EDITORIAL: First Monday in October opens high-court term

The Supreme Court began a new term Monday, giving the justices the opportunity to advance constitutional freedoms on a number of fronts.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has done an admirable job in recent years imposing modest restrictions on a federal administrative state that had become increasingly aggressive and creative in stretching statutory language to expand its authority. Along those lines, the justices this term have a path to ensure that “independent” agencies created by Congress don’t operate outside the normal checks and balances articulated in the Constitution. They will also tackle a handful of cases that have the potential to further protect the First Amendment and free speech rights.

Many of the high-profile cases the court will hear this term concern the executive branch, as President Donald Trump tests legal limits on White House power. He stands upon his sturdiest legal ground when it comes to personnel decisions regarding federal agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board and the FCC. The justices, with good reason, appear ready to revisit a Depression-era ruling that limited executive branch oversight of these agencies, undermining accountability. Nowhere in the Constitution does it give quasi-legislative panels created by Congress to operate essentially as fourth branches of government, largely unmoored from White House supervision.

The First Amendment is also on the docket. The justices will hear a challenge to restrictions on political parties financially coordinating with campaigns. In its 2010 decision, Citizens United, the majority recognized that giving federal bureaucrats the authority to regulate election spending — in this suppressing an unflattering movie about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — can result in limits on speech and communications. They have a similar opportunity in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC.

In addition, the justices this week will hear a Colorado case regarding a law that restricts the rights of counselors to communicate certain information to patients. The statute bans “conversion therapy,” barring any practice that “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” But this is broad enough to encompass behavior that has nothing to do with actual medical treatment and everything to do with regulating “private conversations between counselors and their clients,” as the licensed therapist challenging the law put it. The justices — on both sides of the ideological divide — have been rightly skeptical of government efforts to curtail speech. The have another chance to show it in the Colorado case.