Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS MAR 2, 2020 6:53 AM

Today the justices will begin the second week of the February session with oral arguments in two cases that involve immigrants’ ability to obtain judicial review of deportation decisions. First up is Nasrallah v. Barr, which asks whether courts of appeals have the authority to review factual findings underlying decisions denying deferral of removal. Jennifer Chacon previewed the case for this blog. Lachanda Reid and Gabriela Markolovic have a preview for Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.

The second argument this morning is in Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, in which the court will decide whether limitations on review of expedited deportation orders in habeas proceedings violate the Constitution’s suspension clause. Kari Hong had this blog’s argument preview. Cornell’s preview comes from Basem Besada and Grant Shillington.

At The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reports that Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a constitutional challenge to the structure of the CFPB that will be argued tomorrow, “will test the separation of powers and whether the CFPB, which was created during the Obama administration and is the brainchild of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, runs afoul of the Constitution because its director is largely shielded from being fired by the president.” According to Joan Biskupic at CNN, the case “provokes core questions of how involved government should be in people’s lives and how far presidential power should extend.” For The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Brent Kendall and Yuka Hayashi report that the CFPB “has been politically polarizing, with Democrats citing a need to rein in financial-industry excesses and Republicans warning the CFPB could be a vehicle for runaway government regulation,” and that “[t]he same sort of ideological split has carried into the courts.”

Lawrence Hurley reports at Reuters that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court this week gets its first chance to consider new curbs on abortion rights with President Donald Trump’s two conservative appointees on the bench as it examines the legality of a Louisiana law that could force two of the state’s three clinics that perform the procedure to shut down,” in June Medical Services v. Russo. At USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that the case, which will be argued on Wednesday, “could go a long way toward reversing abortion rights in the United States[:] Whether they ultimately revert by four years or 47 remains to be seen.” At Take Care, Helen Hershkoff and others take issue with Louisiana’s argument that abortion providers lack standing to sue on behalf of their patients, maintaining that “[r]ather than a conflict of interest, as the state argues, doctors have legal and ethical obligations to protect health and safety, including when that means resisting the imposition of a harmful undue burden on a woman’s right to reproductive choice.”

Briefly:

• For The Economist, Steven Mazie writes that although Chief Justice John Roberts, “a zealous defender of the court’s impartiality and legitimacy, is desperate to avoid” political squabbles, “cultivating an image of non-partisanship will be tricky, because he is tackling a host of clashes on the most electric docket the Supreme Court has seen in recent memory.”
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, “Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates hit the highlights of the Court’s recent opinions, orders, and denials.”
• In an op-ed at The Hill, A. Benjamin Spencer weighs in on Hernandez v. Mesa, in which a divided court held last week that the family of a Mexican teenager who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a cross-border shooting cannot sue the officer for damages under the Constitution, arguing that “the culprit in this tragedy should not be seen as a block of conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court but, rather, a Congress that has opted not to open our courthouse doors to those whom our officials harm abroad.”
• Discussing Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, a challenge to the federal government’s expansion of the “conscience exemption” to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, at National Review’s Bench Memos blog, John Bursch urges the court “not only to uphold the religious and moral exemption but to reaffirm the country’s commitment to honoring freedom of conscience.”
• At the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s blog, Todd McFarland maintains that although “it is disappointing that the court did not take” Patterson v. Walgreen, which asked the court to decide how much employers must do to accommodate their employees’ religious practices, “the fact is his case moved the cause of religious liberty in the workplace forward immeasurably.”
• In an op-ed for The Washington Post (subscription required), George Conway questions the motivation behind President Donald Trump’s recent “demand[] that two justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor — refrain from ruling on all things Trump.”
• At The Atlantic, James Phillips and Josh Blackman doubt that corpus linguistics, a “tool [that] allows researchers to search millions of documents to see how words were used during the founding era, and could help courts determine how the Constitution was understood at that time,” will help the court “definitively resolve” the original meaning of the Second Amendment in cases such as this term’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, a challenge to New York City’s limits on transporting personal firearms.
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost pushes back against Justices Neil Gorsuch’s and Clarence Thomas’ recent assertions that “so-called universal injunctions [are] a recent development, contrary to historical practice and constitutional limits on judicial power.”

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