This year, the Supreme Court has already announced rulings knocking out a once major part of the Voting Rights Act and declaring conversion therapy protected under the First Amendment's free speech guarantees.

And as habitual court watchers know, the big decisions for 2026 are just getting started.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Still to come are rulings on transgender students playing sports, IQ testing for criminal

defendants who claim intellectual disability,

and whether the 14th Amendment really does grant birthright citizenship to pretty much everybody born in the United States.

And as those decisions come down in the next few weeks, we can expect the justices who issued them to be out and about making the case to the American

people that they as individuals are devoted to the project of objective constitutional

interpretation, not partisan boosterism. For insights on the rulings, this heavily conservative

majority court is likely to release. We've invited Ian Milheiser. He covers the court as a senior correspondent at

Vox, where you can read his reporting on what the Supreme Court still has left to decide this term.

Ian, welcome to think. It's so good to be here. Thank you so much. Why, by the way, does the court have

this schedule that it has when it releases like a ton of consequential decisions

over the course of a few weeks and then heads out of town for three months?

Yeah.

I mean, being a Supreme Court justice is a sweet, sweet job.

Like only justices and school children get the, get the summers off.

And so the reason why the court, I mean, the court does

have a schedule that's written into statute where it has year-long terms. The new term begins

in October. And so if it's going to stick with its terms, it has to wrap everything up by

October. But the reason that they wrap everything up in late June is because they want to go on vacation in July and they have to finish their work before they can do that.

Maybe it is an exhausting job. The New York Times reported recently about hints of these strained relations among the justices.

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