The court, which is dominated by six Republican appointees, will confront a charged docket, including a case asking it to overrule Roe v. Wade.
A transformed Supreme Court returns to the bench on Monday to start a momentous term in which it will consider eliminating the constitutional right to abortion, vastly expanding gun rights and further chipping away at the wall separating church and state. The abortion case, a challenge to a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks, has attracted the most attention. The court, now dominated by six Republican appointees, seems poised to use it to undermine and perhaps overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion and barred states from banning the procedure before fetal viability. The highly charged docket will test the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who lost his position at the court’s ideological center with the arrival last fall of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. He is now outflanked by five justices to his right, limiting his ability to guide the court toward the consensus and incrementalism he has said he prefers. The chief justice, who views himself as the custodian of the court’s institutional authority, now leads a court increasingly associated with partisanship and that recent polls show is suffering a distinct drop in public support. At a time when the justices have become uncharacteristically defensive in public about the court’s record, one poll taken by Gallup last month found that only 40 percent of Americans approved of the job the court was doing, the lowest rate since 2000, when Gallup first posed the question. Irv Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Supreme Court Institute, told reporters at a briefing that it had been decades since the court faced a similar dip in public confidence. “Not since Bush v. Gore has the public perception of the court’s legitimacy seemed so seriously threatened,” he said, referring to the 2000 decision in which the justices, splitting on ideological lines, handed the presidency to George W. Bush. The recent poll followed a spate of unusual late-night summer rulings in politically charged cases. The court’s conservative majority rejected the Biden administration’s policies on asylum and evictions, and it allowed a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy to go into effect. In the Texas decision, which was both procedural and enormously consequential, Chief Justice Roberts joined the court’s three Democratic appointees in dissent. In a series of recent public appearances, several justices have insisted that their rulings were untainted by politics. Justice Barrett told an audience in Kentucky last month that “my goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Her remarks, at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, came after an introduction by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who helped found the center. Mr. McConnell was instrumental in ensuring Justice Barrett’s rushed confirmation just weeks after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and weeks before President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election. Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Clarence Thomas have in recent weeks also defended the court against charges of partisanship, saying that judicial philosophies rather than policy preferences guide its work. They added, if a little obliquely, a warning that a proposal to expand the size of the court under consideration by a presidential commission would damage the court’s authority.
