Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself from considering a petition to undo a lower court ruling that forced former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman to hand over emails related to the Capitol riot to the House Jan. 6 committee.

The Justices on Monday denied a request to review a trial court order that forced Eastman to forfeit information to the U.S. House committee investigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol. A line on the orders list indicated that Thomas “took no part” in considering the petition.

Notably, Thomas’s spouse Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist, was interviewed by the committee before it dissolved earlier this year and reiterated her belief that the 2020 election was stolen, a regular line of former President Donald Trump since he lost his reelection bid in November that year.

Monday marked the first day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new term as it prepares to tackle major cases involving gun rights, the power of federal agencies, social media regulation and Republican-drawn electoral districts, and considers taking up a dispute over the availability of the abortion pill.

The first case on the docket for the justices, six conservatives and three liberals, is a dispute from Iowa involving the sentencing of a nonviolent drug offender.

In a major case teed up for Tuesday, the justices will consider the first of at least three disputes that could result in new limits on the authority of regulatory agencies — sometimes called the “administrative state” — a longstanding goal for many U.S. conservatives and business interests.

Tuesday’s case involves a constitutional challenge to the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the top U.S. consumer finance watchdog agency. Later in the term the justices will hear a bid to limit the in-house enforcement proceedings of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial markets regulator, as well as a case that could make it harder for agencies to defend their actions against legal challenges.

That latter case, over whether the government can require commercial fishermen to help fund a program monitoring herring catches off New England’s coast, gives the conservative justices a chance to overturn the court’s 1984 precedent calling for judges to defer to federal agency interpretation of U.S. laws, a doctrine called “Chevron deference.”

“The court has the possibility of overruling the Chevron doctrine, invalidating a major federal agency, greatly limiting the use of administrative law judges, and even reviving the non- delegation doctrine,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School. The non-delegation doctrine is a legal concept that embraces the view that Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers given to it under the Constitution to other entities such as agencies of the U.S. government’s executive branch.

The conservative justices in multiple rulings in recent years have pared back the authority of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency.

The court in May put another dent in the EPA’S regulatory reach, embracing a stringent new test for declaring wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act anti-pollution law. The court last year in another ruling imposed limits on the EPA’S authority to issue sweeping regulations involving greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal- and gasfired power plants under a different environmental law, the Clean Air Act.

The justices on Oct. 11 are due to hear a bid by South Carolina officials to revive a Republican-crafted voting map that a lower court concluded had unconstitutionally “exiled” 30,000 Black voters from what was a closely contested U.S. House of Representatives district.

An important case was added to the docket on Friday, when the court agreed to decide the legality of Republican-backed state laws in Texas and Florida that constrain the ability of social media companies to curb content on their platforms that these businesses deem objectionable.

In another social media-related case, the justices on Oct. 31 are due to hear arguments over whether the Constitution’s First Amendment limits on government regulation of speech bar public officials from blocking critics on platforms like Facebook and X, formerly called Twitter.

Powered by the conservative justices, the court in the past two years has overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide, expanded gun rights, rejected affirmative action in college admissions and broadened religious rights.

A case to be argued on Nov. 7 presents the conservative justices with an opportunity to broaden gun rights even further. At issue is whether a federal law that bars people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.”