Monday round-up
on Apr 3, 2017 at 7:09 am
In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that the “Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on the nomination of federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch just 62 days after his nomination by President Trump — a vote Republicans denied President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for 293 days last year.” In The Washington Post, Ed O’Keefe reports that the battle to confirm Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court “is set to come to a head this week and will probably reshape how the Senate confirms future justices,” because if “Democrats successfully filibuster Gorsuch, McConnell and his caucus are likely to agree to change the chamber’s rules and end filibusters on Supreme Court picks.” At NBC News, Kaelani Koenig reports that “Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted Sunday that ‘it looks like Gorsuch will not reach the 60-vote margin’ needed to overcome a filibuster.” In The Washington Post, Amber Phillips and others provide a breakdown of votes for and against a filibuster.
In The New York Times, Matt Flegenheimer describes the “chamber-rattling showdown” over the Gorsuch nomination as “a prospective Senate nadir achievable only after years of creeping institutional shifts, a mutual recognition of the judiciary’s capacity to accelerate a party’s agenda, and a bipartisan embrace of hypocritical arguments and counterarguments, adopted and abandoned with the political winds.” In The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin observes that confirmation battle over Gorsuch “is less about his qualifications than the propriety of his appointment and the bitterness of the country’s divided politics.” At Lawfare, law student Sarah Tate Chambers offers a three-part review of Gorsuch’s record on cyber-related issues here, here and here, concluding that Gorsuch is willing “to engage fully with cyber issues when they are teed up” properly.
The editorial board of The Denver Post urges Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) to reject the “nuclear option,” “as the filibuster it would end serves as a critically important safeguard that would be dangerous to lose.” At The Huffington Post, Christopher Kang lists five reasons Democrats should decline to make a deal that would avoid a filibuster. In The Nation, Joshua Holland maintains that “Democrats should block Gorsuch because they have nothing to lose but an undemocratic remnant of a bygone era known as the filibuster,” and that “while the filibuster protects the minority, in the long run, it’s more likely to benefit Republicans than Democrats.” At Politico Magazine, Liam Donovan takes a different view, arguing that if “Democrats truly believe their rhetoric about the current political moment and the existential threat President Trump poses, daring reluctant Senate Republicans to erode the remaining norms that empower the minority is as myopic as it is gratuitous.”
Briefly:
- At Jost on Justice, Ken Jost discusses Turner v. United States, a case on last week’s argument calendar involving the scope of the prosecution’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence under the Brady rule in a 1984 Washington, D.C., murder case, noting that “Supreme Court handicappers are forecasting a ruling to uphold these convictions,” but that “the government itself is to blame for the doubts cast on a hard-won verdict so long ago.”
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Frank Garrison weigh in on last week’s decision in Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, in which a unanimous court ruled that New York’s credit-card surcharge ban regulates speech, observing that “while the victory was small, the Court chose to recognize the law for what it was—a restriction of the merchants’ ability to tell their customers the truth.”
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