Tuesday round-up

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by House Democrats to speed up the process for the lower courts to start re-evaluating the congressional efforts to obtain President Donald Trump’s financial records. Amy Howe reports for SCOTUSblog – in a story first published at Howe on the Court – that the high court’s decision is a minor victory for the president because it means more delays before the litigation continues in light of the July 9 ruling in Trump v. Mazars. As Pete Williams of NBC News notes, the justices took a different approach with regard to a Manhattan grand jury’s subpoena for Trump’s financial records; last week, the court allowed that case to head back to a lower court on an expedited basis. Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reports that the court’s decision on Monday in the congressional case “further dim[s] Democratic hopes that congressional investigators could obtain the materials prior to November’s election.”

In news relating to the other side of the Capitol, CNN’s Ted Barrett and Manu Raju report that “Senate Republican leaders, undeterred by the scathing criticism leveled against them for blocking President Barack Obama’s election-year Supreme Court nominee in 2016, are signaling that they are prepared to confirm a nominee by President Donald Trump even if that vacancy occurred after this year’s election.”

Briefly:

• In an op-ed in the New York Times, Cate Stetson and Ruth Friedman – lawyers who represented Daniel Lee, who last week became the first federal prisoner to be executed in 17 years – describe the rushed process that led to Lee’s execution, including a middle-of-the-night emergency ruling from the Supreme Court. They argue that the Trump administration’s “unrelenting push to impose the federal death penalty no matter the cost poses a grave threat to the rule of law” and conclude that it is “up to the courts to push back against the government’s lawless execution agenda.”
• Writing for On the Docket, the George Washington Law Review’s blog, Mary Nagle and Sarah Deer – both Native women – respond to the court’s July 9 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, calling it a victory for Native women. “The disestablishment of a tribal reservation constitutes a goal of colonial conquest that many states have historically pursued,” they write. “For Native women, however, it is more than a legal question. It is a matter of life and death.”
• In a piece for The Regulatory Review, Bernard Bell argues that, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court destabilized principles governing federal agencies’ structures and for-cause removal. But in doing so, Bell writes, the court “set forth a robust limit on Congress’s ability to constrain removal – an important aspect of presidential control – without launching the Court into an era of intrusive review of agency design best left to the political branches of government and to scholars.”
• In a blog post, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum recaps the 2019-20 term and provides an in-depth analysis of the term’s impact on the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
• In Law360, Stephen Calkins comments on the potential implications of two cases on which the court recently granted cert: AMG Capital Management v. FTC and FTC v. Credit Bureau Center, which affect the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to obtain equitable monetary relief under FTC Act Section 13(b).

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