Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. As midterm Election Day approaches, Supreme Court justices return to the bench Monday for their next two-week argument session, which features a case that is poised to bring the latest expansion of religion in public life.

While much of the nation’s attention will be on the ballot box and vote tallies on Tuesday, that morning the justices will hear a challenge from Catholic schools who argue that Colorado’s universal preschool program violates their rights by not exempting them from serving LGBTQ families. The state says that it “requires all preschools — secular and religious alike — to deliver publicly-funded services without excluding families based on protected-class status.”The hearing should indicate whether St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy will be the court’s latest endorsement of religious rights or an exception to that trend.

This week the court was relatively quiet, with the main action (as of Friday afternoon) coming in a shadow docket order on Tuesday. The justices refused to grant an application, brought by a legal aid group and Democratic-led cities with large immigrant populations, that urged the court to halt what they called “egregious collusion” between Texas and the federal government.

The red state challenged a Biden-era rule that gave immigration judges discretion to pause removal proceedings to promote efficiency or protect due process rights. When the state brought the case against the Trump administration, the latter immediately joined Texas in a motion against the rule. A sympathetic judge, Reed O’Connor, blessed the deal and vacated the rule nationwide.

No justices dissented from the order declining the application from Centro Legal de la Raza and Baltimore, Maryland, Columbus, Ohio, and New Haven, Connecticut, which warned the high court of the “collusion that infected this suit from its inception.”They said that letting the deal stand would mean that “such collusive suits will surely proliferate further.”Now that the court has denied the application, we shall see.

President Donald Trump also got some good news on his personal docket, when the court ordered a response from Hillary Clinton to Trump’s bid to revive a civil lawsuit against her and others. Hoping the justices would summarily deny Trump’s petition, Clinton and her civil co-defendants initially waived their right to oppose the president’s attempt to resurrect the suit, in which he claimed they conspired ahead of the 2016 election to “weave a false narrative” that his campaign colluded with Russia.

But on Tuesday the court requested a response, signaling that at least one justice wants to hear from Trump’s 2016 election opponent before deciding what to do with his petition. It takes four justices to grant review, so the response request doesn’t necessarily mean that the court is interested in hearing the case, which lower courts have rejected. But it gives the president a bit of hope for now. We could learn later this year whether the justices will add this appeal to the term’s growing docket.

An issue that is more likely to attract the court’s attention is whether the administration has been properly letting lawyers lead federal prosecutors’ offices around the country without Senate confirmation. The latest lower court ruling against the administration came Tuesday, when U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright said Trump’s chosen top prosecutor for the Los Angeles district had been “unlawfully serving.”The George W. Bush appointee noted that the government had pending petitions to the high court on the underlying legal dispute over how to interpret federal law on vacancies, with the Justice Department arguing that lower court rulings had “cast a pall over prosecutions in 14 judicial districts nationwide.”The justices could step in later this term to settle the issue, but they have discretion over whether and when to do so.

And though the court isn’t on the midterm ballot, the resulting makeup of the Senate will determine what sort of justices, if any, can fill any vacancies that arise in the near future. Justice Samuel Alito has said that he intends to serve at least through this latest court term, meaning at least until after the new Senate is seated.

But if Democrats win Senate control on Tuesday, there will still be speculation about whether he or the other eldest GOP-appointed justice, Clarence Thomas, will immediately step down to let Trump appoint their successors while he still has a Republican-controlled Senate. Both justices have suggested otherwise, but in any event, the court’s future is effectively on the ballot.

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