting his power under the Constitution and that Humphrey’s was settled law. According to the legal doctrine of stare decisis, judges should avoid overturning precedent unless it’s found to have several major flaws.

2. Pro-Life Donors

After the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, pro-life pregnancy centers faced a wave of pressure from politicians and activist groups.

Along with other attorneys general, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin accused pregnancy centers of misleading consumers. In attempting to investigate potential legal violations, Platkin subpoenaed a group of faith-based pregnancy centers collectively known as First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc.

First Choice has alleged that Platkin’s subpoena unconstitutionally chills its right to free speech and association by seeking information about its donors. The organization brought a lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, which allows private entities to sue governmental entities in federal court over violations of their civil rights.

What followed was a complicated trail of litigation that questioned state authority and ultimately, whether First Choice would ever be able to bring a challenge in federal court. The Supreme Court is expected to address those issues and others during oral argument on Dec. 2.

First Choice asked the Supreme Court to intervene after multiple federal courts said its case wasn’t “ripe” or ready for adjudication. At first, a district court said it wasn’t ripe because Platkin hadn’t attempted to enforce the subpoena. After Platkin did so in state court, the district court again said the case wasn’t ripe. Its reasoning was based on the idea that the state court had to first threaten contempt for not complying with the subpoena.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit eventually said that it wouldn’t force the district court to hear First Choice’s constitutional claims brought under Section 1983. Again, the case was described as unripe—this time because the appeals court said the state court was able to deal with First Choice’s constitutional claims.

First Choice told the Supreme Court this created a “Catch 22” due to a legal doctrine known as res judicata, which prevents the relitigation of an issue that was already decided by another court. “Once a state court adjudicates First Choice’s federal constitutional claims, res judicata will almost certainly bar First Choice from ever having those claims decided by a federal court,” the group said in briefing to the Supreme Court.

Platkin’s briefing to the Supreme Court has focused instead on whether First Choice had established that it faced a reasonably objective chill of its First Amendment rights.

“Any risk that donors’ identities will be produced is speculative and remains wholly contingent on a future state-court order requiring production,” he said.

3. Campaign Spending Limits

The high court will soon hear a case that may impact the 2026 midterm elections by judging whether the First Amendment allows Congress to limit coordinated spending between political committees and candidates.

The case, known as National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) originated with Republicans, including then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

They focused on the Federal Election Campaign Act, which imposes a series of limits on political spending—including on individual contributions, expenditures by political parties, and coordination between both parties and candidates. That last category was the one Vance and the NRSC said violated their First Amendment rights, specifically because the FEC sought to enforce it in a way that would restrict their advertising activities.

Since the law’s passage in 1971, it has been updated with various provisions and the Supreme Court has wrestled with whether its limits violate the First Amendment. In doing so, it has attempted to balance interests in free speech with the federal government’s interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.

In multiple cases, the court has clarified that the First Amendment allows Congress to limit individual contributions to candidates but not independent expenditures on things like ads that support the candidate. Political parties similarly can spend independently of the candidate but Congress can limit how those two coordinate expenditures.

In 2001, the Supreme Court said that that type of coordination opened a back door for individuals to use parties as middle men and circumvent limits on contributions.

That ruling was made in a case known as FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee and was cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit when it rejected Republicans’ lawsuit last year. During oral argument on Dec. 9, the Supreme Court is expected to address whether, as Republicans have suggested, it should overrule the 2001 decision.

It’s unclear how the court will rule and the only current justice who was on the court during the 2001 decision is Clarence Thomas, who dissented.

Rather than overturning the 2001 decision, the court could also say the Constitution protects the particular type of activity that Republicans are seeking to perform. Whereas the previous decision focused on a party’s ability to pay a candidate’s bills, Republican committees in the current case are seeking to run ads while getting input from candidates.

The case is a bit unusual because the FEC has joined Republicans in criticizing the 2001 decision, arguing that it didn’t apply to the current case. In the FEC’s place, Democratic committees intervened and argued that coordinated expenditures were “constitutionally equivalent” to contributions while posing a risk of quid pro quo corruption.

4. The Sidewalk Preacher’s Suit

Another case, Olivier v. City of Brandon, involves the First Amendment but in a less direct way. Under Section 1983, Americans can sue governments for violating their First Amendment right and other constitutionally protected rights.

During oral argument on Dec. 3, the high court is expected to hear arguments over how and when convicts can use that law.

The issue arose after Christian street preacher Gabriel Olivier was arrested in 2021 for protesting—including calling passersby names such as “Jezebel”—outside a concert venue. The content of his speech wasn’t so much an issue as where he spoke. The City of Brandon, Mississippi, said he violated its ordinance requiring protesters to carry out their demonstrations in a designated area.

Olivier pleaded no contest to the charges, was fined, and received a suspended sentence of 10 days. It wasn’t until after his sentencing, however, that he filed a civil suit under Section 1983, asking courts to declare that the city ordinance violated the First and 14th Amendments.

The suit was dismissed by lower courts because of a previous Supreme Court precedent, Heck v. Humphrey, which said plaintiffs cannot bring claims under Section 1983 if they “would necessarily imply the invalidity of a prior conviction.”

Olivier appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing he was not looking to overturn his previous conviction but just wanted protection from future prosecutions.

He also said his situation was different from the Heck case.

In that case, the defendant was imprisoned, and was able to bring a habeas petition challenging his detention. Olivier told the court that since he was not imprisoned, he was never able to bring a habeas challenge, which he said would have been the appropriate legal mechanism for challenging the ordinance’s constitutionality.

The city disagreed, stating that “the question in Heck cases is whether a civil judgment would undermine a prior criminal judgment, not whether someone is locked up or out of jail.”

5. IQ and the Death Penalty

Joseph Clifton Smith was sentenced to death for brutally murdering a man in 1997. But after a Supreme Court decision in 2002, Smith alleged that his death sentence was unconstitutional because he was mentally disabled.

That decision, in a case known as Atkins v. Virginia, held that executing a mentally disabled criminal was “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Smith’s case has led the Supreme Court to review how lower courts are supposed to weigh multiple IQ scores in order to determine if someone has an intellectual disability.

“Like most States, Alabama requires that offenders prove an IQ of 70 or less to satisfy the intellectual functioning prong of Atkins v. Virginia,” Alabama said in a petition to the court. “This case was not close: Smith scored 75, 74, 72, 78, and 74 on five full-scale IQ tests.”

Although all five of Smith’s IQ scores were higher than 70, four were low enough that the margin of error made it possible that his actual score was lower than 70. A panel of appellate judges said that in order to use IQ to maintain the death penalty, the state had to have evidence strong enough to foreclose the possibility of his actual IQ being lower than 70.

Alabama and the Trump administration sought Supreme Court review, arguing that the appeals court was requiring too much and that courts should consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores.