Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS APR 10, 2017 7:34 AM

In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that although the confirmation of Justice-designate Neil Gorsuch “restored the status quo — a slim conservative majority missing from the court since the death of the legendary Scalia 14 months ago,” “it’s unlikely to stay that way for long — and therein lies a huge opportunity for President Trump and his conservative base to reshape the high court for decades to come.” Lydia Wheeler reports at The Hill that “Gorsuch may be even more conservative than Scalia, his mentor and a fellow adherent to the originalist view of the Constitution.” At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston observes that “Gorsuch will have little time to get comfortable in the surroundings before he could be casting significant – and perhaps even decisive –votes.” At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the court of appeals decisions in which Gorsuch wrote separately in an effort to predict how Gorsuch might rule on some of the cases on the April argument calendar.

Commentary on the confirmation comes from Dana Milbank in a column in The Washington Post, who looks at the role of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, arguing that “[no] man has done more in recent years to undermine the functioning of U.S. government.” Roger Pilon at the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog lauds Gorsuch’s “appreciation for the rich moral, political, and legal theory that stands behind and informs the often broad language of the Constitution.” At Jost on Justice, Ken Jost lays the blame for “the politicization of the Supreme Court” on “Richard Nixon, who turned the Supreme Court into a partisan battleground as part of the divisive campaign he waged for the presidency in 1968.” Advice and Consent (podcast) features reactions to the filibuster and the “nuclear explosion.” At UCI Law Talks (podcast), Joan Biskupic shares her experience covering Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including Gorsuch’s.

Briefly:

• At his eponymous blog, John Q. Barrett looks back at a Senate delay in considering the nomination of Justice John M. Harlan II to the Supreme Court in 1954, noting that the senator who instigated the delay was “an ardent segregationist” who hoped denying “Harlan a hearing then would preclude him from joining the Supreme Court in time to hear the then-scheduled December oral arguments about the proper remedy for unconstitutional school segregation, and it might keep him off the Court altogether.”
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Shannon Rohn discusses the court’s recent decision in in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, which held that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires a school to offer an “individualized education program” reasonably calculated to allow the student to progress appropriately in light of the child’s circumstances, suggesting that although the ruling “raises the bar for special education, it still leaves room for inequities where educators mischaracterize the child’s circumstances and ability to achieve educational progress.”

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