WHAT WE'RE READING

The morning read for Friday, Feb. 28

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Friday morning read:

• Trump foreign aid freeze to stay for now, US Supreme Court chief rules (Paulin Kola, BBC News)
• Justice Dept. hires for court battles as Trump slashes other agencies (Perry Stein, The Washington Post)
• Chief Justice Roberts’s Administrative Stay in the Foreign Aid Funding Cases (Steve Vladeck, One First)
• Supreme Court Comes Running to Trump’s Rescue on Foreign Aid Cuts (Edith Olmsted, The New Republic)
• Montana “Trafficking” Bill Shows Endgame for Abortion Rights Foes (Mary Ziegler, Slate)

OPINION ANALYSIS

Justices validate right to renew lawsuit after voluntary dismissal

Gary Waetzig filed an age discrimination suit against his former employer, Halliburton. He then dismissed the suit when the company pointed out that he had agreed to arbitrate. When he lost in arbitration and tried to return to federal court, the statute of limitations on the alleged age discrimination had passed, and he asked the court instead to grant relief from the previous order of dismissal, essentially reopening that first case.

At the Supreme Court, his case, Waetzig v. Halliburton Energy Services, presented the justices with the intersection between two rules of federal civil procedure, Rule 41, which allows a plaintiff voluntarily to have its own case dismissed, and Rule 60, which establishes the rules for when a court can reopen a case. The question for the court was whether a voluntary dismissal under Rule 41 is the kind of “proceeding” that is sufficiently “final” to fall within the rules for reopening judgments under Rule 60. Yesterday’s opinion from Justice Samuel Alito came down quickly, the first from the January argument calendar. And that opinion gives that question an emphatic “yes.”

EMERGENCY DOCKET

Trump renews request for justices to allow firing of OSC head

The Trump administration on Wednesday reiterated its request for the Supreme Court to lift an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that instructed President Donald Trump to temporarily reinstate the head of an independent federal agency tasked with protecting whistleblowers from retaliation.

Last week the justices declined to freeze the order by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, instead leaving the Trump administration’s request on hold until her order expired on Feb. 26. But Jackson on Wednesday extended that order until March 1. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris then came to the court, repeating her request for the justices to intervene.

A lawyer for Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, urged the justices to keep the government’s request on hold until March 1. At that point, he contended, there will no longer be a live controversy over the plea to lift Jackson’s original order, and the losing side can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

WHAT WE'RE READING

The morning read for Thursday, Feb. 27

Late last night, the chief justice blocked an order requiring the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign-aid reimbursements. He instructed the parties involved to respond by tomorrow at noon. 

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:

• Supreme Court Poised to Rule for Straight Woman in Discrimination Case (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)
• Supreme Court grants Trump request to pause USAID payments order (Ann E. Marimow and Annie Gowen, The Washington Post)
• Supreme court hands Trump first win over $1.5bn USAid payment freeze (Ed Pilkington, The Guardian) 
• Mexico prepares to appear before US Supreme Court in suit against gun manufacturers (Belen Zapata, CNNE & Max Saltman, CNN)
• Conservatives on the Supreme Court May Not Fully Align With Trump (Aziz Huq, Politico)

ARGUMENT ANALYSIS

Court appears likely to side with straight woman in reverse discrimination suit

The Supreme Court on Wednesday was sympathetic to an Ohio woman who alleges that she was the victim of reverse discrimination. Marlean Ames contends that she lost out on a promotion that she wanted, and then was demoted, simply because she is straight. With Ames and her employer in what Justice Neil Gorsuch described as “radical agreement” that federal employment laws impose the same requirements on all plaintiffs, a solid majority (if not all) of the justices appeared ready to overturn a ruling by a federal appeals court that required Ames to meet a higher bar for her case to go forward than if she had been a member of a minority group.

Ames went to work in 2004 as an executive secretary at the Ohio Department of Youth Services. Ten years later, she was appointed as a program administrator. In a performance evaluation in 2018, Ames’s new supervisor, Ginine Trim – who is gay – indicated that Ames met expectations in 10 categories and exceeded them in an 11th.

But in 2019, she applied for a new position that she did not get. Soon after she was demoted to a previous job, where she earned just over half the hourly rate she had been making.