Demonstrators protest against President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban outside the offices of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago, Illinois, on March 16, 2017. Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed one of two cases over President Donald Trump’s ban on visitors from mostly Muslim countries, suggesting it will step away from the controversy for now.

The court got rid of a case that originated in Maryland and involves a ban that has now expired and been replaced by a new version.

But the justices took no action on a separate case from Hawaii. That dispute concerns both the travel ban and a separate ban on refugees, which does not expire until Oct. 24.

Dismissing the cases would allow the court to avoid ruling on difficult legal issues, at least for a while.

The justices had combined the two cases and set them for argument that was to have taken place Tuesday. But after the travel ban expired last month and a new policy was rolled out, the court canceled the argument and began to weigh whether it should decide the legality of the policy after all.

The third and latest version of the travel ban is supposed to take full effect Oct. 18 and already has been challenged in the courts.

Five of the six countries included in the travel ban the Supreme Court was supposed to review remain in the latest version.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: But first: The U.S. Supreme Court began its new term this week with a full bench of nine justices and a jam-packed docket.

Today’s case, on partisan gerrymandering, has the potential to reshape American politics as we know it.

Our regular Supreme Court watcher, Marcia Coyle, will join Lisa Desjardins to break down the arguments.

The case centers on a redistricting map in Wisconsin.

And that’s where special correspondent Jeff Greenfield begins.

FORMER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Wisconsin!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JEFF GREENFIELD, Special Correspondent: The 2012 elections brought good news to Wisconsin Democrats. President Obama carried the state for a second time, and the party won 174,000 more votes for the state assembly than Republicans.

But that didn’t mean Democrats would control the state assembly. In fact, Republicans wound up with 60 of the 99 seats, some 61 percent of the seats, after winning only 49 percent of the votes. Was that because so many Democrats were clustered in urban districts in Madison and Milwaukee?

Bill Whitford didn’t think so. The retired law professor and lifelong Democrat believed the way the district lines had been drawn had effectively rigged the election.

BILL WHITFORD, Plaintiff: The value that’s clearly at stake is that majorities should rule. Democrats got a majority in the statewide assembly vote, and they got less than 40 percent of the seats in the assembly. I mean, that made very clear that we had no chance.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Whitford is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that asked the federal court to strike down a legislative map because of a partisan gerrymander, and, last year, a federal district court agreed.

While both parties have gerrymandered, since the 2010 census, it’s mostly helped Republicans, because they have controlled the legislature and governor’s office in many more states. The Brennan Center for Justice in New York has found what it calls extreme maps, where partisan bias, largely from gerrymandering, currently gives the Republican Party a net benefit of 16 or 17 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans have a 23-seat majority.

MICHAEL LI, Brennan Center for Justice: We’re talking about where you grab and lock in a large share of seats, and make it impossible for the party to — the other party to win seats.

JEFF GREENFIELD: The center’s Michael Li co-authored the extreme maps report and also a legal brief that supports the Wisconsin challenge.

If the court goes your way, it’s fair to say this is a big deal?

MICHAEL LI: This would be a very big deal. The court has never put partisan gerrymandering out of bounds in the same way that it’s put racial gerrymandering out of bounds or other things out of bounds.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Li notes that prominent Republicans, including two presidential nominees and a 2016 presidential candidate, back the effort to limit partisan gerrymandering.

But Rick Esenberg, president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative group, says such limits would be a judicial nightmare.

RICK ESENBERG, President, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty: The problem that the courts have had — and this problem goes back 30, 40, 50 years — is judges have been unable to identify such a judicially manageable standard.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Esenberg filed a Supreme Court brief supporting the existing maps and arguing that Wisconsin’s assembly districts follow all of the existing redistricting rules: They’re compact, contiguous, and encompass communities of interest.

A court-imposed change, he says, would be itself political.

RICK ESENBERG: You’re essentially imposing a constitutional obligation to gerrymander for competitiveness, that is, a constitutional requirement to compensate for the natural disadvantage that Democratic voters might have. That, it seems to me, is every bit as partisan as what the Republicans been accused of doing.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Last year, I spoke with North Carolina Republican State Representative David Lewis, who co-chaired the redistricting committee, who freely says partisanship is perfectly legitimate.

DAVID LEWIS, North Carolina State Representative (R): I think it’s more honest and up-front to say that, as a Republican, I’m going to follow the law, I’m going to follow the rules of the law, and if there is a discretionary decision to be made, I will make it from my partisan point of view.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Like Lewis, Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general, Brad Schimel, says that nonpartisanship is just an illusion.

BRAD SCHIMEL, Wisconsin Attorney General: We could all dream of finding the unicorn that takes all the politics out of these things. But there’s a reality that the Supreme Court has recognized, that you’re not — you can’t take the politics out of this.

JEFF GREENFIELD: In some states, there is no partisan fighting about legislative lines, because the politicians don’t draw those lines. In those states, the power has been taken away from the legislature and placed in other hands.

The biggest is California, where former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger backed referenda that created an independent commission to handle redistricting. Three other states now take a similar approach.

Schwarzenegger says that, when he became governor in 2003, members of Congress were entrenched and protected.

FORMER GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, R-Calif.: You had 265 congressional elections in a 10-year period, and only one changed party hands. I always made a joke that there’s more changeover in a former Soviet politburo than we have here in California.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Schwarzenegger says that, since the independent commission took over the process, the state legislature has become far less polarized. He believes that’s the key to creating less partisan districts and relieving gridlock in Washington.

FORMER GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: For decades now, I have been talking about immigration reform. It can’t get done. You have for decades people talking about in Washington how important it is to rebuild our infrastructure. It can’t get done. It is a dysfunctional system. And it’s dysfunctional because of our gerrymandering.

JEFF GREENFIELD: If the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s findings, it could mean legislative maps across the country will be challenged. And that would mean a radically different terrain for the battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Jeff Greenfield.

LISA DESJARDINS: And here now to discuss today’s arguments, as ever, is Marcia Coyle, chief Washington correspondent for “The National Law Journal.”

And she, of course, was in the courtroom today.

MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal: I was, Lisa.

LISA DESJARDINS: Now, this is an issue almost as old as our country itself, but yet something that has not been definitively resolved by the Supreme Court.

Can you remind us of the last time the court talked about this? And it’s significant now.

MARCIA COYLE: Oh, absolutely.

The court took up a case out of Pennsylvania in 2003, decided it in 2004, and basically said, we can’t decide this. There is no way to really measure when a partisan redistricting has gone so far that it violates the Constitution.

One of the justices — one of the five who said that was Justice Kennedy, but he wrote separately to say, you know, years to come, there may be some way to measure this. Science, social science will evolve to the point where there will be a standard.

And today, in the Supreme Court, the challengers to the Wisconsin plan offered them several standards.

LISA DESJARDINS: And Justice Kennedy was quoted in many of the very long briefs here.

So, what did Justice Kennedy say today, and what did other justices, especially the chief justice, Roberts, say ?

MARCIA COYLE: Justice Kennedy didn’t give the challengers a hard time at all. In fact, he asked no questions of them.

But he did give the state of Wisconsin a rather difficult time. And we took away from that that he may think that perhaps it is time for the court to accept one of the standards that’s being offered, especially in a district where it appeared that most of the justices seemed to feel this one may have gone a bit too far.

LISA DESJARDINS: And Chief Justice Roberts, however, talked about the institution of the court itself. Can you talk about the stakes that he sees on the table here?

MARCIA COYLE: This was really a fascinating argument, Lisa.

And you saw the policy considerations playing out in different ways. The chief justice said, look, you know, if we strike down a redistricting map like Wisconsin, and the decision favors the Republicans or it favors the Democrats, and we say the reason we did it is because of a mathematical formula, the average person on the street is going to say — and these are his words — what a bunch of baloney, that we really voted because you had maybe five Democratic or Republican-appointed justices.

What is that going to do to the integrity of the institution of the Supreme Court? It’s going to throw us into the thick of politics.

On the other hand, you had Justice Ginsburg offering different policy concerns. She said, what about the precious right to vote? What incentive is there going to be for people to vote if the deck is always stacked in favor of one political party?

LISA DESJARDINS: I’m wondering about this case. Is this one of those cases where whatever the justices decide could have a very quick impact on how our politicians act, whether they uphold this map or whether they reject it? Can you talk about what could happen?

MARCIA COYLE: Absolutely.

As the lawyer for the Wisconsin challengers pointed out, the court is the only institution right now that can deal with what he said the cusp of a very serious problem, that if the court doesn’t come up with some kind of test, in 2020, after the census, he said there will be a festival of copycat partisan gerrymanders, the like of which we have never seen.

And that, he said, presents a serious problem for democracy. As Justice Ginsburg pointed out, the right to vote is our most fundamental right.

LISA DESJARDINS: Marcia Coyle, I can’t wait to see what happens with this case. And you will be here to talk to us about it. Thank you.

MARCIA COYLE: And, Lisa, remember, too, our viewers can listen to the audio on Friday on the Supreme Court Web site.

LISA DESJARDINS: Perfect.

Thank you, Marcia Coyle.

MARCIA COYLE: My pleasure.

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By Sam Weber and Laura Fong

JEFF GREENFIELD: On a recent Tuesday evening, dozens of Wisconsin voters gathered in a Milwaukee public library, to hear about a campaign — aimed not at protecting the right to vote, but about where those votes are cast.

The featured speakers were Dale Schultz and Tim Cullen, both former state senators, both leaders of opposing political parties in the state senate — but with a common cause: redistricting.

TIM CULLEN, (D) FORMER STATE SENATOR: He’s Republican and I’m a Democrat — a lot of things we don’t agree on. We agreed that this issue was a problem. It was just inherently wrong that you can use your raw political power to guarantee yourselves a job. And guarantee yourselves power.

DALE SCHULTZ, (R) FORMER WISCONSIN STATE SENATOR: We need to put the people first. Give them the opportunity to pick their representatives. That’s what this boils down to. And it’s the difference between being a good partisan as opposed to a good patriot.

JEFF GREENFIELD: They’re talking about “gerrymandering”— when legislative maps are drawn to advantage one party over the other during redistricting… which happens every 10 years after the census.

It’s a practice almost as old as our country. In 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on a highly misshapen district that a newspaper lampooned as a salamander, and labeled it a “gerrymander.”

In Wisconsin, the power to redistrict hadn’t belonged to one party for 100 years…

But in 2010, Republicans won control of the state assembly, the state senate, and the governor’s office, and like parties have done throughout American history, they used that power to maximize their political advantage.

Listening at the library meeting was retired school principal Helen Harris. She lives on the northwest side of the city with her husband, Curt. The 2011 redistricting plan placed their heavily democratic Milwaukee neighborhood into a Republican-leaning district that stretches far to the northwest past the suburbs into farm country.

HELEN HARRIS: We live in the city. And now we — our little neighborhood — I think it’s like six or seven thousand people were taken and attached to a very strongly Republican district.

JEFF GREENFIELD: The new district line was just two blocks from her house.

So when the district line was redrawn, anything this side of it was moved into the new district?

CURT HARRIS: That’s correct.

HELEN HARRIS: Mmm-hmm.

JEFF GREENFIELD: In the 2012 election for her district, the Republican candidate ran unopposed – winning almost 99 percent of the vote.

HELEN HARRIS: I don’t feel that I have a voice in this district. If every single Democrat in this district voted, it wouldn’t change anything. And many of the districts have been specifically aligned and created so that that Democratic voice will not be heard.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Moving the Harris’s from a Democratic, Milwaukee district into a larger Republican area was part of a strategy known as “packing and cracking.” Heavily Democratic Milwaukee voters were “packed” together in fewer districts, while other sections of Milwaukee were “cracked” and added to several Republican districts… diluting that Democratic vote. The result? Three fewer Democrats in the state assembly representing the Milwaukee area.

In 2015, Helen Harris and eleven other Wisconsin Democrats sued in federal court, alleging the partisan gerrymandering was unconstitutional and deprived their candidates of a fair chance to win. The plaintiffs won in Wisconsin and now the Supreme Court will decide whether the maps went too far.

In 2011, Republican leadership hired consultants to use mapping software to draw new district lines behind closed doors — in secrecy — and without any input from any Democrats. Even when Republican assembly members were shown their new districts, they had to sign non-disclosure agreements.

The impact was clear in 2012, when Republicans won 49 percent of the votes for the state assembly, but captured 61% of the seats. Republican State Senator Dale Schultz voted for the plan, but he’s since had a change of heart.

DALE SCHULTZ, (R) FORMER WISCONSIN STATE SENATOR: When I realized the Democrats had won by over 100,000 votes in Wisconsin and yet in the State Assembly the Republicans ended up with 60 seats. It just didn’t make sense to me.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Helen Harris’ former state representative, Democrat Fred Kessler, was drawn out of his district. He decided to move to stay in the assembly.

FRED KESSLER, (D) STATE REPRESENTATIVE: We had about a 3,500 square foot house, brand new, that we built in 2005, and then they put the whole subdivision out. And my border was four blocks away. We had to sell a house and we had to buy another house and I know it was deliberate on their part.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Helen Harris’ new representative was Republican Don Pridemore, who lives near the town of Hartford, 20 miles west of Milwaukee County. He said he was pleased his district included sections of the city.

DON PRIDEMORE, (R) FORMER STATE REPRESENTATIVE: Some people in the district admitted to me that they were Republicans, but they were they didn’t want me to let anybody know that especially their neighbors. But that’s just the way it is the Republicans in those wards. We’re very happy now that they had somebody to represent them, even though they may have been in the minority.

JEFF GREENFIELD: And Pridemore says gerrymandering is just normal part of politics.

DON PRIDEMORE, (R) FORMER STATE REPRESENTATIVE: I have no doubt that Democrats would do the same thing, if not even a little worse than what was done, when we had the opportunity.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Across the country, state legislatures in the majority use mapping software to protect their incumbents and enable their candidates to win as many seats as possible.

So, in some states where Republicans dominate — like North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — gerrymandering has helped Republicans win a greater percentage of seats than their statewide share of votes. It’s happened in democratically drawn states too, like Maryland and Massachusetts.

The Supreme Court has allowed partisan gerrymandering in the past, as long there was no intent to racially discriminate, and districts had roughly the same number of people.

Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General, Brad Schimel, thinks the case is motivated by sour grapes.

BRAD SCHIMEL, (R) WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: That’s what Democrats in Wisconsin are doing is using this as a tool to try to convince voters, ‘Hey, Republicans aren’t really winning because of their message or because their candidates, they’re winning because they cheated.

JEFF GREENFIELD: In winning their case in Wisconsin, attorneys for Helen Harris and her fellow plaintiffs convinced the district court of the republican majorities intent.

They also introduced a new metric called the efficiency gap, which measures the number of so-called “wasted” votes in each district, in other words, the number of votes beyond the majority needed to win an election plus the votes cast for the loser. It attempts to quantify the amount of “packing and cracking” in a legislative map.

The argument was designed to appeal to Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote in a 2004 redistricting case that “… We have no basis on which to define, clear, manageable, and politically neutral standards…”

JEFF GREENFIELD: If a state legislature chooses to draw the lines to maximize its political advantage, are there any circumstances under which that would cross a constitutional line?

BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well the United States Supreme Court hasn’t found that line. The majority of the court has concluded that political consequences are both predictable and intended in redistricting efforts. So as long as the legislative body follows traditional redistricting principles like compactness, avoiding dividing municipalities, population equity. The fact that there’s a political gain built into it as well is not problematic from the Court.

JEFF GREENFIELD: As for that split between the statewide vote and the large Republican majority in the assembly, Schimel says that’s because of “clustering”—Democrats win by massive majorities in Milwaukee and Madison, while Republican votes are spread out more evenly.

BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: It is very much a factor that people choose to live in particular places that they are with people who vote like them. I live in the very Republican county of Waukesha. I’m glad that we aren’t close in my county.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Schimel also argues — if the Supreme Court adopts the efficiency gap as a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering, it would create chaos for legislative maps all over the country.

BRAD SCHIMEL, WISCONSIN ATTORNEY GENERAL: One third of the maps drawn across the last 45 years across America would fail. Those consequences are enormous. The litigation will be endless and fruitless. And we’ll constantly be back in the court looking at it again, and again, and again until you satisfy whatever judge or judges you’re in front of.

JEFF GREENFIELD: The Supreme Court will hear the case this week. And a decision could have implications not only here in Wisconsin, but across the country.

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The Supreme Court building is pictured in Washington, D.C. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Disputes over a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and partisan electoral maps top the Supreme Court’s agenda in the first full term of the Trump presidency. Conservatives will look for a boost from the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, in a year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said will be momentous.

President Donald Trump’s travel ban appears likely to disappear from the court’s docket, at least for now.

But plenty of high-profile cases remain.

The justices will hear important cases that touch on gay rights and religious freedoms, the polarized American electorate, the government’s ability to track people without search warrants, employees’ rights to band together over workplace disputes and states’ rights to allow betting on professional and college sporting events.

Last year, “they didn’t take a lot of major cases because they didn’t want to be deadlocked 4-to-4,” said Eric Kasper, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “This year, that problem doesn’t present itself.”

Gorsuch quickly showed he would be an ally of the court’s most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, most recently joining them in objecting to the court’s decision to block an execution in Georgia.

While justices can change over time, Gorsuch’s presence on the bench leaves liberals with a fair amount of trepidation, especially in cases involving the rights of workers.

The very first case of the term, set for arguments Monday, could affect tens of millions of workers who have signed clauses as part of their employment contracts that not only prevent them from taking employment disputes to federal court, but also require them to arbitrate complaints individually, rather than in groups.

“I’m very fearful, given the new Supreme Court, of what will happen,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Just on Thursday, the justices added a case that has the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.

Taken together, the two cases “have a real chance of being a one-two punch against workers’ rights,” said Claire Prestel, a lawyer for the Service Employees International Union.

In the term’s marquee cases about redistricting and wedding cakes, 81-year-old Justice Anthony Kennedy, closest to the court’s center, remains the pivotal vote.

In an era of sharp political division, it may be now or never for the court to rein in excessively partisan redistricting. If the justices do set limits, their decision could affect elections nationwide.

The high court has weighed in several times on gerrymandering over the past 30 years, without agreeing on a standard that would allow courts to measure and oversee a process that elected lawmakers handle in most states.

But a lower court was convinced that Democratic voters’ challenge in Wisconsin to the Republican-led redistricting following the 2010 census offered a sensible way to proceed. The GOP plan seemed to consign Democrats to minority status in the Wisconsin Assembly in a state that otherwise is closely divided between the parties.

The only real question in the case is whether Kennedy will decide that partisan redistricting “has just gone too far” in Wisconsin and other states where one party has a significant edge in the legislature, but statewide elections are closely fought, said Donald Verrilli Jr., solicitor general during the Obama administration.

The wedding cake case stems from a Colorado baker’s refusal, based on his religious beliefs, to make a cake for a same-sex couple.

Colorado’s civil rights commission said baker Jack Phillips’ refusal violated the state’s anti-discrimination law.

As the case has come to the Supreme Court, the focus is on whether Phillips, who regards his custom-made cakes as works of art, can be compelled by the state to produce a message with which he disagrees.

On the other side, civil rights groups worry that opponents of same-sex marriage are trying to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that extended same-sex marriage rights across the country by carving out exceptions to civil rights laws.

The competing narratives are both meant to appeal to Kennedy, who has forcefully defended free-speech rights in his 30 years on the court and also wrote the court’s major gay rights rulings, including the landmark decision two years ago.

The Trump administration is supporting Phillips in this case. Former Justice Department official Martin Lederman said the administration’s high court filing is the first in American history in favor of an exemption from civil rights laws.

The administration also has reversed course in two cases before the justices. In the arbitration case, the administration now is supporting employers over their workers. In the other, the administration backs Ohio’s efforts to purge its voter rolls, over the objections of civil rights groups.

The justices have so far largely avoided being drawn into controversy surrounding the president. They found common ground and resisted a definitive ruling on Trump’s travel ban, which critics have derided as an effort to exclude Muslims. The latest revision to the policy could prompt the court to jettison the case they originally had planned to hear in October.

David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said plenty of other cases will test “whether and to what extent the court will be playing an independent role in checking the Trump administration’s positions with respect to basic rights protections.”

One case concerns privacy in the digital age. The issue: Can police obtain cell tower location records from mobile phone companies to track a person’s movements for several months without a search warrant?

Amid a clutter of ideologically divisive disputes, this case could unite conservative and liberal justices who have worried about how much unfettered access authorities should have to the digital records of peoples’ lives.

“It’s hugely important because, although this case is just about cell site records, it’s about much more,” said Orin Kerr, a privacy expert at George Washington University’s law school, including “internet records, bank records, credit card records and telephone records.”

Beyond the cases is the perennial court guessing game: Is anyone retiring?

Ginsburg and Kennedy, 81, are the court’s oldest justices. Kennedy’s plans are anyone’s guess. Some of his former law clerks have said they wouldn’t be surprised to see him leave the court as early as June.

Ginsburg turns 85 in March, at which point she’d become just the sixth justice to serve beyond that milestone birthday.

She has said she plans to serve as long as she can go “full steam.” Ginsburg’s discussion in public appearances about her workout routine, including planks and pushups, is her way of saying she’s sticking around.

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The Trump administration is dealing with lawsuits that were in progress before the president took office — and asserting different positions than the Obama administration. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Backing employers over employees. Backing the state of Ohio over groups involved in voter registration. Backing a narrow reading of a sexual discrimination law over a broad one.

Those are just some of the legal about-faces President Donald Trump’s administration is making at the Supreme Court and in lower courts.

The Trump administration has found itself in court defending a variety of new policies: the president’s travel ban, the phasing out of a program protecting young immigrants, and the revisiting of a policy that had allowed transgender individuals to serve openly in the military. But it’s also dealing with lawsuits that were in progress before the president took office — and asserting positions different from those of the Obama administration.

The Office of the Solicitor General, the Justice Department office that represents the federal government at the Supreme Court and determines what position it will take in federal appeals court cases, does some position switching every time the White House changes parties. But the office prizes its reputation as largely nonpartisan and switches positions with “a great deal of trepidation,” said Gregory Garre, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush.

“The office’s currency and credibility before the court depends on it not being viewed as a political institution,” Garre said. He said Supreme Court justices, and Chief Justice John Roberts in particular, have given the office a hard time in court about flipping positions.

On Monday, the first day of its new term, the Supreme Court will hear its first case in which the Trump administration is reversing course from its predecessor. In one of the most important business cases of the term, the Obama administration had backed employees in a dispute with their employers over arbitration agreements. Now, the Trump administration is backing employers.

A federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, is being permitted to defend the original position, meaning that two government lawyers will argue against each other. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that the unusual lineup “will be a first for me in the nearly 25 years I’ve served on the court.”

The justices will soon consider a case in which the government now supports a method Ohio uses to remove people from voter rolls. When the case was being heard in a federal appeals court, the Obama administration argued that the method, which puts someone on the path to being removed from the rolls if they haven’t voted for two years, violates federal law.

Samuel Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor and former Justice Department official, called the switch in a longstanding position “stunning” because it reversed a view held for more than 20 years by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

While the highest-profile shifts in position may be those at the Supreme Court, the administration has also altered course in cases at lower-level courts. In cases about pollution-control rules put in place by the Obama administration, the Trump administration has asked for pauses in the litigation so the rules can be re-evaluated, said Pat Gallagher, the director of the Sierra Club’s environmental law program.

In a case out of Texas, the Obama administration had joined groups suing over a controversial voter ID law. The Trump administration, in contrast, has abandoned the argument that the state passed ID rules with discrimination in mind. It said changes signed by Texas’ governor should satisfy the courts.

The Trump administration has also aggressively shifted positions in cases involving gay rights, said Human Rights Campaign legal director Sarah Warbelow. In a New York case involving a skydiving instructor who alleged he was fired after telling a customer he was gay, the Trump administration’s Justice Department weighed in to argue that a federal law barring “sex” discrimination means discrimination based on gender and doesn’t cover sexual orientation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Barack Obama took the opposite view.

The Trump administration is also supporting a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because of his religious beliefs, a case now before the Supreme Court.

Donald Verrilli, who served as solicitor general from 2011 to 2016, said the Obama administration either wouldn’t have weighed in on the case at all or would have supported the couple. But Verrilli, who himself backed position switches when he was solicitor general, declined to discuss other about-faces by his former office.

“It’s a hard job. You know, you’ve got to make difficult judgments in that job,” Verrilli said. “I’m sure they’re doing their best.”

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

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Photo by Molly Riley/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Its conservative majority restored, the Supreme Court said Thursday it will return to an issue with the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.

After the justices deadlocked 4-4 in a similar case last year, the high court will consider a free-speech challenge from workers who object to paying money to unions they don’t support.

The court, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch on board, could decide to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling that allows public sector unions to collect fees from non-members to cover the costs of negotiating contracts for all employees.

The union fees case is among nine new cases the justices added to their docket for the term that begins on Monday. Others deal with a defendant’s right to direct his own defense, police searches of vehicles and overtime pay for service advisers at car dealerships.

Labor unions have been under sustained attack at the high court in recent years. The latest appeal is from a state employee in Illinois. It was filed at the Supreme Court just two months after Gorsuch filled the high court seat that had been vacant since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

The stakes are high. Union membership in the U.S. declined to just 10.7 percent of the workforce last year, and the ranks of private-sector unions have been especially hard hit.

About half of all union members now work for federal, state and local governments, and many are in states like Illinois, New York, and California that are largely Democratic and seen as friendly toward unions.

Labor leaders criticized the court for taking up the case. “This case is yet another example of corporate interests using their power and influence to launch a political attack on working people and rig the rules of the economy in their own favor,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

But National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation president Mark Mix said the court was poised to protect employees’ rights.

“With the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Janus case, we are now one step closer to freeing over 5 million public sector teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other employees from the injustice of being forced to subsidize a union as a condition of working for their own government,” Mix said.

The Illinois case involves Mark Janus, a state employee who says Illinois law violates his free speech rights by requiring him to pay fees to subsidize AFSCME, which represents tens of thousands of Illinois workers. About half the states have similar laws covering so-called “fair share” fees that cover bargaining costs for non-members.

Janus is seeking to overturn a 1977 Supreme Court case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. It said public workers who refuse to join a union can still be required to pay for bargaining costs, as long as the fees don’t go toward political purposes. The arrangement was supposed to prevent non-members from “free riding,” since the union has a legal duty to represent all workers.

A federal appeals court in Chicago rejected Janus’ claim in March. Gorsuch was confirmed in April and the appeal was filed in June.

Scalia died in February 2016, just a month after the justices heard a similar case from California. The court seemed ready to overrule the 1977 case, and the 4-4 tie the court announced in March of that year almost certainly meant that Scalia, not typically a friend of unions in high court cases, would have been part of the majority ruling against them.

The justices will hear argument in the winter.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: The U.S. Supreme Court is dropping, for now, upcoming arguments over President Trump’s controversial travel ban. The move comes one day after the White House issued a revised and expanded ban. It restricts travel to the U.S. from eight countries, including five on the original ban, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. New to the list, Chad, North Korea and Venezuela.

For more on the ban and what comes next, we are joined by Yeganeh Torbati. She covers immigration for the Reuters news service.

Yeganeh, welcome back to the program.

So, what is mainly different about this one?

YEGANEH TORBATI, Reuters: So, what happened was the administration essentially dropped Sudan from the list of countries that whose citizens can come to the United States.

It added a couple of other countries, Chad, North Korea, and it restricted travel to the United States by certain Venezuelan government officials and their families. But for the five main countries on the travel ban list, the ones you just named, the restrictions are largely still in place, and they’re now indefinite. There’s no time limit on them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What was the rationale behind this change?

YEGANEH TORBATI: So what the administration said over the past weekend, essentially, Friday and again on Sunday, is that they went through a rigorous process where they engaged with countries around the world to — in order to get more information from them on their citizens and get certain assertions and certain agreements of cooperation, essentially, to help the United States verify their citizens’ identity.

And what they have told the public and what they have told us is that those countries that didn’t provide that or either were not able to or willing to provide that level of cooperation, those are the countries whose citizens are now basically banned from coming to the United States.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So it’s no longer then a Muslim ban, which is what the critics were saying it was, even though the administration denied that?

YEGANEH TORBATI: Right, so the administration denies that.

But what critics of the ban are saying is that throwing in countries like North Korea and Venezuela into this ban doesn’t sort of take away from the original intent or what they see as the original intent, which was to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from coming to the United States.

North Korea last year sent about 109 individuals to the United States in the form of immigrants and non-immigrants, a tiny number. The restrictions on Venezuela, another non-Muslim majority country in this new list, are very narrow. It’s just certain government officials and their families can’t come as tourists to the United States.

Chad is 53 percent Muslim, and so critics still see this as a Muslim-majority — a ban on countries that are Muslim-majority.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, finally, as we reported, the Supreme Court now put off hearing these arguments. What is likely to be the effect? There were lawsuits filed on the basis of this being unconstitutional. Where is all that likely to go?

YEGANEH TORBATI: Right. So, legal experts see the Supreme Court’s move today as essentially an indication that it really doesn’t want to rule on this case, and that it likely or perhaps will indeed rule it moot.

The Supreme Court has a long-term view and it realizes that President Trump is not going to be the last president. There will be presidents after him, and they don’t want to rule on a case related to immigration and national security, areas that are very much the prerogative generally of the executive branch. They don’t want to set very far-reaching precedents if in fact the original reason for the case has now expired.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yeganeh Torbati of Reuters, we thank you.

YEGANEH TORBATI: Thank you.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Appreciate it.

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Photo by Molly Riley/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has canceled arguments set for Oct. 10 in the dispute over President Donald Trump’s travel ban, after Trump rolled out a new policy Sunday.

The unsigned order from the justices Monday asks both sides to weigh in by Oct. 5 about what to do with the case.

The court had been ready to hear argument about the legality of a 90-day ban on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries and a 120-day ban on refugees from around the world.

The ban expired Sunday and was replaced by a new policy that affects eight counties and has no expiration date.

Those countries are Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

Chad, North Korea and Venezuela were not covered by the earlier ban.

READ MORE: Trump’s travel ban unlikely to affect North Korea

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A view of the U.S. Supreme Court building is seen in Washington, D.C. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s travel ban offers the Supreme Court the chance to make a major pronouncement on the president’s power over immigration. But the case also could vanish into the legal ether, and that may be what a majority of the court is hoping for.

Getting rid of the case would allow the justices to avoid second-guessing the president on a matter of national security or endorsing an especially controversial part of Trump’s agenda.

The timetable surrounding the travel ban could make that possible.

The court will hear a challenge to the temporary pauses on visitors from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees worldwide in less than a month.

But even before that happens, the 90-day travel ban expires on Sept. 24. The refugee ban lapses a month later.

The administration has yet to say whether it will impose new bans, how long they might last and what countries may be affected. Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are the six countries covered by the existing ban.

The high court could react by ruling that a new lawsuit is necessary or ordering lower courts that have handled the challenges so far to assess the new policy.

So far, the court has stepped in three times to evaluate what parts of the policy can take effect even as legal challenges proceed in the courts.

Chief Justice John Roberts may have the most at stake among the justices in finding a way out of the case without passing judgment on the controversy over a policy Trump talked about during the campaign and then rolled out a week into his presidency.

“It creates political controversy whether the court approves or rejects the travel ban,” said Ilya Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Supreme Court review.

Shapiro said Roberts would strongly prefer any way to get the case out of his court rather than come down on either side of tough questions dealing with the Constitution and immigration law.

READ MORE: Trump calls for ‘larger, tougher’ travel ban after London subway attack

Top Justice Department officials in previous Democratic and Republican administrations agreed. “There’s incentive to not decide very much at all,” said Donald Verrilli, the solicitor general for most of President Barack Obama’s tenure.

Several other justices may be willing to help Roberts get there, said Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center.

The court’s pronouncements about the travel ban so far have either been by consensus or a six-justice majority including the more conservative Roberts, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four more liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

“The liberal justices, especially the pragmatic liberals Breyer and Kagan, will do anything to allow Roberts to avoid a substantive constitutional decision,” Rosen said.

In part, their motivation stems from a widely held view that the case is difficult to predict. Presidents have substantial power over immigration and courts typically are reluctant to undercut executive authority, especially when presidents say national security is at stake.

That argument is at the heart of the administration’s defense of the Trump policy. The challenges shouldn’t have made it this far, the administration has told the court.

On the other side, opponents of Trump’s policy have persuaded two federal appeals courts that Trump has either overstepped his authority under immigration law or violated the Constitution’s protections against religious bias. Trump’s campaign statements calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and tweets while president have figured in the rulings.

Just last week, Trump returned to the travel ban after a bomb partially exploded on a London subway. “The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific — but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!”

At one point in July, the court hashed out an order when Roberts was in Australia, Kennedy was in Austria and other justices were in time zones in between. The product of their collaboration was an unsigned order that said grandparents, cousins and other similar relations could not be excluded under the travel ban, while refugees who already had a relationship with resettlement agencies in the U.S. could be kept out of the country.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, would have let the administration set more restrictive conditions on family members from the six countries.

The outcome appeared to be the product of “cross-party consensus about what to do,” said Irv Gornstein, executive director of Georgetown law school’s Supreme Court Institute.

Justices rarely explain what goes on in their private deliberations, but in late July Ginsburg offered a peek to an audience in Aspen, Colorado.

The court’s three grandparents were unhappy with one aspect of the travel ban, she said.

“The government’s restrictive interpretation had no provision for grandparents. I commented that three justices are obviously not going to put up with that — Justice Kennedy, Justice Breyer and me,” Ginsburg said.

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The Supreme Court building is pictured in Washington, D.C. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to maintain its restrictive policy on refugees.

The justices on Tuesday agreed to an administration request to block a lower court ruling that would have eased the refugee ban and allowed up to 24,000 refugees to enter the country before the end of October.

The order was not the court’s last word on the travel policy that President Donald Trump first rolled out in January. The justices are scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 10 on the legality of the bans on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees anywhere in the world.

It’s unclear, though, what will be left for the court to decide. The 90-day travel ban lapses in late September and the 120-day refugee ban will expire a month later.

The administration has yet to say whether it will seek to renew the bans, make them permanent or expand the travel ban to other countries.

Lower courts have ruled that the bans violate the Constitution and federal immigration law. The high court has agreed to review those rulings. Its intervention so far has been to evaluate what parts of the policy can take effect in the meantime.

The justices said in June that the administration could not enforce the bans against people who have a “bona fide” relationship with people or entities in the United States. The justices declined to define the required relationships more precisely.

A panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge’s order that would have allowed refugees to enter the United States if a resettlement agency in the U.S. had agreed to take them in.

READ MORE: Trump’s travel ban shouldn’t include grandparents or extended family, 9th circuit court says

The administration objected, saying the relationship between refugees and resettlement agencies shouldn’t count. The high court’s unsigned, one-sentence order agreed with the administration, at least for now.

The appeals court also upheld another part of the judge’s ruling that applies to the ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Grandparents and cousins of people already in the U.S. can’t be excluded from the country under the travel ban, as the Trump administration had wanted. The administration did not ask the Supreme Court to block that part of the ruling.

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File photo of the U.S. Supreme Court by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is back at the Supreme Court, asking the justices to continue to allow strict enforcement of a temporary ban on refugees from around the world.

The Justice Department’s high court filing Monday follows an appeals court ruling last week that would allow refugees to enter the United States if a resettlement agency in the U.S. had agreed to take them in. The appellate ruling could take effect as soon as Tuesday and could apply to up to 24,000 refugees.

Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a brief order Monday that will keep the ruling on hold for the time being, at least until the ban’s challengers submit written arguments by midday Tuesday and the full court has a chance to act.

The administration is not challenging the part of the ruling that applies to a temporary ban on visitors from six mostly Muslim countries. The appeals court ruled that grandparents and cousins of people already in the U.S. can’t be excluded from the country under the travel ban.

READ MORE: Trump’s travel ban shouldn’t include grandparents or extended family, 9th circuit court says

The Supreme Court already has weighed in twice on lower court rulings striking down or limiting the travel and refugee bans, though it has to rule on their validity.

In June, the high court said the administration could not enforce the bans against people who have a “bona fide” relationship with people or entities in the United States. The justices declined to define the required relationships more precisely.

In July, the justices issued an order that temporarily allowed strict enforcement of the exclusion of refugees. But the Supreme Court refused to go along with the administration’s view that it could keep out grandparents, cousins and some other family members.

The 90-day travel ban affects visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The high court is scheduled to hear arguments about the legality of the travel and refugee bans in October. By that point, the original 90-day travel ban will have lapsed and the 120-day refugee ban will have just a few weeks to run. The administration has yet to say whether it plans to renew the exclusions, expand them or make them permanent.

The administration told the court Monday said that changing the way it enforces the policy on refugees would allow “admission of refugees who have no connection to the United States independent of the refugee-admission process itself.”

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An Ohio voter receives the message that her vote has been counted on Super Tuesday in Parma, Ohio March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk – RTSALSE

COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Donald Trump’s administration has reversed the government’s position on a voter roll case before the U.S. Supreme Court and is now backing Ohio’s method for purging voters.

Ohio’s system for removing inactive voters from the rolls does not violate the National Voter Registration Act, the Justice Department said Monday.

The government’s filing said it reconsidered its position following the change in administrations. The Justice Department under President Barack Obama said Ohio’s method was prohibited.

Ohio’s process involves a three-part test that starts with voters who haven’t cast ballots in two years, then fail to respond to a notice trying to verify their address, and then fail to vote for an additional period of two federal elections.

As a result, the Justice Department said, “Registrants who are removed in part because they failed to respond to an address-verification notice are not removed solely for nonvoting.”

The Supreme Court said in May it would hear the case. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Civil liberties groups are challenging the state’s program for removing thousands of people from voter rolls based on their failure to vote in recent elections. Those groups say Ohio was unfairly disenfranchising eligible Ohio voters.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the New York-based public advocacy group Demos sued Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted over the practice. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled last year that the process violates the national voting law.

Following that decision, a federal district court entered an injunction for the November 2016 presidential election that allowed more than 7,500 Ohio voters to cast a ballot.

The ACLU called the Justice Department’s decision disappointing, saying the agency has consistently rejected the notion of purging people from rolls just for voting infrequently.

“We have a Justice Department that’s supposed to be protecting and expanding people’s ability to vote,” Mike Brickner, senior policy director for the agency’s Ohio chapter, said Tuesday. “By allowing these types of purges, that will mean people who are eligible to vote will have their registration suspended.”

Husted welcomed the Justice Department’s position. Several other groups, including former attorneys with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division and attorneys general from 17 states, have adopted the same position, Husted said.

“This case is about maintaining the integrity of our elections, something that will be harder to do if elections officials are not be able to properly maintain the voter rolls,” said Husted, who is running for governor next year.

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Photo by Molly Riley/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is granting the Trump administration’s request to more strictly enforce its ban on refugees, at least until a federal appeals court weighs in.

But the justices are leaving in place a lower court order that makes it easier for travelers from six mostly Muslim countries to enter the United States.

The administration had appealed last week’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson that required the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. Watson also vastly expanded the family relations that refugees and visitors can use to get into the country.

The high court on Wednesday blocked Watson’s order as it applies to refugees, but not the expanded list of relatives. The justices said the federal appeals court in San Francisco should now consider the appeal. It’s not clear how quickly that will happen.

In the meantime, though, up to 24,000 refugees who already have been assigned to a charity or religious organization in the U.S. will not be able to use that connection to get into the country.

The Supreme Court also denied the administration’s request to clarify its ruling last month that allowed the administration to partially reinstate a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees from anywhere in the world.

The court’s ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travelers with a “bona fide relationship” with a person or an entity in the U.S. The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

Watson’s order added grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins to a list that already included a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling already in the U.S. The expanded list of relatives remains in effect.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have blocked Watson’s order in its entirety. Those same three justices said last month they would have allowed the Trump travel ban to take full effect.

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Behnam Partopour, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) student from Iran, is greeted by his sister at Logan Airport after he cleared U.S. customs and immigration in February in Boston. The State Department on Monday expanded its definition of “close family” to include grandparents and other relatives that constitute a bona fide U.S. relationship for visa applicants and refugees from six mainly Muslim nations. Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The State Department on Monday expanded its definition of “close family” to include grandparents and other relatives that constitute a bona fide U.S. relationship for visa applicants and refugees from six mainly Muslim nations.

In response to a Hawaii federal judge’s order last week, the department instructed U.S. diplomats to consider grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces and first cousins to meet the criteria for applicants from the six countries to receive a U.S. visa.

They had been omitted by the department after the Supreme Court partially upheld the Trump administration’s travel ban in June. Initially, it had included only parents, spouses, fiancés, children, adult sons or daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law and siblings. Monday’s instructions change that.

“The ruling is effective immediately and we have issued instructions to our embassies and consulates to use the expanded definition when adjudicating visa cases,” the department said. Under the rules, applicants from the six countries — Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Yemen — have to prove a bona fide relationship with a person or entity, including a “close familial relationship” in the U.S. to be exempt from the ban.

READ MORE: The Supreme Court just had a quiet term. These high-profile cases are about to change that.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson had ruled on Thursday that excluding grandparents and others defied common sense.

“Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents,” he wrote. “Indeed grandparents are the epitome of close family members.”

The Trump administration has appealed the Hawaii order to the Supreme Court saying that Watson’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on what family relationships qualify refugees and visitors from the six Muslim-majority countries to enter the U.S. “empties the court’s decision of meaning, as it encompasses not just ‘close’ family members, but virtually all family members. Treating all of these relationships as ‘close familial relationship(s)’ reads the term ‘close’ out of the Court’s decision.”

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A view of the U.S. Supreme Court building is seen in Washington, D.C., on October 13, 2015. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is seeking to close a legal window opened for tens of thousands of refugees to enter the United States, appealing a federal judge’s order directly to the Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson had ordered the government to allow in refugees formally working with a resettlement agency in the United States. His order also vastly expanded the list of U.S. family relationships that refugees and visitors from six Muslim-majority countries can use to get into the country, including grandparents and grandchildren.

In its appeal Friday night, the Justice Department said Watson’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on what family relationships qualify refugees and visitors from the six Muslim-majority countries to enter the U.S. “empties the court’s decision of meaning, as it encompasses not just ‘close’ family members, but virtually all family members. Treating all of these relationships as ‘close familial relationship(s)’ reads the term ‘close’ out of the Court’s decision.”

Only the Supreme Court can decide these issues surrounding the travel ban, the Justice Department said. “Only this Court can definitively settle whether the government’s reasonable implementation is consistent with this Court’s stay,” it said.

READ NEXT: Travel sanctions loom for nations that don’t meet new U.S. security criteria

On Saturday, the U.S. Justice Department asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to put Watson’s ruling on hold while the Supreme Court considers its appeal.

The long, tangled legal fight is expected to culminate with arguments before the nation’s high court in October.

Watson’s ruling could help more than 24,000 refugees already vetted and approved by the United States but barred by the 120-day freeze on refugee admissions, said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, a resettlement agency.

“Many of them had already sold all of their belongings to start their new lives in safety,” she said. “This decision gives back hope to so many who would otherwise be stranded indefinitely.”

Citing a need to review its vetting process to ensure national security, the administration capped refugee admissions at 50,000 for the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, a ceiling it hit this week.

The federal budget can accommodate up to 75,000 refugees, but admissions have slowed under Trump, and the government could hold them to a trickle, resettlement agencies say.

“Absolutely this is good news for refugees, but there’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Melanie Nezer, spokeswoman for HIAS, a resettlement agency. “It’s really going to depend on how the administration reacts to this.”

READ NEXT: More court challenges expected for Trump’s new travel ban

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had said the administration would ask the Supreme Court to weigh in, bypassing the San Francisco-based 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, which has ruled against it in the case.

The Supreme Court allowed a scaled-back version of the travel ban to take effect last month.

“Once again, we are faced with a situation in which a single federal district court has undertaken by a nationwide injunction to micromanage decisions of the co-equal executive branch related to our national security,” Sessions said. “By this decision, the district court has improperly substituted its policy preferences for the national security judgments of the executive branch in a time of grave threats.”

The administration took a first step by filing a notice of appeal to the 9th Circuit, allowing it to use a rule to petition the high court directly. There was no timetable for the Supreme Court to act, but the administration sought quick action to clarify the court’s June opinion.

The justices now are scattered during their summer recess, so any short-term action would come in written filings.

The administration has lost most legal challenges on the travel ban, which applies to citizens of Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran and Yemen.

The Supreme Court’s ruling exempted a large swath of refugees and travelers with a “bona fide relationship” with a person or an entity in the U.S. The justices did not define those relationships but said they could include a close relative, a job offer or admission to a college or university.

The Trump administration defined the relationships as people who had a parent, spouse, fiance, son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law or sibling already in the U.S.

Watson enlarged that group to include grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins.

Hawaii Attorney General Douglas S. Chin, who sought the broader definition, said Thursday’s ruling “makes clear that the U.S. government may not ignore the scope of the partial travel ban as it sees fit.”

“Family members have been separated and real people have suffered enough,” Chin said.

Spagat reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Julie Watson in San Diego, Jennifer Sinco Kelleher in Honolulu, Sudhin Thanawala in San Francisco and Sadie Gurman and Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

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