Professor Will Thomas Joins KCBS San Francisco to Talk Supreme Court, Trump Items

“...it does seem, at least according to what we heard last month, from oral arguments, that the court is really leaning towards the idea that it wants to find some way to keep Donald Trump on the ballot. And in some respects, the hardest thing for them to do is not to reach that outcome but to figure out the legal reasoning in that direction. What we've heard from both the conservative and the liberal justices is some desire for a kind of uniform resolution of this issue to really just take it out of the 2024 election. And so that points to finding out an answer sooner or later.”

“…if Donald Trump cases never made it to the Supreme Court this year, it would still be a blockbuster term for the court. And so once you start piling on all these extra cases, it is a lot. And frankly, we're seeing a court that is acting slower than it usually does. By this point in the term, the term starts in October and ends in October, we usually see not quite a majority, but certainly a good chunk of the cases are resolved. And because of the Trump cases, because of a variety of sort of emergency dockets, we're seeing the court moving much more slowly than they have in the past.”

“I suspect that to the extent the court has to sort of prioritize, they will be emphasizing cases that you have a deadline of the November election. So those are cases like the Trump election cases, some of the January 6 cases. There's also a variety of other kinds of, like legislative map or congressional map cases that the court wants to get to sooner rather than later. Some of the other cases, things like Second Amendment issues, some like medical access or religious exemptions, they're very important cases, but there's not that same sort of ticking clock. So to the extent the court wants to put its attention, it will do the things with the deadline first.”