Supreme Court has 6 cases to decide, including birthright citizenship

By MARK SHERMAN and LINDSAY WHITEHURST WASHINGTON AP The Supreme Court is in the final days of a term that has lately been dominated by the Trump administration s crisis appeals of lower court orders seeking to slow President Donald Trump s efforts to remake the federal regime Related Articles States can cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood the Supreme Court rules Key Medicaid provision in Trump s big tax cut and spending bill is revealed to violate Senate rules Federal judge orders US Labor Department to keep Job Corps running during lawsuit Senate struggle over Medicaid cuts threatens progress on Trump s big bill Kennedy s new vaccine panel alarms pediatricians with inquiries into long-settled questions But the justices also have six cases to resolve that were argued between January and mid-May One of the argued cases was an crisis appeal the administration s bid to be allowed to enforce Trump s executive order denying birthright citizenship to U S -born children of parents who are in the country illegally The remaining opinions will be delivered Friday Chief Justice John Roberts mentioned On Thursday a divided court allowed states to cut off Medicaid money to Planned Parenthood amid a wider Republican-backed push to defund the country s biggest abortion provider Here are a few of the biggest remaining cases Trump s birthright citizenship order has been blocked by lower courts The court rarely hears arguments over emergency appeals but it took up the administration s plea to narrow orders that have prevented the citizenship changes from taking effect anywhere in the U S The issue before the justices is whether to limit the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions which have plagued both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past years These nationwide court orders have emerged as an major check on Trump s efforts and a source of mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies At arguments last month the court seemed intent on keeping a block on the citizenship restrictions while still looking for a way to scale back nationwide court orders It was not clear what such a decision might look like but a majority of the court expressed concerns about what would happen if the administration were allowed even temporarily to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally Democratic-led states immigrants and rights groups who sued over Trump s executive order argued that it would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than years The court seems likely to side with Maryland parents in a religious rights scenario over LGBTQ storybooks in residents schools Parents in the Montgomery County school system in suburban Washington want to be able to pull their children out of lessons that use the storybooks which the county added to the curriculum to better reflect the district s diversity The school system at one point allowed parents to remove their children from those lessons but then reversed discipline because it determined the opt-out strategy to be disruptive Sex tuition is the only area of instruction with an opt-out provision in the county s schools The school district introduced the storybooks in with such titles as Prince and Knight and Uncle Bobby s Wedding The affair is one of several religious rights cases at the court this term The justices have repeatedly endorsed insists of religious discrimination in latest years The decision also comes amid increases in latest years in books being banned from general school and population libraries A three-year battle over congressional districts in Louisiana is making its second trip to the Supreme Court Lower courts have struck down two Louisiana congressional maps since and the justices are weighing whether to send state lawmakers back to the map-drawing board for a third time The incident involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has been skeptical of considerations of race in masses life At arguments in March several of the court s conservative justices suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder if not impossible to bring redistricting lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act Before the court now is a map that created a second Black majority congressional district among Louisiana s six seats in the House of Representatives The district elected a Black Democrat in A three-judge court identified that the state relied too heavily on race in drawing the district rejecting Louisiana s arguments that politics predominated specifically the preservation of the seats of influential members of Congress including Speaker Mike Johnson The Supreme Court ordered the challenged map to be used last year while the event went on Lawmakers only drew that map after civil rights advocates won a court ruling that a map with one Black majority district likely violated the landmark voting rights law The justices are weighing a Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing online pornography Texas is among more than a dozen states with age verification laws The states argue the laws are necessary as smartphones have made access to online porn including hardcore obscene material almost instantaneous The question for the court is whether the measure infringes on the constitutional rights of adults as well The Free Speech Coalition an adult-entertainment industry pact group agrees that children shouldn t be seeing pornography But it says the Texas law is written too broadly and wrongly affects adults by requiring them to submit personal identifying information online that is vulnerable to hacking or tracking The justices appeared open to upholding the law though they also could return it to a lower court for additional work Specific justices worried the lower court hadn t applied a strict enough legal standard in determining whether the Texas law and others like that could run afoul of the First Amendment