Three issues dominate the Supreme Court term that begins next week, based on the cases the justices have agreed to hear so far. Realistically, however, there is little uncertainty about how this GOP-dominated Court will resolve two of them.

The uncertain question is whether the Court will strike down President Donald Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs — a question the justices will take up in November. The tariffs are clearly illegal under a doctrine the Republican justices used to halt many of President Joe Biden’s policies. And many leading conservatives are vocal opponents of the tariffs, some of whom are even involved in this case. But the Court’s Republican majority rarely breaks with Trump.

There’s less mystery about how the Court will handle two other groups of cases, which concern election law and LGBTQ issues.

The Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act — the landmark 1965 law that banned race discrimination in elections. Kagan’s Republican colleagues repealed central provisions of the law, and misread other provisions of the law so egregiously that it is hard to believe they are acting in good faith.

In its upcoming term, the Republican justices are widely expected to expand on this project — abolishing the Voting Rights Act’s longstanding safeguards against racial gerrymandering. And they are expected to do so at the very moment that President Donald Trump is pushing Republican lawmakers to gerrymander their states to lock the Democratic Party out of power.

The Court is also likely to advance another of the Republican justices’ longstanding projects: destroying campaign finance regulation. One of the few campaign finance laws that even most Republican judges have historically supported is a cap on donations to individual candidates. During the 2026 election cycle, for example, congressional candidates may only accept up to $3,500 from each individual donor to their primary election campaign, and another $3,500 for their general election campaign.

In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, however, the Republican justices are likely to open up a loophole that would effectively allow donors to give tens of thousands of dollars to individual candidates, thus increasing wealthy donors’ ability to trade money for favors.

The other big loser in the upcoming term is likely to be queer people. The Court seems poised to strike down bans on “conversion therapy,” where therapists try to suppress their patients’ sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s also likely to uphold state laws requiring student athletes to play on a sex-segregated team that aligns with their sex assigned at birth.

Many of the biggest cases of the upcoming term, moreover, are yet to be determined. The Court announces which cases it will hear during its October to April argument sessions on a rolling basis, typically finalizing the full list during the winter. Last term, the Court handed down a long string of temporary decisions handing significant victories to Donald Trump — including a decision permitting him to fire so many federal employees that many federal programs cease to function. Several of these cases are likely to return to the Court in 2026, so we will find out soon if the justices intend to permanently endorse many of Trump’s most aggressive attempts to remake American society.

In the meantime, here are the significant cases the Court already plans to hear in its upcoming term, and what’s at stake in each of them.

The tariffs cases: Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources v. Trump

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