Monday round-up

For The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that “Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh celebrated early successes in the nomination process with White House officials Friday,” and that “administration officials feel the judge is strongly positioned for confirmation.” For The Washington Post, Seung Min Kim reports that “Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is escalating a contentious dispute over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s records, pressing former president George W. Bush directly to release all the documents from the nominee’s five years in the White House.” Jordain Carney reports for The Hill that “[t]he key part of the battle is Democratic demands for documents tied to Kavanaugh’s work as a staff secretary in the Bush administration.” For The New York Times, Charlie Savage writes that Kavanaugh’s “role in President George W. Bush’s use of signing statements to claim the power to bypass new laws — like a much-disputed assertion … that he could override a ban on torture,” “is becoming a case study for Democrats’ vehement arguments that the Senate must see his staff secretary files before any confirmation hearing.” The editorial board of The Washington Post maintains that “there should be an acceptable compromise between a massive document dump and no disclosure at all of Mr. Kavanaugh’s staff secretary papers.”

Sean Sullivan writes for The Washington Post that “Schumer has opted not to use hardball tactics to pressure moderates from Republican states to join the resistance.” According to the Associated Press, Alabama Democratic senator “Doug Jones says he is keeping an ‘open mind’ on … Kavanaugh.” In more Post coverage, Paul Kane looks at the pressure being brought to bear on moderate Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, noting that “the reduced constituent engagement makes the Supreme Court fight more difficult for liberals than last year’s defense of the ACA.” For the Boston Herald, Mary Markos reports on a town-hall meeting in Boston at which Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren vowed to fight the nomination.

For the Associated Press, Michael Kunzelman and Larry Neumeister report that “[g]un rights advocates believe Kavanaugh interprets the Second Amendment right to bear arms more broadly than does Anthony Kennedy, the justice he would replace,” and that “[a]s a first step, some legal experts expect Kavanaugh would be more likely to vote for the court to hear a case that could expand the right to gun ownership or curtail a gun control law.” Amy Howe looks at Kavanaugh’s record on Second Amendment issues in a post for this blog that originally appeared at Howe on the Court. At Vox, Emily Stewart interviews the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the country’s largest abortion-rights advocacy group, “about how her organization and others plan to resist Kavanaugh’s nomination and sway lawmakers.” In an op-ed for The Hill, Joshua Sandman maintains that “[o]n social and cultural issues, he has been a consistent conservative – but not an absolutist.” The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal notes that a recent appeals-court separation-of-powers decision could help “a Supreme Court that may soon include Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch [to] rein[] in the excesses of the administrative state.”

Briefly:

• At CNN, Dan Berman reports that in remarks this weekend, 85-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “said she hopes to stay on the Supreme Court until the age of 90.”
• At Bloomberg Law, Patrick Gregory and Kimberly Robinson report that “U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco navigated four major shifts made by the federal government in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in his rookie year, and won each time.”
• For the MetroWest Daily News, Chris Stevens reports that after the Board of Selectmen of Marblehead, Mass., the birthplace of Elbridge Gerry, complained to Chief Justice John Roberts that almost all of the justices were mispronouncing the word “gerrymandering,” the chief justice’s office reassured the legislators “that not only do we tend carefully to our Gerry collection, but we pronounce it with a hard ‘G.’”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!