No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.
This reality will be on full display in a few weeks, when the justices return for the Court’s new term at the beginning of October. Indeed, on October 3, the second day of that term, the Court will hear a case where the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit declared an entire federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unconstitutional.
In the unlikely event that the justices uphold this decision, a brief filed by the banking industry explains to the Supreme Court, the entire US mortgage market could seize up, as banks will have no idea what rules they need to comply with in order to issue loans. Worse, because home-building, home-resale, and related industries make an estimated 17 percent of the US gross domestic product, such a decision risks economic devastation unheard of since the Great Depression.
And this case, known as CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association, is one of at least six cases the Court will most likely decide this term where Fifth Circuit judges issued legally indefensible decisions that will have calamitous results if they are not reversed. That court, which is dominated by the most reactionary Trump appointees and similarly minded judges, has become the forum of choice for litigants pushing preposterous legal arguments that are unlikely to fly elsewhere, even in a very conservative judiciary.
By next June, the Supreme Court is likely to toss out a Fifth Circuit decision nuking the federal government’s power to prevent companies from defrauding investors. It is also likely to reverse a Fifth Circuit decision holding that people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders — meaning that a court has determined that they are a violent threat to their romantic partner or their partner’s child — have a constitutional right to possess a gun.
And, on top of these three cases, which the Court has already agreed…
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