Thursday round-up
Coverage relating to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to replace him comes from Seung Min Kim, who in Politico reports that “[s]ome of Donald Trump’s toughest GOP critics in the Senate are pressuring the presumptive Republican nominee to reveal more information about the type of justices he would nominate for the Supreme Court.” Commentary comes from Charlotte Garden, who in The Atlantic contends that “Garland’s confirmation—and the possible arrival of a ‘pro-worker’ Supreme Court—could have immediate and concrete consequences in offices and on shop floors across the country.” And a podcast at Advice and Consent looks at the questionnaire that Garland submitted earlier this week, as well as the 1991 confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Briefly:
- At WGBH, Harvey Silverglate weighs in on last month’s oral argument in the challenge by former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell to his fraud convictions; he concludes that, if “the Supreme Court tosses these federal ‘anticorruption’ statutes as applied to state politicians, it will be up to Congress to attempt to replace them with clearer and more realistic guidelines that give more deference to state-by-state decisions as to what constitutes acceptable political culture.”
- In The Economist, Steven Mazie contends that, with the Court’s recent refusal to hear a challenge to Seattle’s new minimum-wage law, “cities have the green light to legislate for higher wages, even as the national debate over wage policy becomes a point of contestation in the presidential campaign.”
- In The Huffington Post, Michael Meltsner discusses Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent from the denial of review in a death-row inmate’s challenge to the constitutionality of an extended stay on death row, as well as a response from Noah Feldman; Meltsner asserts that “[w]hat Feldman fundamentally misses is that the Supreme Court has created a system that does not work because it has not and probably cannot resolve a clash of inconsistent constitutional values.”
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman “looks at some of the defining aspects of the most effective amici before the Court both this Term and throughout the years of the Roberts Court.”
- At US Law Week Blog, Patrick Gregory reports that a “registered sex offender wants the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate a North Carolina law that bans him from accessing Facebook and other social media sites.”
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