Friday round-up

ANDREW HAMM SEP 2, 2016 10:30 AM

Yesterday the Ohio Democratic Party filed an emergency request for relief from the Sixth Circuit’s recent ruling allowing Ohio to eliminate “Golden Week,” a five-day early voting period during which voters can both register to vote and vote on the same day. Amy Howe covers the appeal for this blog, with additional coverage from Cristian Farias of The Huffington Post. For his Election Law Blog, Hasen predicts the Court will deny the stay, with at most two noted dissents from Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

Greg Stohr of Bloomberg Politics covers the Court’s denial of North Carolina’s request to allow the state to enforce three provisions of its 2013 election law. For his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen suggests that Paul Clement wrote the brief for North Carolina “as if there were still a five Justice conservative majority on the Court,” despite foreseeing a defeat by this approach, so that Clement and the state “could paint the loss as caused by the ‘liberal Justices.’” At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman examines how the death of Justice Antonin Scalia has influenced this and other recent stay decisions.

Briefly:

• For Cato at Liberty, Thaya Brook Knight and Ilya Shapiro discuss the amicus brief that the Cato Institute filed recently, urging the Court in the cases consolidated as Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami to constrain the Fair Housing Act “to its proper application: helping those who have been the victims of discrimination. Not helping governments dip into deep pockets.”
• For The Atlantic, Garrett Epps relates the Court’s 1940 decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, in which the Court ruled that Congress could promote national unity by requiring children to pledge allegiance to the flag in school regardless of religious objections, to contemporary debates about national-anthem protests.
• For the ABA Journal, Debra Cassens Weiss covers the Justice Department’s admission to the Court that it understated the time spent in no-bail detention by certain undocumented immigrants with criminal records in a 2003 immigration case, Demore v. Kim, in which the federal government ultimately prevailed.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the Court’s decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis was in 1935. The case arose in 1935 but was decided in 1940.]

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