Just before the Supreme Court handed down its final crush of opinions at the end of its last term in June, Chief Justice John Roberts strolled onto a stage in Washington and extolled the virtues of taking it easy.

He told the audience that the high court’s summer break wasn’t just a vacation for the justices – it also gave them time to cool off from the clashes that arose in the term’s final weeks, so they could return in the fall ready to face new controversies, without the old baggage.

“That break,” the chief justice said at the time, “is critical to maintaining a level balance.”

The nine justices will retake their seats behind their mahogany bench on Monday to start a momentous new term after a summer that was anything but peaceful. Over the past three months, the court was repeatedly forced to hammer through major emergency cases involving President Donald Trump – often with sharply written dissents that looked more like rancor and resentment than rest and relaxation.

Now the court is embarking on a new term that will thrust the justices into even more high-stakes political confrontations with Trump, wrenching culture war disputes over transgender youth and a case that has threatened a key provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

As the justices toil over the next nine months on their march toward June, they will be working through an extraordinary tension that has developed with some lower court judges.