The high court is saving the high drama for the end of its term. 
 
 As June dwindles, five cases are left for the Supreme Court to decide — including one that could legalize same-sex marriage across the country. 
 
 After announcing two decisions on Thursday, the court is scheduled to announce more decisions Friday and Monday — and it could add days beyond that. There's no indication which decisions will be released on which days. 
 
 Here's a rundown of what's left to settle: 
 
 Same-sex marriage 
 
 In a landmark decision, the court will confront two questions. The first is whether states can ban same-sex marriage. The second is whether states must recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states. 
 
 All eyes are on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote three of the court's most important opinions on gay rights. At an oral argument in April, Kennedy asked tough questions of both sides, and at one point he said "it's very difficult for the court to say, oh, well, we know better" what defines marriage than centuries of tradition limiting it to the union of a man and a woman. 
 
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 Lethal injection 
 
 The justices must decide a challenge to the drug protocol several states use by to execute inmates. 
 
 The case is from Oklahoma. The question is whether the sedative midazolam puts condemned inmates into a coma-like state, protecting them from cruel and unusual punishment while two other drugs are given, or whether it merely paralyzes them while conscious, inflicting serious pain. 
 
 Justice Elena Kagan pointed out at the oral argument that the third drug in the Oklahoma protocol, potassium chloride, has been likened to being burned alive. 
 
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 Redistricting 
 
 The court will decide an issue that goes to the very founding of the U.S.: Who controls the creation of congressional districts? 
 
 Arizona voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2000 stripping the Legislature of the power to draw districts and giving to an independent redistricting commission. It's meant to avoid "gerrymandering" — the habit of legislators to draw bizarrely shaped districts that give their parties' candidates the best shot at winning. 
 
 The Legislature went to court, pointing out that Article I of the Constitution specifies that "the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof" — and that only Congress, not state bodies, can change that. 
 
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 Violent crime 
 
 The court could give thousands of federal prisoners new hope and potentially hamstring prosecutors in ruling on a federal law that sets mandatory minimum sentences for federal firearms offenders who already have three convictions for "violent felonies." 
 
 Advocates say the Armed Career Criminal Act is unconstitutional, arguing that it's too vague in defining a "violent felony," sending away minor offenders for years. 
 
 Law enforcement — noting that the case involves an alleged neo-Nazi accused of manufacturing napalm — says it needs the leeway to interpret the law broadly, not only to get potentially dangerous criminals off the streets but also to use as bargaining chips in plea negotiations. 
 
 Power plant pollution 
 
 Three cases being considered together ask the court to force the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the economic cost of complying with regulations limiting emissions from power plants before it issues any rules. 
 
 During oral arguments in March, Justice Stephen Breyer said cost should logically be a factor in such decisions, observing: "It begins to look a little irrational to say, 'I'm not going to take it into account at all.'" 
 
 But the government argued that the Clean Air Act made no reference to costs when it required the EPA should to adopt "appropriate and necessary" emissions rules. 
 
 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, picking up on that argument, asked lawyers for the states and industry groups pushing the case whether the court has ever required the EPA to consider costs." 
 
 "Is there any such decision?" she asked, to which the plaintiffs' lawyers acknowledged that they couldn't cite one. ||||| The Supreme Court agreed on Friday afternoon to hear the appeal of three Oklahoma death-row inmates who are challenging the three-drug protocol the state now uses for executions. The Court on January 15 had refused, by a five-to-four vote, to grant delays of four inmates’ executions, and one of them was put to death that night. The other three remain in the case. 
 
 Even while agreeing to hear the case, the Justices took no action — at least not immediately — to put off any of the execution dates for the three still involved. The next such date is next Thursday. 
 
 The Court, in a separate order, agreed to clarify when an agent of a foreign government may be sued in U.S. courts for an overseas incident involving an official agency of the foreign state. That case is OBB Personenverkehr AG v. Sachs, involving a California woman who was injured in an accident in Austria involving the railroad owned by the Austrian government. The woman lost both legs in the accident. 
 
 The newly granted cases are expected to be argued in the Court’s April sitting, which begins April 20. 
 
 The Oklahoma case focuses on one of the three drugs that Oklahoma uses in execution procedures — the sedative, midazolam. The first drug in an execution by lethal injection is supposed to make the inmate unconscious so that the two other drugs can then be injected without causing excruciating pain. The three inmates contend that midazolam is not supposed to be used as an anesthetic, and is not reliable in achieving a coma-like unconsciousness. Lower courts, however, rejected the inmates’ challenges. 
 
 The Justices’ action in granting review of the case as it applied to the three inmates was unusual in several respects: the Court has repeatedly refused to review the specifics of lethal-drug protocols; it specifically refused to stay the executions set for all four of the inmates, thus leading to the execution of one of them; and it took on the case even though last week only four Justices had expressed concern about the specific protocol in Oklahoma — a state that badly botched an execution last April. 
 
 The four Justices who dissented from the refusal to block the executions did have the authority, under the Court’s traditions, to grant review of the case even though the Court had declined to postpone the executions. Whether the grant of review had drawn only their votes is not known; the Court does not reveal how the Justices vote in agreeing to hear a case. It may be that those four did vote to grant review, and did so with some hope — if not some strong indication — that at least one other Justice might be inclined to favorably consider the merits of the inmates’ challenge. 
 
 Because the Court did not rewrite the questions spelled out in the inmates’ petition, it may be assumed that it intends to review all of them. 
 
 Paraphrased from legal language, these are the three questions: 
 
 ** Is a three-drug execution protocol unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment if the first drug cannot reliably put the inmate into deep unconsciousness and he may therefore suffer real pain while dying from the other two drugs’ effects? 
 
 ** Will the Supreme Court keep intact its declaration in a 2008 lethal-injection case (Baze v. Rees) restricting postponement of lethal-drug executions unless there is a clear risk of severe pain when compared to what would result by using an alternative protocol? 
 
 ** Must a death-row inmate, seeking to challenge a state’s lethal-injection protocol, prove that a better alternative protocol is available, even if the existing procedure violates the Eighth Amendment? 
 
 When the Court acted last week to allow execution dates to go forward for all four of the inmates in the case, the case was titled Warner v. Gross. That night, Oklahoma carried out the execution of Charles F. Warner, the only one scheduled for that date. At that time, the Court did not have before it, and thus took no action on, the separate petition for review that it agreed on Friday to hear. 
 
 All four of the inmates were given death sentences for gruesome murders. The other three inmates are Richard E. Glossip, who is currently scheduled to die next Thursday; John M. Grant, who has an execution date of February 19; and Benjamin Cole, scheduled to die March 5. 
 
 Since the Court’s order on Friday said nothing about those execution dates, the lawyers for the three inmates are expected to act quickly to ask the Justices to delay those dates. 
 
 The case does offer the Court the opportunity to rule broadly on lethal-drug executions, an issue that it dealt with comprehensively in the Baze decision nearly seven years ago. But the forthcoming ruling might also be a narrow one, focusing only on the properties and the consequences of using the sedative midazolam. 
 
 That drug was the first one used in last week’s execution of Charles Warner, and there was no strong sign of distress observed by witnesses to that execution, although some witnesses reported that they heard him complain about feeling a strong burning sensation, but before the first drug was injected. 
 
 When the Court refused to delay any of the executions last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strong dissent, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan. In that opinion, Justice Sotomayor expressed the “hope that our failure to act today does not portend our unwillingness” to consider the constitutional challenge the inmates had raised. 
 
 The Court apparently discussed the next step in the case — whether to grant review — at their private Conference Friday morning. The order granting review emerged fairly late in the afternoon. 
 
 Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Court to rule on lethal-injection protocol, SCOTUSblog (Jan. 23, 2015, 4:23 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/01/court-to-rule-on-lethal-injection-protocols/
– We don't know which rulings will come when, but starting today through Monday (and perhaps beyond that), the Supreme Court is scheduled to let the hammer fall on seven major cases that will reverberate through the nation, NBC News reports. A quick rundown of what's on the docket: The court's stance on gay marriage is perhaps the most anticipated decision, and the justices have to consider two things: whether states can ban same-sex marriages, and also whether they have to recognize such unions legally carried out in other states. The fate of ObamaCare is also a high-profile case in front of the bench, which could end up costing 34 states their subsidies under the Affordable Care Act because they don't have their own health care insurance exchanges. Insurance experts warn that ObamaCare would go into a "death spiral" if the court rules against federal subsidies. The case against lethal injection, spurred by an Oklahoma man's botched execution, puts the drug midazolam on the hot seat, asking if the drug does what it should—puts a prisoner into a "coma-like state" so two other drugs can finish the job—or if it merely paralyzes the inmate and forces them to endure the pain of their own death. How the court defines redistricting rules—and whether states must count only eligible voters or the entire population when drawing congressional districts—as well as whether or not to greenlight federal violent-crime laws that impose mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted of three felonies, are being mulled. Also set to be finalized: decisions on whether to permit lawsuits under the Fair Housing Act, even if discrimination was not intended, and a trio of cases grouped together that asks the court to make the EPA consider economic costs before forcing power plants to control their emissions.