Monday round-up
on Sep 19, 2016 at 8:03 am
The intersection between the Supreme Court and the upcoming elections continues to take center stage. In The Hill, Alexander Bolton reports that if Hillary Clinton is elected in November, her choice to fill the vacancy on the Court could affect the political fate of congressional Democrats, noting that “Democrats facing tough races in the next cycle don’t want Clinton” “to spend her political capital on a messy fight over the court — and the hot-button social issues under its jurisdiction — during her first 100 days in office.” Chris Geidner at Buzzfeed notes that the Court has fallen “to the wayside” as an election issue, and outlines occasions over the next few months that might bring it back into the spotlight.
Coverage of the Senate’s refusal to act on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland comes from Lydia Wheeler in The Hill, who reports that “Senate Democrats are blasting their Republican colleagues for not only blocking the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, but also 53 other judges in the lower courts.” Ken Jost at Jost on Justice also weighs in on the Senate’s refusal to act on judicial nominations, noting that “Garland’s supporters rallied this month in front of the Supreme Court urging the Senate to ‘do its job,’” but that to the detriment of “the short-staffed federal courts, Garland is only one of the victims of the Senate’s Republican leadership’s decision to turn deaf ears to the plea.” Additional commentary on the confirmation issue comes from LeRoy Goldman at BlueRidgeNow.com, who argues that if Democrats regain control of the Senate in November under the leadership of Senator Chuck Schumer, they may employ the “nuclear option” to muscle though Supreme Court nominees should Hillary Clinton be elected; he argues that “Hillary Clinton will have everything to gain and nothing to lose if Schumer acquiesces to the pressure and the temptation to further transmogrify long-standing Senate tradition and procedure by pulling the nuclear trigger again.”
At Harvard Law Today, Nadia Farjood reports that Justice Elena Kagan visited Harvard Law School last week to discuss her career and the Court with incoming law students; Justice Kagan remarked on the ways in which the death of Justice Scalia “has hamstrung the Court’s decision-making.” Additional coverage of Justice Kagan’s visit comes from Cristian Farias in The Huffington Post, who reports that although “Kagan steered clear of talking confirmation politics directly,” “she was not shy about what the empty seat does to the Supreme Court’s inner workings ― suggesting that its work and overall decision-making power could take a toll in the long run.”
Briefly:
- At The American Prospect, Justin Miller reports on “a trove of leaked documents from an investigation into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 recall election campaign” that “detail the allegedly illegal coordination between Walker’s campaign and an outside group”; the investigation is the subject of a cert. petition pending before the Court in which several Wisconsin prosecutors have asked the Court to overturn the decision of the Wisconsin Supreme Court to end it.
- On Prawfsblog, Steve Vladeck discusses how last Term’s decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana “calls into question at least some features of contemporary post-conviction habeas jurisprudence.”
- At Medium.com, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse suggests that a new Supreme Court appointment “opens the opportunity to revisit an array of decisions, Citizens United chief among them, that made the Roberts Court the most ‘pro-business’ court since the Gilded Age, and restore the precedents so many of these 5–4 decisions overturned.”
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