The legal cases concerning US President Donald Trump, his finances and his separation-of-powers disputes with Congress are moving like a brush fire to the Supreme Court, and together provide both potential and challenge for the court in its aspiration to be seen as non-partisan.

The court, composed of five conservatives nominated by Republican presidents and four liberals chosen by Democrats, has little choice but to step onto a fiercely partisan battleground.

It announced that it will consider on December 13 whether to schedule full briefing and argument on the president’s request that it overturn a lower-court ruling giving New York prosecutors access to Trump’s tax returns and other financial records in their investigation of hush-money payments in the lead-up to the 2016 election. There are many more such evaluations to come.

“This is a real existential test for this Supreme Court,” said Walter Dellinger, a longtime member of the Democratic legal establishment who argued for president Bill Clinton when the Supreme Court ruled he was not immune from a lawsuit.

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“This will be a special moment for the independence of the judiciary, and whether the hyperpartisanship that has inflected so much of our culture has also infiltrated the Supreme Court.”

In the 1997 Clinton case, the court was unanimous. The same was true in 1974’s United States vs Nixon, in which the president was forced to comply with a grand jury request.

The court took its first step on Monday, when it put on hold a ruling that the House Oversight and Reform Committee has the authority to review essentially the same financial records as the New York prosecutors.

The court’s order came with no dissents – just the kind of thing legal experts say the court strives for. But the cases come with personal connections and baggage for the justices, and at least appearances that could cause questions about objectivity.

For instance, there was no indication in Monday’s short order that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had recused herself from the Trump financial records case, despite past criticism.

The first case likely to reach the Supreme Court on the question of Trump’s broad assertion of executive power over those who worked for him features former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who played a pivotal role in the confirmation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Susan Low Bloch, a Georgetown law professor who testified before the House as an expert during the 1998 Clinton impeachment inquiry, is among those who say Kavanaugh should recuse in the McGahn case, should it reach the high court. “He appropriately worked closely with McGahn on the appointment process and it would be an appearance of impropriety if Kavanaugh sat on the case,” she said.

Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethics expert at New York University’s law school, disagreed. In general, justices are reluctant to recuse, he said, because it leaves the court with only eight votes and increases the chances of deadlock.

In the case involving the House subpoena for McGahn’s testimony, Gillers said Kavanaugh could separate the man and the office, because the issue is about the role of White House counsel. Gillers said the coming Trump cases are the reason the Supreme Court exists. “Surely they don’t want to be seen as political, but they also know these are the momentous decisions they want to write and be remembered for,” he said.

Among the other cases in the pipeline is the House Ways and Means Committee lawsuit seeking the president’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.

In the second week of December, appeals courts in Washington and Richmond will hear separate arguments in cases alleging Trump is violating the anti-corruption “emoluments” provisions of the Constitution when his private companies benefit from business transactions with foreign and state governments. (© Washington Post)

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