Thursday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jun 9, 2016 at 7:34 am

Coverage of Monday’s announcement that the Court would review Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections comes from Josh Gerstein of Politico, who notes that the case “could clarify how much consideration of race is permissible when legislatures or other bodies redraw district lines.”  Commentary comes from Lisa Soronen, who at the NCSL Blog suggests that “what those challenging the plan seem most upset about is that the lower court concluded race does not ‘predominate’ in redistricting unless the use of race resulted in an ‘actual conflict’ with traditional redistricting criteria.”

At Bloomberg View, Noah Feldman discusses Monday’s decisions in Simmons v. Himmelreich and Ross v. Blake, concluding that the “technical details matter less than the bottom line, which is that the court wants it to be very hard for prisoners to sue, but not totally impossible.”  At Verdict, Michael Dorf contends that the unanimous ruling in Ross confirms that “all of the justices have been influenced by Justice Scalia’s insistence on the primacy of text in statutory cases.”

Commentary related to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to succeed him, and Supreme Court nominations generally comes from Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones, who contends that, if a Republican appoints the next Justice, he “will seek another Samuel Alito”; Adam Feldman, who at Empirical SCOTUS looks at “signs of a gridlocked” Court; Adam Winkler, who in The Atlantic predicts that, in the next confirmation hearings, “guns will likely play the role that abortion used to play”; and the editorial board of The (Madison, Wis.) Cap Times, which argues that Republican senators who “claim that it is somehow impossible or incorrect for the Senate to act on Supreme Court nominations in a presidential election year” “are spinning a partisan fantasy.”

Briefly:

• In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse suggests that Justice Clarence Thomas “revels in his chosen role as the anti-Thurgood Marshall.”
• At Townhall, Jonathan Wood weighs in on last week’s ruling in United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. Inc. and its possible effect on another case, in which the Court is being asked to review “whether decisions to regulate private lands as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act can be challenged in court.”

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